[pjc50]

> Right now every app feels like a walled garden, with broken UX, constant redesigns, enormous amounts of telemetry and user manipulation

OK, but: that's an economic situation.

> so much less scope for engagement-hacking, dark patterns, useless upselling, and so on.

Right, so there's less profit in it.

To me it seems this will make the market more adversarial, not less. Increasing amounts of effort will be expended to prevent LLMs interacting with your software or web pages. Or in some cases exploit the user's agentic LLM to make a bad decision on their behalf.

[13pixels]

the "exploit the user's agentic LLM" angle is underappreciated imo. we already see prompt injection attacks in the wild -- hidden text on web pages that tells the agent to do things the user didn't ask for. now scale that to every e-commerce site, every SaaS onboarding flow, every comparison page.

it's basically SEO all over again but worse, because the attack surface is the user's own decision-making proxy. at least with google you could see the search results and decide yourself. when your agent just picks a vendor for you based on what it "found," the incentive to manipulate that process is enormous.

we're going to need something like a trust layer between agents and the services they interact with. otherwise it's just an arms race between agent-facing dark patterns and whatever defenses the model providers build in.

[anthuswilliams]

Maybe. Or maybe services will switch to charging per API call or whatever instead of monthly or per-seat. Who can predict the future?

I mean, services _could_ make it harder to use LLMs to interact with them, but if agents are popular enough they might see customers start to revolt over it.