alt Hacker NewsOne problem with HPOP is the chicken-egg adoption problem: There is little reason to implement HPOP because nobody will have a client for it, and little reason to build a client because nobody has implemented HPOP.
Part of this is the friction required to implement a client for a bespoke API that only one vendor offers, and the even bigger friction of building a standard.
AI and MCP servers might be able to fix this. In turn, companies will have a motivation to offer AI-compatible interfaces because if the only way to order a pizza is through an engagement farm, the AI agent is just going to order the pizza somewhere else.
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If big pizza franchises wanted HPOP they could just make it the api by which their apps talk to their backend. New cross-pizza-place-apps and tools would pop up within a month
Really, they could each do their own bespoke thing as long as they didn't go out of their way to shut out other implementers.
Instant messaging used to work like this until everyone wanted to own their customer bases and lock them in, for the time-wasting aspect
You don’t even need a custom protocol. A published OpenAPI schema is enough to help an LLM-powered agent figure out the right APIs to invoke on the user’s behalf.
I wonder how long it will take for sellers to realize the war against agents cannot be won and that their compute resources are better spent giving agents a fast path to task completion.