Live data from Hacker News

Apps SDK

developers.openai.com

171–180 of 397 posts

Re: Apps SDK

#171
I don't understand, what could be built with this platform that wouldn't be made obsolete by conceivable updates to ChatGPT?

Another commenter suggested a hotel search function:

> Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night

ChatGPT can already do this. Similarly, their own pizza lookup example seems like it would exist or nearly exist with current functionality. I can't think of a single non-trivial app that could be built on this platform - and if there are any, I can't think of any that would be useful or not in immediate danger of being swallowed by advances to ChatGPT.

Re: Apps SDK

#172
Seems wild to have an App SDK for a technology that's 1. supposed to free us from purpose-built APIs and interfaces, and 2. comprised entirely of a single textbox. Feels perhaps more like a MS-type strategy of standards and formal rules intended to lock down the extended ecosystem?

Re: Apps SDK

#173
remember when custom GPTs would just need an OpenAPI spec to be compatible with any existing API out there? we've been through this app store journey once before, maybe it's different this time since we now have agents and MCP

Re: Apps SDK

#174

Seems wild to have an App SDK for a technology that's 1. supposed to free us from purpose-built APIs and interfaces, and 2. comprised entirely of a single textbox. Feels perhaps more like a MS-type strategy of standards and formal rules intended to lock down the extended ecosystem?

I think they want businesses to be more tightly integrated with ChatGPT to open up future opportunities for monetization.

Re: Apps SDK

#175
post #55

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

The problem is not the limitations of the capabilities per se but their discoverability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability ). The user doesn't know what the capabilities are, as they are added and -- infuriatingly -- removed. Google Assistant is a perfect example of this. Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

They don't lack affordances, you can do stuff. They lack signifiers, ie it's not easy to discover the stuff you can do.

Re: Apps SDK

#176
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A platform requires a user moat or unfair advantage. Having a better quality model is neither

How's having the best model not a most?

Because it changes all the time. A few weeks ago, it was Gemini 2.5 Pro, then Claude Opus 4.1, GPT-5 Thinking, now maybe Claude Sonnet 4.5, etc[1]. Having a good model isn't enough when they're basically interchangeable now. You need something else.

[1] This is an example. Which model was the best when is not important.

Re: Apps SDK

#177

I don't understand, what could be built with this platform that wouldn't be made obsolete by conceivable updates to ChatGPT? Another commenter suggested a hotel search function: > Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night ChatGPT can already do this. Similarly, their own pizza lookup example seems like it would exist or nearly exist with current f…

There are multiple branches they are exploring. This is a more structured one. But they also work on Agents that load the website and produce clicks to do the task. Also, this requires hand design, but they also work on generating the gui just-in-time, based on context.

They also have this new design gui for visual programming of agents, with boxes and arrows.

It's going to be a hybrid of all these. Obviously the more explicit work done for interoperability, the easier it is, but the gaps can be bridged with the common sense of the AI at the expense of more time and compute. It's like, a self driving car can detect red lights and speed limit signs via cameras but if there are structured signals in smart infrastructure, then it's simpler and better.

But it's always interesting to see this dance between unstructured and structured. Apparently any time one gets big, the other is needed. When theres tons of structured code, we want AI common sense to cut through it because even if it's structured, it's messy and too complicated. So we generate the code. Now if we have natural language code generators we want to impose structure onto how they work, which we express in markup languages, then small scripts, then large scripts that are too complex and have too much boilerplate so we need AI to generate it from natural language etc etc

Re: Apps SDK

#178

Ads. They created ads. Now (or eventually) they can charge app developers to be featured first for a specific use case.

Ads was always the end goal, they have an opportunity to become a bigger player than Google in the ad space.

Instead of the user wasting time, ChatGpt can come up with the recommendations.

Re: Apps SDK

#179
post #36

I see a lot of negative comments here but to me, it was obvious this is where OAI should land. They want to be the platform in which you tell what you want, and OAI does it for you. It's gonna connect to your inbox, calendar, payment methods, and you'll just ask it to do something and it will, using those apps. This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share.

> This means OAI won't need ads. Ads are defenitely there. Just hidden so deeply in the black box which is generating the useful tips :)

Because the AI labs are just hovering up all internet text that they can, I've been seeing more and more marketing pilots that deliberately seed marketing material in thousands of fake, AI-generated blogs and tutorials. The intention here is to get new LLMs to train on these huge numbers of associations between specific use cases and the company's product. All in a way that gets their marketing information into the final weights.

You may have started seeing this when LLMs seem to promote things based entirely on marketing claims and not on real-world functionality.

More or less, SEO spam V2.

Re: Apps SDK

#180
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not the limitations of the capabilities per se but their discoverability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability ). The user doesn't know what the capabilities are, as they are added and -- infuriatingly -- removed. Google Assistant is a perfect example of this. Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

They don't lack affordances, you can do stuff. They lack signifiers, ie it's not easy to discover the stuff you can do.

Affordance is not what it can do, it is what it signals that it can do. It needs to be perceptible, by the definition I use (Norman's). I see others go by different definitions that even admit hidden affordances. I do not.
Post reply on HN