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Comment by howunfortunate

4 hours ago

These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.

Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?

One use case I've been having a lot of success with is using Muse's browser use capabilities to cut through annoying web UIs. I subscribe to a meal delivery service but the web app is slow and I often forget to pick the next week's meals (being stuck with unappetizing defaults), so now I have Muse crawl through the app weekly and surface the options I care about (taking into account my dietary preferences). I think most people have a few places where they could replace a habitual multi-step flow with a single button/prompt like this.

Another great use case for me has been richer search. I'm looking for a new apartment to rent right now so I gave Muse all my (long) list of requirements and preferences and every day it searches Craigslist and Facebook marketplace to see if any new places pop up that fit my needs. It only pings me if something worthwhile comes up. I've stopped short of actually having it email the landlords and arrange showings for me, but that's theoretically possible.

I've been using Muse for all of the above, but I'm trying to move off of it onto a self hosted hermes to avoid giving Zuck the keys to my personal life. I've really been inspired by this personal super app blog post and I'm trying to get my personal agent to create some custom UIs on demand for the above use cases instead of just interacting via a chat window.

https://wilhelm.substack.com/p/building-a-personal-super-app...

One of them (Instinct) saved me from having to pay a cancellation fee on a restaurant reservation when it noticed I had accidentally booked the reservation for the week before I was going to be in that city. It proactively reached out to me to suggest I check on it.

I would have figured it out eventually on my own - but likely not until my calendar fired a "time to leave" notification and then I'd have to pay the cancellation fee and place an awkward call to the restaurant.

I suspect they're mostly for managers and entrepreneurs. It's always "set up meetings, write emails, check if someone calls me on slack".