Comment by Analemma_
18 hours ago
I want agents to be able to act on my behalf, that’s the entire point. An agent should be able to do anything I can do sitting at my browser.
18 hours ago
I want agents to be able to act on my behalf, that’s the entire point. An agent should be able to do anything I can do sitting at my browser.
I suspect most people would be ok with this if they could only do it at the rate and frequency you yourself can do it. The problem is largely one of scale.
Is scale what we're discussing though?
e.g. a prompt of "fetch <article URL> and summarise it for me" is very close to what a human would be doing with a web browser, and doesn't seem to involve any kind of scaling issue.
Sure, but all the time I'll ask Claude a question, and then I'll see it fetch 5-10 different URLs to come up with answer. I certainly would not be fetching those URLs at that rate if I were doing it myself. I would probably be visiting those pages, one by one, over the span of 10-20 minutes.
That's the scale argument.
1 reply →
It’s easy to write instructions that have the agent check once every fifteen minutes, or even once an hour, in perpetuity, which never sleeps. And people do write such instructions. A human can’t do that by hand for very long.
The problem is that it is hard to distinguish your one off (which seems perfectly fine) from the tidal wave of bad actors.
Then make agent friendly content. Take the text and make a markdown version.
People doing this say it makes things worse because then the bots download both.
3 replies →
Technically, even your browser is an agent. It says it in the HTTP: User-Agent. So is cURL. Every application the user runs is acting on the user's behalf.
Dunno why the downvotes. I feel that is reasonable as well. Owners that block that stuff are doing so only to their detriment.