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by gdudeman 1 hour ago
Computer use is a great idea. It gets the job done when nothing else will.

If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently.

I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish their goals.

4 comments

I think there's a sweet spot- a lot of the time you're probably better off with "reverse engineer this web page and build me an API or personalized chrome extension to meet my needs".

I have an agent doing price checks for me for an item on a certain website. Instead of blasting through a zillion tokens processing the DOM over and over, it loaded the page once and figured out how to download a json with the price.

How are folks using “computer use” to click things on intranet portals that are behind an SSO? Even this OP example shows visitors a url and enter this search term… that is port of useless.

How can I automate things behind an SSO wall? Even if it means I manually authorize it once and watch it do things on its own..

That is an incredibly niche use case and comes with a boatload of footguns.

Even then, an AI writing AHK scripts likely outperforms.

Yeah, it's not that computer use is the most theoretically optimal paradigm, but there's a reasonable case that given the constraints of modern software systems and how they're built, that it's the most realistically optimal paradigm.