Can someone give me examples of where you use agents in your browser? I’ve heard executive leaders tout that “people use agents to buy things for them” but I haven’t actually seen that.

> I’ve heard executive leaders tout that “people use agents to buy things for them” but I haven’t actually seen that.

My wife really dislikes building up the shopping cart for our weekly grocery delivery, so I built an agent... thing with earendil's npm libs. It takes the menu my wife has decided on, confers with her about the ingredients (if it hasn't seen a recipe before), and then uses Chrome's devtools protocol to head to Walmart and add everything to the shopping cart.

It works fairly well and uses the local models I have running on my Mac Studio.

For any horrible web administration UI:

- Apple Appstore Connect (gazillions of forms of metadata to release an app) - AWS - DigitalOcean - Google Play Store

Whenever I dread logging in because I know the simple sounding task requires me to click through countless menus I use an agent browser. With confirmations of course. However, while the agent clicks through these (oftentimes dog slow) UIs I can do other things. Once it requires permission, I read, decide and act.

It’s usually incidental. Costco’s receipts aren’t easy to get. You go to a particular page listing them all and then for each date you click view receipt and look for the thing you want. You can’t really search because the thing will be labeled SHWR103 or something.

I didn’t “use an agent to find a receipt” in the sense that I purpose built one. I just asked my existing agent that I talk to on telegram by photographing the thing I wanted to know if we could return and while I changed the baby it chugged along and by the time we were ready to go it could tell me whether we did buy it at Costco and when so I know if I can return it.

Web scraping is the age old pre-LLM way to implement scratch-your-own-itch automations on the web. Anything you do manually with a web browser. Also used in corporate settings to interface with bad "enterprise" software, it's called RPA there. This kind of thing is the logical AI progression of those.

tldr; to workaround the lack (or shortcomings) of public m2m APIs in web apps

I often use it to browse sites to get web/app design inspiration, then make moodboards based off it and send it to me. saves me a lot of manual browsing time

I would use them to solve captchas if that was a thing.

i've been tempted to use an agent to help me find non-horrible seats to see the 70mm imax version of the odyssey. but that's also the kind of thing that is heavily guarded by anti-bot detectors.

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