We must do whatever we can to stay above the API: https://www.johnmacgaffey.com/blog/below-the-api/
Great article, agreed. I don't want to work for a company where algorithms are weaponized against me.
Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
51–60 of 206 posts
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#52Hiring humans to do a consistent job is gonna be a nightmare and a limit on the scalability of the service. How are you defining your service level agreements?
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#53Congrats on the launch Dex! A long way from the Metalytics days.
Can’t wait to try this out.
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#54Congrats on the launch! Human in the loop is an underserved market for AI toolchains. I've usually had to build custom tools for this which is a PITA. Make.com has a human in the loop feature in closed beta. https://www.make.com/en/help/app/human-in-the-loop There's also https://www.gotohuman.com/ that uses review forms. Looking forward to playing with HumanLayer. The slack integration looks a lot more useful for my…
thanks for sharing your experience so far! Like I said, we built this ourselves for another idea and it was painful.
I have played with Make and I actually chatted w/ the gotohuman guy on zoom a while back, I like his approach as well, he went straight to webhooks which makes sense for big production use cases
re: LinkedIn, no I don't know how to get agents to integrate with linkedin. I have tried a bunch of things, I know of some YC companies that tried this but I don't know how it went for them. Best I have gotten is using stagehand/dendrite with browserbase to do it with a browser, and then using humanlayer human_as_tool to ping me if it needs an MFA token or other inputs
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for the validation of the problem! totally open to feedback about the solution, and totally get that you only need something simple for now. I want to point out that we do have a pay-as-you-go tier which is $20 for 200 operations, and have a handful of indie devs finding this useful for back-office style automations. ALSO - something I think about a lot - if a all/most of the HumanLayer SaaS backend was open s…
My gut feeling is with where we're headed we'll clear that 200 pretty quickly in production cases, so we'd be interested in bit higher volume. Our dev efforts would probably clear that 200/mo. If the flow/backend was open-source that'd be a total game changer for us as I see it as an integral part of our product. edit: I want to add here that while ycomb companies like yourself may have VC backing, a lot of us don't…
that makes sense - and have wondered a lot even more generally about the price of software and what makes a hard problem hard. Like Amjad from Replit said on a podcast recently "can anyone build 'the next salesforce' in a world where anyone can build their own salesforce with coding agents and serverless infra"
I think in building this some of the things that folks decided they don't want to deal with is like, the state machine for escalations/routing/timeouts, and infrastructure to catch inbound emails and turn them into webhooks, or stitch a single agent's context window with multiple open slack threads, but you're right, that can all be solved by a software engineer with enough time and interest in solving the problem.
I will need to clear up the pricing page as it sounds like I didn't do a good job (great feedback thank you!) - it's basically $20/200 credits, and you can pay-as-you-go, and re-up for more whenever you want. We are early and delivering value is more important to me than extracting every dollar, especially out of a fellow founder who's early. If you geniunely find this useful, I would definitely chat and collaborate/partner to figure out something you think is fair, where you're getting value and you get to focus on your core competency. feel free to email me dexter at humanlayer dot dev
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#56Congrats on the launch! Human in the loop is an underserved market for AI toolchains. I've usually had to build custom tools for this which is a PITA. Make.com has a human in the loop feature in closed beta. https://www.make.com/en/help/app/human-in-the-loop There's also https://www.gotohuman.com/ that uses review forms. Looking forward to playing with HumanLayer. The slack integration looks a lot more useful for my…
thanks for sharing your experience so far! Like I said, we built this ourselves for another idea and it was painful. I have played with Make and I actually chatted w/ the gotohuman guy on zoom a while back, I like his approach as well, he went straight to webhooks which makes sense for big production use cases re: LinkedIn, no I don't know how to get agents to integrate with linkedin. I have tried a bunch of things,…
Thanks for the reply! I've used a bunch of grey market 3rd party tools for LinkedIn automation. Most of them have some sort of API. I'll try integrating with HumanLayer.
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#57We must do whatever we can to stay above the API: https://www.johnmacgaffey.com/blog/below-the-api/
Great article, agreed. I don't want to work for a company where algorithms are weaponized against me.
the dystopian startups that use bounding boxes to observe workers in a warehouse and give the boss a report on how many breaks they took...they're here
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks for sharing your experience so far! Like I said, we built this ourselves for another idea and it was painful. I have played with Make and I actually chatted w/ the gotohuman guy on zoom a while back, I like his approach as well, he went straight to webhooks which makes sense for big production use cases re: LinkedIn, no I don't know how to get agents to integrate with linkedin. I have tried a bunch of things,…
Thanks for the reply! I've used a bunch of grey market 3rd party tools for LinkedIn automation. Most of them have some sort of API. I'll try integrating with HumanLayer.
i am gonna talk with the guy who made trykondo.com this week, I think he has a lot of experience in that area too
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#59Definitely a problem that everyone needs to solve. I wonder if you can achieve this workflow by just using prompt and the new Model Context Protocol connected to email / slack. https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol
so I played with MCP for a while last night and I think MCP is great as a layer to pull custom tools into the existing claude/desktop/chat experience. But at the end of the day its just basic agentic loop over tool calls.
If you want to tell a model to send a message to slack, sure, give it a slack tool and let it go wild. do you see a way how MCP applies for outer-loop or "headless" agents in a way that's any different from another tool-calling agent like langchain or crewai? IT seems like just another protocol for tool calling over the stdio wire (WHICH, TO BE CLEAR, I FIND SUPER DOPE)
Re: Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
#60Hiring humans to do a consistent job is gonna be a nightmare and a limit on the scalability of the service. How are you defining your service level agreements?
They aren't providing the humans. Just the tools for integrating human input/oversight.