alt Hacker NewsMany of the examples given for agents such as this are things I just flat wouldn’t trust an LLM to do - buying something on Amazon for example: Will it pick new or ‘renewed’? Will it select an item that is from a janky looking vendor and may be counterfeit? Will it pick the cheapest option for me? What if multiple colors are offered?
This one example alone has so many branches that would require knowing what’s in my head.
On the flip side, it’s a ridiculously simple task for a human to do for themselves, so what am I truly saving?
Call me when I can ask it to check the professional reviews of X category on N websites (plus YouTube), summarize them for me, and find the cheapest source for the top 2 options in the category that will arrive in Y days or sooner.
That would be useful.
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I got Amazon Prime. If it has Prime, it is a no-brainer. Free return for 30 days. No S&H costs. Only cost is my time.
You don't trust it yet, like a new human assistant you might hire - will they be able to handle all the variables? Eventually, they earn your trust and you start offloading everything to their inbox.
This is a great point -- the example we chose was meant to be a consumer example that we could relate with.. however a similar example exists for the enterprise which may be more interesting
Let's say that you are a parts procurement shop and want to order 10,000 of SKU1, and 20,000 of SKU2. If you go on parts websites like finditparts.com, you'll see that there is little ambiguity when it comes to ordering specific SKUs
We've seen cases of companies that want to automate item ordering like this on tens of different websites, and have people (usually the CEO) spending a few hours a week doing it manually.
Writing a script can take ~10-20hours to do it (if you know how to code).. but we can help you automate it in <30 minutes with Skyvern, even if you don't know how to code!