logoalt Hacker News

peytonyesterday at 6:09 PM1 replyview on HN

It’s great at

1. things you wouldn’t otherwise bother doing

2. things where it otherwise would get stuck iterating on hacky workarounds doomed to fail

“Reverse engineer this app/site so we can do $common_task in one click”, “by the way, I’m logged in to $developer_portal, so try @Browser Use if you’re stuck”, etc.

I just had Codex pull user flows out of a site I’m working on and organize them on a single page. It found 116. I went in and annotated where I wanted changes, and now it’s crunching away fixing them all. Then it’ll give me an updated contact sheet and I can do a second pass.

I’d never do this sort of quality pass manually and instead would’ve just fixed issues as they came up, but this just runs in the background and requires 15 minutes of my time for a lot of polish.


Replies

overgardyesterday at 7:11 PM

I guess the problem I see here is that if the use case is "things I otherwise wouldn't bother doing", that's fine, but it's pretty niche. I dunno, if you're talking about a human "Agent" (like say in sports or entertainment), they'd be a trusted person to handle business matters outside of your competency (contract negotiations, etc.). I don't see AI "agents" being at all like that, they're more like an intern you need to supervise constantly.