What AI boosters don't realize is that we're not in the optimistic days of the 1990s anymore. We've seen that the prevailing tech business model is to offer convenience as a lure to lock in dependent users and extract value from them.

Unless these AI assistants are running on self-managed platforms independent of their developers, all I see is immense counterparty risk.

>This is the future stuff we always wanted.

Speak for yourself. I hated the idea of agents ever since I first heard of it back in the 90s or 00s. For me, the most valuable feature of computers is predictability. I want tools, not agents. A computer should augment my own skills, not replace them.

I see the value of the tool but I would never use it from Meta. Would need to be self hosted with a very structured framework and guardrails so that even my local model couldn't accidentally wire 50k to a Nigerian prince or whatever the latest email scam is.

I trust mine considerable, but only because I can run it mostly offline on hardware I own that lives in my garage. It baffles me that I am the only technical person I know that exclusively uses AI this way.

I’m in the same boat. After witnessing context rot and inference collapse, I do not trust any LLM with mission critical work. Not Jev, not grok, not fable, not Opus.

I made an agent to derive and iterate on a stock trading strategy for me. What I did was give it a virtual bank account that models your typical brokerage account. So my agent reads the news, financials, markets, all the information it can gather to decide what stocks to buy/sell and manage its portfolio. Then what I do is just follow along with real money.

I could see shopping being the same way, let the agent shop for you or identify good deals on things you want but then push them to you to make the actual purchase. Like you, I'm certainly not going to let an agent make a real purchase for me unattended and I doubt any merchant is going to have much sympathy for "my AI bought this by mistake".

The missing piece for connecting an agent to your credit card or other financials is financial liability.

If Meta/OpenAI/etc would guarantee they’d compensate you in full for anything that wasn’t supposed to happen —and had an established track record of doing so— it would make trusting agents to make financial choices easier

Sad to see such paranoia, agents can genuinely be an agent of good and positive change.

Last night I had ChatGPT go through an old email account and surface memories that I literally forgot. People who I have fond memories of. Yea I could have spent time querying gmail and digging but the agent did it in a way that really resonated. I don't care if Sama has my emails now. I do care about connecting with my past and enjoying the memories of a time long past.

Paranoid scolds of HN want the average person to be deprived of value like this for some reason.

My wife has scheduled a visit with a physician and there was a younger person in there. They legit said “haha I don’t know what it is” and used ChatGPT for diagnosis.

I have no doubt they would have no problem outsourcing everything to agents.

Personally to me this feels like another classic case of starting with the technology and figuring out where to sell it as opposed to the customer experience.

It feels and seems too forced.

Sorry, no. This is not the future I wanted. I do not run any agents nor ever will.

I find all this is just the next-gen privacy violation, disguised obviously as: "Oh, WOW an agent in the computer is doing all this for me". Bullshit.

It seems that never is enough with these ever thirsty companies, they keep pushing the limits and surprinsingly a lot of people do not care at all nor value the implications of having an arbitrary process running and doing pretty much whatever the agenda of their creators are.

Don't worry, I'm sure eventually you'll simply be required to give one of these things access to your bank account and that decision will be taken out of your hands.

Yeah, just waiting for the AI-enshittification when they give it to the growth hackers to drive VC returns at the expense of utility.

You don't have to, there is a world of things you can do with them without giving them access to your email or bank account.

"Hermes, clone this android app to my computer, add this and this feature and fix this annoyance and then rebuild it and push it to my phone"

"Hermes summarize this YouTube podcast and push the summary and transcript to my Obsidian vault"

"Hermes check mg obsidian notes for when I last wrote a blog article about Neovim's integration with AI agents"

*Hermes, you have an API token that allows read only access to the Zabbix monitoring system, check that and then use the Proxmox API token that only allows you to do limited actions to reboot the VM that is having issues"

Etc, etc,