Comment by no_wizard
8 hours ago
Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?
Thats always missing from these sorts of articles and comments, is why is this better
Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.
It's simply assuming what the way forward is without positing why other ways will not work to justify the position.
My secondary critque of the article, is using this as a basis of comparison:
>any product that can't be used by an agent will be as dead as a product without mobile support is today
First, I think its important 'mobile support' is defined. Is it as simple as a mobile friendly website or an app? Are we talking equivalent functionalities as well with the desktop counterpart?
Second, it ignores a ton of successful projects and products. Blender, Maya, Unreal engine. There's also a huge swath of games that only launch on PC or consoles.
If equivalent 1:1 functionality is to be considered, Adobe suite is still primarily a desktop tool, as is Figma.
I know there are a huge host of apps I'm missing too.
While more consumer apps migrated to web + mobile, you can often find functional differences between accessing on desktop vs mobile, where desktop is more complete. Its still not uncommon to have a mobile / tablet version of an app that is missing features that the desktop or website version is not.
> Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?
Same reason you’d use an automated approach to anything - you want to solve a problem and want to solve it along some Pareto front of minimal effort and maximum results.
You use search engines to find things and all sorts of other automated time saving approaches. Agents are just another one. I used one to find an old email receipt for a car seat that I’d not been able to find myself with keywords.
> Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.
Common data formats have thrived where they’re actually used by middle services that users actually use - aggregations of some sort. Scientific papers have common data so they are indexed, webpages have metadata so they appear in google search results.
Linked data for technical reasons fails because the real world is too messy. There needs to be a good business reason so that the formats get nailed down to a small reasonable set and everyone just does it.
Now, part of the problem with supplying apis is who is going to use them? Even the nicest ones are only useful for people building a product on it, or a few nerds.
This has changed. We have systems that can use apis from natural language. That means that normal end users can integrate multiple services nicely and easily, and add others into the same interface they’re already using.
> Whats the value prop?
Because you get to do other stuff while the agent's working. Maybe spending hours optimizing the best flight possible is fun for you, or actually reading online reviews, I ain't judging. I don't care about half the features the marketing copy brags about, I only care about the parts that affect me. This theoretical agent knows me, what I care about, and can optimize based on that.
That "other stuff" you get to do is up to you to take advantage of. It could be scrolling TikTok, or it could be learning a foreign language or calculus, it's totally up to you.