[typpilol]

I've yet to see a useful case for these AI browsers that is something other than a dead simple task.

But when I browse the net, I'm not thinking about asking AI about the info on my screen. I can just read it?

And by no means am I anti AI, I use it a bit for coding

[CuriouslyC]

AI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it. Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're doing all this work to basically work around jackass site operators who make everything require javascript and don't provide a documented user facing API.

The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off, all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent interface, so people can use their service without having to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.

[sebzim4500]

Obviously an API is better but realistically we aren't going to convince every web service to offer an API overnight and people want to be able to e.g. make reservations through chatgpt today.

[schmidtleonard]

Yep, the only way to convince companies to offer an API is to implement an agent that slowly but surely works around whatever trainwreck of a web experience they put in its way and then give them an option to make it smoother by offering an AI.

See: mobile websites. They sucked so badly that "desktop internet, not mobile internet" was a big selling point of the original iPhone. Then, once mobile had enough market share to "set the terms," we went back to having special mobile versions (or even mobile-first), but this time it didn't suck. Part of that was tech, but most of it was mobile acquiring a critical mass of marketshare, and the winner of the mobile wars won using an all-important temporary workaround stepping stone that solved the chicken-egg problem.

[typpilol]

They're also the reason we have to support backwards compat for some shit sites designed in 99.

Like update it already ffs or it's not worth having around, we can archive it instead

[atonse]

It feels like it's always the same 3-4 things.

Travel Bookings Recipes Calendar/Email integration

But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint, do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)

[victorbjorklund]

The only useful case I can think of is if you’re on a website with a big unstructured list or collection and you want to filter or reformat the data. For example, say you’re looking at a listing of houses for sale and you want to see only the ones that are painted blue, but the site doesn’t have that kind of structured data. Then AI could help by looking at the images and picking those out. Still, that’s probably not a very common situation, and you could do something similar with a bit of scripting and feeding that data into an AI manually. But for people who don’t know how to code, or are intimidated by it even when AI writes it for them, I guess it could be useful.

Oh and maybe one more thing to just give you the content that you're looking for like on all of these recipe sites with walls of text and images for SEO purposes where you just want the recipe. I guess that could be useful to just ask show me the recipe.