I have the opposite problem. I have a genius idea, and I start to research it.

I find a company that actually built a solid product, dangit this is really good. They appear to have executed well, but they failed, or went nowhere, heck the app is still out there. Maybe they are even chugging along but its a smaller business even with a better product than I would have been able to build. Had I been a founder of the product, I would be questioning staying.

Then I also find sometimes I was doing it all wrong and the world has moved past my notions of products. I think there's a market opportunity because I don't realize that the rest of the world is already cool using a $15 plant hygrometer bluetooth device which can also keep track of your medicine or food in your cooler, my notion of the value of something is skewed by western costs

Interestingly that sort of research is actually what I've used Claude/Chatgpt deep research and openclaw for. If I have an idea, I get an agent to go and do some product research for me and see if there is a market, if anyone has tried it, and if there is anyone doing it.

It has unironically saved me a lot of time I would have otherwise spent going down rabbit holes.

Of the models I've found that claude doesn't gas you up as much as GPT, so for stuff like this where the answer can be "no, that's not a good idea" I usually use claude.

Story of my life.

Oh for sure. When I present something to the LLM it always tells me how great it is until I make it "question" it, then it says it was overestimating this or that. Eh. Quite annoying.

Can it suggest me to do the things I should do ? Can it talk to me into overcoming what's blocking me from completing tasks at an emotional level ? :)

Do you think an agent is going to do all of that and get you the best price/time/comfort combination for your exact preferences. Or do you think it's going to pick the first that looks reasonable? Or do you think it's going to sacrifice one dimension too much?

We already have agents for this if you really want to avoid it, they're called travel agents. They're pretty good at complex travel booking and not very expensive.

I think it depends on your priorities and needs.

I just booked a round trip for myself, plus two more flights for quicker hops while I'm away, and I didn't spend much time on it at all. I just looked at Google flights, picked the flights I wanted, and then ended up buying them through Chase with points. Chase's travel website is among the worst I've ever used, but it wasn't hard. Then I went to the airline's website and changed my seats (Chase doesn't know I have status and couldn't directly book the seats I wanted) and did an upgrade for one of the legs using miles I had at the airline. Half hour of work, maybe?

The price-setting algorithms are garbage, but an LLM isn't going to fix that.

Agree with the other sibling posters that if this annoys you so much, you should just call up a human travel agent. I haven't used one in many years, but when I did (mostly for business travel), it was always pleasant, and the agent knew my preferences and took care of things if there were any snags or changes needed. At the time, they usually got me flights cheaper than if I were to book them myself, even with their fee on top.

But I do wonder what the profession is like now. I can imagine some sort of website where you often don't even deal with the same person, who won't get to know your preferences and will be sort of like a customer service agent, just trying to close as many cases as fast as they can. But hopefully there are still smaller shops around, where you can talk to the same person (either phone or email) every time. Dunno.

Booking flights/tickets is terrible. And then the dark patterns… wonder if OpenClaw can navigate these? Anyway, it is nothing compared to sourcing electronic components, there are literally thousands and thousands of different manufacturers, lead times, moq’s … for the same component, leading to super hard to search and filter database/websites that are slow as molasses.

I think we literally have those agents today, albeit implemented in meat rather than silicon. Any particular reason you elect not to use the free-to-you travel agent? Generally they are the same or less expensive and able to work in your best interests.

> They really didn't fall short. A lot of people who would've had assistants no longer do, now it's really just the executives like you said. But fairly low managers used to have them and now they don't.

I think the reason for this is labor cost, and "good enough". I don't think a smartphone is an equivalent replacement for a dedicated assistant. The average mid-level manager who would have had an assistant 30 years ago likely (today) spends more time on "assistant-y" work than they would if they had an assistant today. It's just that now they do 30% of the work the assistant did, and their phone handles the other 60%. That kind of ratio is enough to make upper management believe that human assistants for the lower-level folks isn't worth the cost. (While they themselves of course still have human assistants.)

> It will never forget to remind you of something.

Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND).

> The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives.

Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions. We are nowhere close to the usefulness of a secretary in our devices.

> The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it.

Scheduling in a larger org and/or with multiple equally busy people is a non-trivial, complex task; it makes sense to dedicate resources to the task. Good Executive Assistants are generally fairly smart folks, in my experience.

When the scale is substantially more and involves objects as well it evolves into multi-million $ ERM (Enterprise Resource Management) systems.

This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough.

Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal.

Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment."

Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.

Unless this whole setup is self-hosted (which I doubt), it's also uploaded to some data lake of a company which is in business of profiting from information.

Intelligence agencies are really heading into a golden age, with everyone syncing all the data they have to the cloud, in plaintext. I mean it was already bad, but it's somehow getting worse.

I recently started having my AI assistant help clean up my email gradually. (Using stumpy.ai for what it's worth.)

The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.

I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).

Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.

Why an agent? Why not simply filter by unread, select all and mark as read? I recently did this with my email accounts which has many thousands of unread emails.

I run my own claw on a hetzner setup. The claw writes his own code based on some rules I gave to him (20 prs per day). it's active on moltbook and has access to my whatsapp, Gmail etc. dangerous it is. But fun as well. Specially fun to see which features it decides to build. https://github.com/holoduke/myagent

Even the navigation part, I'm not so sure. I remember Dad would bring a laptop when we would drive new places and it would be running Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS dongle, and I think that have been late 90s or early 00s. I remember seeing other people do that and by the time I was driving a lot in 07 I remember having a dash mounted GPS, maybe a Magellan or Garmin, that didn't cost that much and again I remember a lot of people doing it. The smartphone definitely displaced it, but it wasn't a complete novelty even for the general public.

Such a wrong take.

The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product.

All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you.

Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.

AFAIK both of these use cases had many millions of invested dollars dumped into them during the Blockchain hype and neither resulted in anything. It might not be an exact match for (1), but there was famously the ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure. For (2), IBM made "Farmer Connect"[1], which is now almost entirely scrubbed from their website, which promised to do supply chain logistics on a blockchain.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b...

[1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...

IMHO, most people misunderstand the real utility of crypto.

The thing to keep in mind is that replacing a database with computationally expensive crypto is sub-optimal. Supply Chain tracking falls into this category: why crypto over barcodes and a database?

Governments use Banks with their deterministic processes to manage and guarantee transactions. This is where crypto shines- replacing the entire banking system as an intermediary to manage and guarantee transactions. Crypto can do this better and cheaper than Banks.

There are other domains where the government is the backstop/guarantor and leverages intermediaries to manage the scale. Real Estate comes to mind. Identity is another. Crypto can be useful there.

One last useful crypto application is to replace governments themselves as the backstop and final/guarantor for transactions.

These are ideas that evoke strong reactions. There's a reason the inventor of crypto is anonymous, to this day.

The only "killer app" for crypto*currencies* is being a payment method. Not counting speculation. This is what they are used for right now, but the scale at which this happens doesn't justify their current valuation (even after recent losses).

Not only do you not need the blockchain for either of those things, you don't want it.

Think it through. How do you actually "cryptographically hold" someone to anything? You take them to court.

Guess what you can do, right now, without the blockchain? That's right, you can take them to court.

You're just reinventing normal contract law with extra steps.

The cryptographic part doesn't even help you when you can just say in court that "here are our records that show we gave them these packages, here are our records of customers filing complaints that they never got them" and that is completely fine.

All such private applications work better with a regular database.

You mean trying and failing to build a C compiler. This isn't a very hard task to begin with (assuming you know compilers, and the models do), but it was made unrealistically easy by giving the agents thousands of tests written by humans over years (on top of a spec and a reference implementation, both of which the models were trained on), and the agents still failed to converge. I was actually surprised that they failed as this was the purest possible example of "just do the coding" (something that isn't achievable in real or more complex cases) and when I read the description I thought they made it too easy, and in a way that isn't representative of real software. My thought at that failure was that if agents can't even build a C compiler with so much preparation effort put into the test, then we have some ways to go. Indeed, once you work a lot with agents for a while you see that coding isn't really their strong suit (although they are impressive at debugging).

How many C compilers do we need...

Right. Pretty impressive.

What percentage of people will think that’s life changing?

Because then we’re not talking about “can everyone up their demos to life changing, please?”, we’re talking about “can everyone use demos Oarch thinks are life changing, please?” - and “can build a MVP C compiler draft that barely works for $XXK” isn’t really that compelling to me, and we’re both software engineers, and my whole day job has been an agentic coder for…2.5 years?…now. My incentive structure and demographics are lined up perfectly to agree with you, but I don’t :/

You're too easily impressed

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