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Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

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Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#21

[flagged]

why can't people write comments by hand these days?

Are they even people? I've stopped going to Reddit because many of the subreddits I used to enjoy have devolved into bots talking to bots, interspersed with a bunch of confused humans. That's probably the future of every public forum.

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why can't people write comments by hand these days?

Are they even people? I've stopped going to Reddit because many of the subreddits I used to enjoy have devolved into bots talking to bots, interspersed with a bunch of confused humans. That's probably the future of every public forum.

It is just sad to see hn becoming this abomination...

Site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

---

Is it really an "illusion" anymore???

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#24
It's a really cool idea. Many desktop tasks are teachable like this.

The look-click-look-click loop it used for sending the Telegram for Musk was pretty slow. How intelligent (and therefore slow) does a model have to be to handle this? What model was used for the demo video?

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the hard part, and I agree it matters more than the happy path. A few concrete things we do today: 1. It’s fully agentic rather than a fixed replay script. The model is prompted to treat GUI as one route among several, to prefer simpler / more reliable routes when available, and to switch routes or replan after repeated failures instead of brute-forcing the same path. In practice, we’ve also seen cases…

What if you had it ask for another demonstration when things are different? or if it's different and taking more than X amount of time to figure out. Like an actual understudy would.

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#26
sounds a bit sketch?

learning to do a thing means handling the edge cases, and you cant exactly do that in one pass?

when ive learned manual processes its been at least 9 attempts. 3 watching, 3 doing with an expert watching, and 3 with the expert checking the result

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#28
post #13

[flagged]

Out of curiosity - were this and other comments from this account written by hand, or generated and posted by an agent on behalf of a human user?

This kind of comment from greens (and even old accounts) has been popping up nonstop l.

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#29
post #6

One more tool targeting OSX only. That platform is overserved with desktop agents already while others are underserved, especially Linux.

That's mostly because Mac OS users make tools that solve their problems and Linux users go online to complain that no one has solved their problem but that if they did they'd want it to be free.

Listen; we're not in a "Windows vs MacOS vs Linux user" meme. We're trying to have intelligent discussion here, and surely generalizing a large amount of people simply because they use one OS is not intelligent discussion. Wake up. Real life is not what you see in funny memes.

Re: Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly because Mac OS users make tools that solve their problems and Linux users go online to complain that no one has solved their problem but that if they did they'd want it to be free.

Listen; we're not in a "Windows vs MacOS vs Linux user" meme. We're trying to have intelligent discussion here, and surely generalizing a large amount of people simply because they use one OS is not intelligent discussion. Wake up. Real life is not what you see in funny memes.

I'd truly like to see what examples you have of Linux users "complaining about the fact no one solved their problem yet"
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