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by jiggawatts 32 days ago
I just had a thought: is there some API so obscenely baroque and painful to use that even AIs would flatly refuse to work with them?

It would be an interesting exercise to keep feeding a coding agent ever crazier interface designs until it cracks.

“The base64 of the rot13 encrypted EBCDIC string has to be included in a JSON in the XML SOAP request, but both the JSON and XML escaping is manual and incorrect...”

"...but first split the string into chunks no bigger than 64 bytes and spread the request amongst HTTP headers instead of the POST body. Reassemble by trying every possible ordering until one passes the decoding steps."
4 comments
wwalexander 32 days ago
AIs can barely handle PKCE OAuth flow. It’s not very hard to confuse them.
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NoMoreNicksLeft 32 days ago
>I just had a thought: is there some API so obscenely baroque and painful to use that even AIs would flatly refuse to work with them?

Copilot Studio. It's painful to try to set up any sort of logic within Copilot Studio. Worse if you're not on the most bleed-edging-new machine with overkill levels of ram. So I had a thought... why am I doing this when I have Claude with absolutely no quotas?

Turns out, there's just no way to drive it from Claude. It first started with the pac command line tool, but that's agonizingly broken. Tried to use Chrome next, but even it can't navigate that UI from the browser (neither could I, you'd click and sometimes the response occurs 10 seconds later). Copilot Studio is the quintessential Microsoft technology. Shortly after, Claude began experiencing what I can only call schizophrenic symptoms. It imagined that every time I queried it that there were embedded hacking attempts in my reply and that soon spread to every conversation I had with it even in new chats.

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Atiscant 31 days ago
It is kind of ironic that the AI building tool is so hostile to AI. Copilot studio really is a hot mess, at least for me.
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irishcoffee 31 days ago
I’ve been trying for the last few weeks to get a really solid local model workflow going, and every single tool I use feels hostile af, whereas the stuff work pays for, it all “just works” together. It really irritates me.
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borski 32 days ago
Sounds like the IOCCC[0] of APIs

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod...

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lq9AJ8yrfs 31 days ago
that's nearly a requirement for anti-bot things. turnstile etc.
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