[Oarch]

Responding to the tweet quoted in the article: why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. Doing this manually is already pretty trivial, it's more productivity theatre than genuinely life-changing.

There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

[mjr00]

> why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting.

This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well.

They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.

[FpUser]

I have "new genius" ideas very often. After doing quick search I discover that any idea worth thinking of implementation is either implemented already or what seems to be low barrier to entry clashes with some legal obstacles.

[aorloff]

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

[volkercraig]

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.

[gck1]

Yup. I do have a 4-step process for this (just for prompts and some bash scripts that call CC). 1. Breadth first 2. Compress 3. Per player deep research 4. Per player compression. Then I just merge all the markdown files, fit it into 250k tokens, load any model that supports that much and you can pretty much "tall to market".

The biggest limitation here is data access though. A lot of market data is gated behind registration or anti-bot captchas, so the project that my CC is working on now is a playwright clone that is not easily detectable + can be used with CLI same as playwright itself.

[FpUser]

Sure I do use AI to to do research on my ideas as well

[bazmattaz]

I find ChatGPT so infuriating the way it always agrees with everything you say. The product is optimised for engagement so it wants its users to be delighted

[pojzon]

Jim Rohn said one time “just pick a direction and go, you will find out sooner”, if its good or bad.

That was adjusted for 80s. In todays world you can know whether something is worth pursuing in minutes. Tip - in 99.9% of cases its not, but you will still learn along the way. Maybe you find something new.

[wolvoleo]

Hmm I often have ideas that I don't see anywhere else but I'm just in it for rent curiosity and learning. I absolutely hate the business side and usually I do stuff for free just so I don't have to complicate my taxes.

So being an entrepreneur would never work for me.

[mmarian]

Story of my life.

[stbtrax]

the whole obsequious nature of how LLMs also amp them up thinking they're onto something incredible is throwing gas on this dumpster fire.

"What a great idea! This will revolutionize linkedin commenting. Let's implement it together."

[gck1]

Anthropic tried to fix this I think. Because it's the only model that will push back, but it's even funnier.

Ask a question, it will say yes, ask "are you sure?", it will reverse direction full throttle, then ask are you sure again and it'll go back to initial response saying "yeah I confused myself there". You can do this until context window exhaustion and this will never stop.

On the other side of this, Gemini will stand by whatever it generated the first time, no matter how much you push back and no matter how stupid the idea is.

[johnisgood]

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.

[Jimmc414]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU

[salawat]

You have to remember that LLM's don't have any persistent capacity to hold a "judgement". You ask for something, it provides an attempt at a completion for it. No fact checking, no reasoning, just a plausible looking output, tuned to hopefully get you to repeat the interaction.

Half the reason the dominant UX is a "Chat" is that's the only way to provide a facsimile of memory or persistence across requests. Append the last few turns, press go. Over time you can develop an eye for the model's tics/attractor topics.

Remember that they bill by token use, and suddenly, the entire UX/architecture starts making sense.

[_dain_]

Yeah it seems like we're still in the "XYZ ... but on a computer!" stage of AI.

[brightball]

Wait til you see my todo app though…

[cassepipe]

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 ? :)

[ethbr1]

Obligatorily appropriate https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg&t=45s

[tacticus]

nope.

It won't even help you understand that the 20 second task you've been putting off for 6 months causing anxiety will only take 20 seconds (nor will we learn from this)

[rigrassm]

Or the fact that in the time it took me to read this thread I could have finished that task. Sometimes I really want to punch my brain in its stupid face lol.

[davidw]

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot.

I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

[kelnos]

To be fair, you can cancel flight reservations for a full refund within 24 hours, so if the LLM gets it wrong, you're not on the hook for anything.

But in general I do agree: flight bookings are something I want to do myself, because even I don't fully know my preferences when it comes to timing and price until I see what's available. And in general I don't find it all that difficult to do. A couple days ago I booked a multi-city travel itinerary with four different destinations, and it took me about a half hour?

Sure, if an LLM can do that in under a minute, that would be cool, but in absolutely zero situations would I not need to check its work, and if it did get it wrong, I'd have to do it all myself anyway.

[yencabulator]

Even worse, I will only know if the booking is "right" or "wrong" if I look at the alternatives, to see that it really is the best flight.

The best value of "AI" there is making a shortlist of best alternatives, which is just a Google Flights UX improvement. It's not like your own little agent would have good enough access to the underlying data, gatekeeping that is worth money.

[etiam]

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it.

I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give it a chance collating options with tolerable time and cost, attempting to make the price include the stuff that has to be added to preserve health, sanity and a modicum of human dignity.

[joquarky]

Nearly everything targeting consumers is a snake pit now.

Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.

[davidw]

Asking it to find the best deal? Sure, I could totally see that. But I want to double check that myself and actually buy it in order to make sure my flight to Denver from Portland doesn't have a layover in Anchorage or something.

[takinola]

Booking a flight is the type of thing you think you want to dedicate your full attention to. Largely, the issue is one of trust that whatever is making the bookings will take into account the nuances of your schedule and preferences. Here's the typical flow for how my (human) assistant books my flights. I tell them I want to go to $LOCATION from $START to $END. They have my calendar, my travel preferences (airlines, hotels, etc) and the company travel policy. A couple hours later, they slack me a couple of options. If there is one I like, I tell them to book it. If not, I tell them why none of the options work. The process repeats until I see something I like or we run out of options and I have to choose the least bad option. There is nothing about this process that needs a human. It's all done on Slack and for all I know the person at the other end is actually an AI (they're not, but for arguments sake, they could be).

[ericd]

Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the second set of us with a slightly different itinerary massively more expensive, because it was "in demand".

Can't wait for agents to handle all of it.

[danpalmer]

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.

[ericd]

Maybe, I've never used a human travel agent. Based on my experiences with human agents in other industries (especially real estate), I think the LLM version will probably already know my preferences a good bit better than most human travel agents would bother to learn - they're infinitely patient, and not trying to maximize earnings by minimizing time spent per booking.

[yencabulator]

Also, which one is easier to adversarially fool into bad decisions, an LLM or you?

[kelnos]

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.

[ericd]

Yeah, maybe just finding a small shop is the move. Surprising that they can get you something for less than buying direct can after their fee, though!

[thenthenthen]

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.

[ericd]

Seriously. Have you tried Octopart? One of the very early YC companies, dedicated to electronics part search (I haven't used them recently, so no idea if they're good these days, just remember them from like a decade and a half ago).

[thenthenthen]

I used it, mainly for 3d models and footprints. I source most of my parts from LCSC because of the assembly integration nowadays. Sticking to their part ID’s works well for known parts, but yeah, still need to find the part first. It is so time consuming.

[jungturk]

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.

[ericd]

Are their incentives totally aligned? I'd assume they'd want to get through bookings as quickly as possible to maximize earnings?

[thenthenthen]

Travel agents duh. Reminds me of the classic silicon valley startup trope that most tech bro’s are basically trying to pitch a product that replaces their mother.

[viccis]

Exactly. When you're spending money, you want to be in the loop. It's why the Alexa Echo devices as media for Amazon purchases never really worked out. Amazon had two conflicting aims. They wanted to race to the bottom with their increasingly shady vendors which eroded trust, while also positioning themselves and their devices to be trusted agents of purchases. Of course no one wants to buy anything sight unseen through them.

[Ferret7446]

We will get to the point where you'll trust it to catch those issues. The latest models can already do it sometimes for code, like explain that it considered various options and the tradeoffs between them.

[sdoering]

Not using OpenClaw - but I have a limited agent running that currently does a few things well.

Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of things done. Has access for cross referencing to my "people files" to get context on mails/appointments and chat messages.

From all this, as well as my RSS feeds, it generates a comprehensive yet short-ish morning briefing I receive on weekdays at 7am.

Two minutes and I have a good grasp of my day, important meetings/deadlines/to dos, possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies). This is a very high level overview that already enables me to plan my day better, reschedule things if necessary. And start the day focused on my most important open tasks/topics. More often than not this enables me to keep the laptop closed and do the conceptual work first without getting sucked into email. Or teams.

By the way: Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments.

Just for that alone it is worth having it to me. YMMV.

I also can fire a research request via chat. It does that and writes the results into a file that gets synced to my other devices. Meaning I have it available at any device within a minute or so. Really handy sometimes. It also runs a few regular research tasks on a schedule. And a bit of prep work for copy writing and stuff like this.

Currently it is just a hobby/play project. But the morning briefing to me is easily worth an hour of my day. Totally worth running it on my infra without additional costs.

[aftbit]

>possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies)

Doesn't this sorta defeat those policies though? Now all of your calendars are "synced" to a random unvalidated AI agent.

[localuser13]

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.

[Ucalegon]

The thing about that is the benefits, saving a couple minutes a day and not having to click to different windows where the information is stored, is apparent and intimidate whereas the harms associated with loosing most, if not all your privacy and security isn't felt in the same type of immediate way, so the dopamine of the positive effects completely overwhelms. It is hard for many people to be able to weigh different cost/benefit in situations where it is so one sided on the immediacy spectrum.

[Terretta]

> Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments.

In the spirit of CLIs being easy on your tokens:

https://pnp.github.io/cli-microsoft365/cmd/teams/chat/chat-g...

Use the JSON responses for full detail including e.g. reactions.

Composio, behind the blog post, offers "Enterprise" pricing, and has no Teams examples. A stat HN ignores: 85% of SMBs are on M365, not Google Workspace and Slack.

You can pick winners and losers in a segment early, by whether they treat M365 as a first class platform or pretend it doesn't exist. Check for the "Continue with Microsoft" button or support for OIDC not just SAML+SCIM, as well as examples for Teams.

This isn't just true for YC classes, holds true for unicorns. Compare Anthropic's "Claude in Excel" and "Claude in PowerPoint" instead of in Google Docs or Sheets, and guess which firm has a better grasp of how business works outside the valley. And yeah, Claude in Chrome works in Edge (and the lack of just renaming and posting Claude in Edge for normals to find is an ANTHROP\C miss).

[PurpleRamen]

> Morning Briefing

How do you ensure that it's not hallucinating stuff, or ignoring something important?

[vl]

What are you using for email integration?

I want to setup agent to clean up my gmail inbox which has many thousands of unread messages.

[bluesnowmonkey]

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.

[driftnode]

this is the approach that actually makes sense to me. gradual trust not yolo from day one. curious though, can you see what it learned about your patterns or is it a black box? like if it starts auto-archiving something you actually wanted, how do you debug that

[rcruzeiro]

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.

[vayup]

gogcli is good for this purpose. You can use it with openclaw or with coding agents like Codex or Claude code.

[Atiscant]

Would you mind adding some details about how this is actually setup?

[holoduke]

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

[ericd]

What gpu hardware/model? Good enough?

[holoduke]

Small vps 5 euros a month. Uses the Claude cli . No compute needed on running machine.

[sylos]

I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.

[array_key_first]

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.

Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever. It will never forget to remind you of something. It can give you directions, sort your emails by how important they are, help you find shops and restaurants. The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. And, even then, I think for most of them it's an ego thing, not an "I need this" thing.

[oatmeal1]

> 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.

[array_key_first]

> 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).

I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken.

> Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions.

Ehh, I kind of disagree. The work is the same, at best it shifts to something else. Asking for more productivity is a monkey paw. Best to just take it all in and try to enjoy the simple joys of life. Or, uh, work.

[kelnos]

I agree with you on the work shifting. Whenever someone takes some of our work burden from us, someone else just gives us more tasks to do, and we end up working for the same amount of time. Maybe the work ends up being more interesting or rewarding, though. But sometimes trivial work is a nice physical/mental break, too.

[ziml77]

Why do you guess it's an iPhone? I switched to an iPhone because my OnePlus phone failed to ring or play alarms due to a constantly crashing and restarting media indexer service (I could only tell this is what was happening from the logs).

[array_key_first]

Because all of my family members have had sound issues with iPhones. Ringer, alarms, media. Mostly software, I think. I also had an iPhone, I somewhat recently switched.

[kelnos]

> 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.)

[butlike]

> Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever.

This is not a true statement and never was. Bitrot is real

[the_snooze]

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. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.

[ninjagoo]

> 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.

[the_snooze]

I'm a pretty busy person professionally. When I feel like I'm being pushed to "scale" my time and attention, I take that as a signal to do the opposite: do less, and do those remaining things more meaningfully.

Trying to do more is a losing game, and AI assistants just paper over that. We all have finite time and attention. I think a pragmatic engineering approach is the right one here: consider that as a non-negotiable constraint, a fact of the physical world, not something to magic away.

[blackcatsec]

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.

[mrguyorama]

>Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full?

Also this supposed use case is called "Autopay" and requires zero AI. A lot of people still don't use it. Even when it includes a discount!

[ForHackernews]

The dream of the middle class IT drone is to become the executive Office Man: he shouts at his PA and she books his flights.

Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.

[kbenson]

Well, I've taken to describing the best responsible use of AI to help your work as though you have an executive assistant, so I can see why people would come to that conclusion. I don't tend to think of booking flights for that though, I tend to think of asking them to gather information and present it to me so I can review it for whether it's appropriate to include, probably with changes, in whatever I'm working on. Perhaps an executive assistant isn't the right term for that, or perhaps it's just that different people and different industries have vastly different ideas of how to make use of an executive assistant. I don't know enough to answer that.

[bitwize]

Been a middle-class IT drone much of my adult life. This is not my dream. In fact I just realized that one reason I don't like AI dev tools is because they turn me into the kind of dickhead manager I despise: one who doesn't understand the code or the nature of the work involved, just gives orders on what needs to be built and complains when it doesn't work.

[never_inline]

I fix it by micromanaging it. Which class, method, function, module - I dictate the low level structure and features. I dump my all my hard earned coding opinions in a profoundly crafted markdown file.

[bitwize]

What helps me adjust is what I call Thanos-coding: trying to get AI to do the thing with contexts and agents and SDD and whateverthefuck, and if it gets tangled on its own shoelace say "Fine. I'll do it myself." Alternatively: making its mistakes disappear with a snap of my fingers and starting over.

[Barrin92]

>There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows

there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up.

Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyone's pushing it the faster you should run into the opposite direction.

[aftbit]

I'm gonna keep saying this forever - there are two obvious "killer apps" for crypto:

1. Semi-private blockchains, where you can rely on an actor not to be actively malicious, but still want to be able to cryptographically hold them to a past statement (think banks settling up with each other)

2. NFTs for tracking physical products through a logistics supply chain. Every time a container moves from one node to the next in a physical logistics chain (which includes tons of low trust "last mile" carriers), its corresponding NFT changes ownership as well. This could become as granular as there's money to support.

These would both provide material advantages above and beyond a centralized SQL database as there's no obvious central party that is trusted enough to operate that database. Neither has anything to do with retail investors or JPEGs though, so they'll never moon and you'll never hear about them.

[habinero]

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.

[rahkiin]

This exact thing happens too often. We try to use fancy technology to solve a non-texhnical problem.

With or without blockchain you end up at court. If you build a decentralized trust system, the builder of the system needs to be trusted. If you want to use decentralized trust to do your taxes or other government communication you still need to trust your government. These are all actual examples i’ve encountered.

You pretty much always end up at the legal system. If there js anything to make big impact on it would be that. But that requires world-wide revolution.

[mjr00]

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...

[weakened_malloc]

> ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure.

FWIW if you know anything about the ASX, you'll know that the failure was a result of the people running the ASX and not necessarily the tech behind it.

[ninjagoo]

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.

[localuser13]

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).

[jsunderland323]

But is that a better experience than just using your visa? Nobody wants to wait at the cashier for 15 minutes to pay for their groceries, which is what has to happen if you really want the decentralized experience. Otherwise you really are just reinventing a worse, centralized payment rails. Volatility and wait times are features of crypto, not bugs, but they make for terrible payment experiences.

Writing that I feel back in 2021.

[ericd]

Doesn't lightning settle basically instantly, while still being decentralized? You're just trading signed transactions iirc, with settlement happening whenever.

[jsunderland323]

The settlement happening whenever is a problem. Instant authorization is very different from a practical settlement model.

At least with card networks, there are layers of liability if solvency issues occur. There’s merchant protections from the acquiring bank and if for some reason the acquiring bank fails there is the guarantee of the card network.

On the issuing side there are chargebacks. I hate chargebacks as much as the next startup bro but consumer protections are a necessary aspect of a functioning payment rail. There are reasons we don’t use ACH for everything.

I think hand waving the pesky settlement details is absurd. The settlement process is the payment rail.

If you do want those protections you end up back with a custodial wallet, which brings us back to a centralized model.

I’m not arguing crypto doesn’t have its place in the universe, I am arguing it’s a very bad payments product.

[pjc50]

All such private applications work better with a regular database.

[sxg]

Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years:

- A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world

- The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years

- We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers

- Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop

- A short video sharing app will kill TV

- QR codes become relevant

Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.

[runarberg]

None of these actually were hard to sell. In 2007 we had mobile phones, we had mp3 players (the iPod was actually very good), we had CouchSurfing, etc.

I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public).

Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy.

However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.

[rpcope1]

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.

[kelnos]

I think you lived in a strange bubble when you were a kid. When I was a teenager in the 90s, we'd have paper maps that we'd bring with us. We had no GPS. I don't think we knew what GPS was.

In the late 90s we'd print out directions from MapQuest. That was a game-changer. Still no GPS, though.

As an adult in the early 00s, I was still printing out MapQuest maps. In 2004 I got a car with a built-in navigation system! (Complete with a DVD drive in the trunk with a disc holding the maps.) It was still incredibly uncommon; I was one of the few people I knew who had one. I did know a few people who had Garmin GPS devices that they'd suction-cup to their windshield, but not many.

By 2007 most people were aware of GPS devices with little screens that you could bring into the car, though I'd guess maybe 25% of the drivers I knew then had one.

If your dad was bringing a laptop with a GPS dongle in the car in the 90s, I think you were very unusual. Hell, I didn't even have a laptop until 2004, and even then it was a hand-me-down from my dad's work. And I was in my 20s by then!

[runarberg]

I remember GPS being something mountaineers had. People who would take their jeeps up to the glacier had them. Boats also had them. Coincidentally I was a fisherman back then and did observe my captain using a super fancy navigation device with an interactive map (and yes the map did come on a DVD); I also knew a couple of jeep men (or jeppakarlar as we call them in Icelandic) who had something similar (though more compact) in their jeeps; and to top it of, I would spend hours on google earth, just having fun looking at the map on my desktop.

I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.

It has been a day since I wrote the upthread post, and navigation is still the only novel capability of smartphones, which I think would have been a hard sell in 2007. I really can‘t think of another example.

[kelnos]

> I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.

I didn't see a lot of things coming to phones. I never expected that I'd pay for things by hovering my phone over a payment terminal. Didn't think it would replace my iPod (or MP3 CD player, or Discman, or Walkman). Absolutely had no idea it would replace my camera.

And on the other side of the coin... my "phone" is barely a phone. The phone features are probably what I like least about it.

[rjrjrjrj]

Air travel has changed a lot.

Booking, boarding, change/gate notifications, rebooking options, customs and immigration is done via phone.

Transit to/from the airport via Uber or a transit pass stored in your smartphone wallet.

Baggage tracking via airtags

Yeah, there's vague precedents for this stuff from the desktop computer era, but it only _really_ works when you've got an internet-connected device in your pocket.

[alfanick]

Wardriving with a car + GPS and Atheros Wifi adapter and Pringles antenna, oh sweet 90s/00s.

[alfanick]

I used to have PDAs with Windows Mobile, hmm even a BlackBerry. Oh gosh, navigation apps were absolutely crap back then, screens were crap, cameras were crap. Video calls via "3g", if any of your friends/family also had a 3g-capable phone, maybe it worked, experience you couldn't compare to FaceTime. iPhone/Android, really brought a new life into this ecosystem.

[runarberg]

Camera phones were already very popular in 2007. The Flight of the Concords even made a joke out of it. But most people still owned a separate digital camera. It was not hard to predict that the cameras on your phone would get better and eventually replace your dedicated digital cameras. We all saw that coming.

Same with video calls, if anything that idea was oversold in 2007. Most people had Skype (or something similar) and would video call international calls (which were very expensive using the regular phone lines back then). If you were traveling internationally you would find an internet café log in to your Skype and make a call. Moving this capability to the smart phone was a no-brainier. Turns out that when we have it in our phones, video calls are still more popular on desktops (via zoom, etc.) in 2026.

[adrianwaj]

- A nation-agnostic online currency (and its offshoots) would lead to a multi-polar world.

- Publicly waving your resume around will passively invite job interviews.

There's a new OpenClaw adaptation, Ottie, that I think could be a bank manager, bank teller, stockbroker, piggy bank, accountant, wallet, security guard and credit card provider all rolled into one. I just haven't used it yet. https://ottie.xyz/

So that would be:

- Digital sidekick weeds out parasitic relationships.

There has to be tremendous value in that.

When solutions are looking for problems, it means that things may seem oversold when in fact they are still undersold.

[namibj]

Instagram Arabian spring Uber Airbnb Cloud-ification/shift to web apps and mobile-first ....tiktok? Or is YouTube considered "short video sharing app"? Because I see no evidence tiktok in particular killing TV... To be fair, QR code did hit print magazines/newspapers in Germany (just as an example; English wiki was not elaborating on initial history of public use/perception) in late 2007, so that one wasn't nearly as far-fetched.

[butlike]

Not only is TV alive and well, we're even getting channels back with the content splintered across multiple streaming platforms.

[lxgr]

That's a fair point, and I guess the marketing problem here is intrinsic: If the problem is trivial, off-the-shelf solutions abound; if it's idiosyncratic, almost nobody will be able to relate (as you can't assume that people will do the transfer of "if it can solve complex problem I don't understand A, it'll probably be able to solve my complex problem B" for promotional material).

[endofreach]

> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.

[enraged_camel]

What does this even mean? By definition, we have been enjoying "the moment" for quite a while now. What is so special about it that we should work to prolong it, and to avoid moving forward?

[thomasfromcdnjs]

I've been super impressed with this genealogy workflow -> https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy

Somewhere should definitely make this for missing persons.

[mandeepj]

> booking a flight

> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial

No, it’s not! You are the one who made it trivial by using three words to define! How about if I could only fly out between 9 am-noon next Friday? Also, combine it with hotel and rental car. Many times total $ between sites could be a difference of close to $200 or more along with better itinerary. That’s just the surface. The more preferences you add, the complex it becomes, so make it a right scenario for agent automation along with calendar management which has similar complexity.

[procone]

Still sounds trivial. Not sure why you're trying to make travel sound like a complex problem that can only be solved by burning tokens.

[tacticus]

get a travel agent?

Probably more reliable and corp ones exist.

[mandeepj]

> get a travel agent?

I think: to Uber founder, you’d have said get a driver or yellow cab :-)

To TurboTax founder, you’d have said get a tax accountant :-)

[bluGill]

They are only trivial in the simple case.

When you need a bunch of busy people in a meeting it becomes hard to book a meeting. If several people need to travel incuding get a visa it is hard to fit it all it between other meetings that refuired people caanot skip.

travel is hard when you are trying for the best deal across flights, hotels and such. many sites only guarentee prices for 15 minutes so you can't even get all the needed prices on a spreadsheet at once - particularly if you have flevible travel dates. I've booked a best price plane ticket only to discover it was the worst date for hotels and I could have saved money on a more expensive flight.

[mickdarling]

I don't use Claw. It is way too dangerous. I built my own system where I know the ins and outs and how they can break.

When it comes to agents' tasks, I tend to focus on things that I couldn't do before without automated agents, at least at the going price.

The kind of automation I'm doing is more like building a set of agents to generate marketing surveys for me. They take free form input from me and my project. They aren't particularly sexy but they go off and do something valuable that I literally would never pay for at the prices that they are normally.

[takinola]

This is a really tempting approach but I think it is the wrong one. The issue is one of trajectory. OpenClaw has the attention of thousands of hackers and there is a huge incentive to contribute to make it better. That will compound very quickly and will become much better than whatever private solution you create.

[tyingq]

> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial

Well, and doing them programmatically and automatically without any AI is also possible, if not trivial...and has been for some time.

[zihotki]

I also have the same concerns. I have my agenda meeting free and create meetings like once a few weeks. The same is for booking flight tickets - once a decade. Adding openclaw there would take more time and effort than doing it manually.

And none of the friends playing with openclaw have any useful non-trivial workflows which can't be automated in oldschool way.

The only viable workflow so far I could think of - build your own knowledge base and info processing pipeline.

[ljm]

The real impressive examples get turned into SaaS prototypes and not placeholders for your imagination.

If they had vision they wouldn't be thrown out in a blog post.

[timacles]

This is the tech equivalent of my girlfriend goes to another school.

If someone implemented something impressive with this stuff, they wouldnt be keeping it quiet. False negatives are unproductive

[jnaina]

agreed. using my locally hosted LLM, created a skill on OpenClaw to export data from sfdc and build my weekly sales report, complete with charts, summary of deals, meddpicc updates. some small tweaking required to be 100% production ready, but already saved about 4-5 hours of my weekly time spend on this.

this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc).

I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.

[hgoel]

I feel like part of it is the obsession with AI assistants a la Jarvis from Iron Man, but most people do not have the skills or need for an AI agent to support technical work, so they just end up trying to do mundane things that have already been largely streamlined by smartphones, while the primary advantages of these kind of agentic workflows are in technical work.

[nunez]

Doing this isn't trivial if you're traveling heavily throughout the week and have lots of people vying for your attention. However, these folks usually have an exec assistant to help them wrangle the chaos. Morever, them using a Claw would likely be a huge security risk, as this kind of person is much more likely to be a high-profile target.

[refulgentis]

> Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

No.

And there’s mundane answers why.

People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots

It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else.

So it goes for agent demos.

Another reason: every agentic flow is a series of mundane steps that can be rounded to mundane and easy to do yourself. Value depends on how often you have to repeat them. If I have to book a flight once every year, I don’t need it and it’s mundane.

There’s no life changing demo out there that someone won’t reply dismissively to. If there was, you’d see them somewhere, no? It’s been years of LLMs now.

Put most bluntly: when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. The contradiction here being, everyone else doesn’t understand their agent demos are boring and if just one person finally put a little work and imagination into it, they’d be life changing.

[otabdeveloper4]

There are easy no-brainer productivity boosts with LLMs. For example, automatically sorting your email by topic.

Nobody shows this because the technology is still immature and very shit.

[driftnode]

honestly sorting email is the one thing that should have been solved five years ago. the tech is fine for classification. the problem is nobody wants to build a boring email sorter when you can announce an autonomous life assistant

[AlienRobot]

For example?

[Oarch]

It would probably depend on the target audience.

I was very impressed by Anthropic's swarm of agents building a C compiler earlier this year with 1000 PRs per hour. Easy to nitpick that it wasn't perfect, but it sure was impressive.

[pron]

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).

[refulgentis]

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 :/

[Oarch]

I'm still sure we can do a little better though.

Maybe a personalised diet and exercise plan based on a huge range of information: preferences, biometrics, habit forming, disposable income, your local area etc

[refulgentis]

This is an excellent point and reminds me that, in some ways, the agentic coding stuff and ability for RL to hill climb on that and improve models quickly, has distracted from prompt engineering / putting more effort into getting data to them as a user.

[greedo]

Like putting glue on your pizza?

[AlienRobot]

How many C compilers do we need...

[queenkjuul]

You're too easily impressed

[gherkinnn]

It's either vague notions like "more important than the invention fire", or concrete cases like booking trips that the likes of Google can enshittify at lightspeed.

I am not optimistic, not because the techs is lacking, but the context in which it is born is awful.

[tchock23]

I love when they use making a restaurant reservation as the example. On a list of things keep me up at night that is somewhere around #6,054, yet apparently for many tech bros that’s a top 10 life problem.

[usui]

Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? I've had to download airline apps a majority of the time because the website failed to finish payment properly.

I don't think we should call presentations visionless or fault them for wanting to solve this UX nightmare.

[amanzi]

And you want to add an unreliable, non-deterministic LLM into the flow too?

[dawnerd]

And this sounds like something you absolutely wouldn’t want an ai agent trying to figure out.

[ceejayoz]

> Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get?

Claude is pretty amazing, but it still goes down rabbit holes and makes obvious mistakes. Combining that with "oops I just bought a non-refundable flight to the wrong city" seems... unfun.

[thinkingtoilet]

That is never happened to me once.

[gum_wobble]

So the solution to bad design and enshittification is to have an horde of agents to throw at tasks now?

[brotchie]

OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you.

Just like anything in engineering really: you have to play around source control to understand source control, you have to play around with database indexes to learn how to optimize a database.

Once you've learned it and incorporated it into your tool set, you then have that to wield in solving problems "oh, damn, a database index is perfect for this."

To this end, folks doing flights and scheduling meetings using OpenClaw are really in that exploration / learning phase. They tackle the first (possibly uninventive thing) that comes to mind to just dive in and learn.

The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"

[phist_mcgee]

>The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"

Such as?

[imiric]

> OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you.

That's ridiculous. The utility of any tool is usually knowable before using it. That's how most tools work. I don't need to learn how to drive a car to know what I could use it for. I learn to drive it because I want to benefit from it, not the other way around.

It's the same with computers and any program. I use it to accomplish a specific task, not to discover the tasks it could be useful for.

OpenClaw is yet another tool in search of a problem, like most of the "AI" ecosystem. When the bubble bursts, nobody will remember these tools, and we'll be able to focus on technology that solves problems people actually have.

[wyre]

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.