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Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

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Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#251

Post by solarkraft »

majormajor wrote: post #192
bloppe wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend at a faang was talking about the "massive overhauls to make everything ready for ai". I asked for an example. He said "basically just documenting the shit out of everything" I guess that just never occurred to anybody before.

Having the humans document the code seems backward (maybe that's not what they're doing, but "make everything ready for ai" sound manual). And hopefully there aren't that many scary surprises that humans need to manually document. One of the best parts of LLMs is that you can use them to bootstrap your documentation, or scan for outdated things, etc, far more quickly than ever before. Don't just throw a mountain at i…

The humans are the only ones knowing the why. The what is cheap.

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#252

Post by klvino »

zmmmmm wrote: post #163
angry_octet wrote: post #111

Great guidance hidden in here for making it expensive for agents to navigate your website. Move elements on screen as the mouse moves, force natural mouse movement to make the UI work, change the button labels in the JS to be randomly named every visit, force scrolling to the bottom of the screen to check for hidden extra tasks... Hang on, that sounds like common corporate SaaS apps.

It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI. It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive…

Had similar discussion around prompting. Spend years clearly outlining required data inputs, creating forms to dummy proof communication from users. Now that AI is in the picture, users are willing to learn to write elaborate Shakespearean-scale prompts. They are more willing to learn how to communicate to a computer more than how to clearly communicate to a human.

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#253

Post by close04 »

_heimdall wrote: post #189
bloppe wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend at a faang was talking about the "massive overhauls to make everything ready for ai". I asked for an example. He said "basically just documenting the shit out of everything" I guess that just never occurred to anybody before.

The CEO of Uber made the same comment on Diary of a CEO recently. I think it was for their customer service team if I'm not mistaken, they threw their existing docs at an LLM and it was all over the place because policies were poorly documented and defined. The team is now documenting everything from scratch, focusing on outcomes rather than process - TBD if it works out.

Companies really want to use AI because they can cut the workforce. But today's AI is generally not able to fill in the gaps in processes and documentation a human could. Hence the renewed focus on formalizing everything properly because it's the only way it will work.

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#255

Post by _heimdall »

zepolen wrote: post #242
_heimdall wrote: post #190

We gave up on structured APIs 20+ years ago when JSON RPC largely replaced XML REST. You can do REST in many different formats, it mainly just needs to be structured data and self-discoverable. Had we not made that wrong turn, LLMs and humans would have a much easier time reasoning about APIs they don't directly control.

> You can do REST in many different formats, it mainly just needs to be structured data and self-discoverable. REST has nothing to do with structured data or discoverability.

Schemaed data may be more accurate than structured. Regardless I'd be curious how you would consider something RESTful when it isn't schemaed data or discoverable via the data describing actions that can be taken.

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#256

Post by _heimdall »

close04 wrote: post #253
_heimdall wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO of Uber made the same comment on Diary of a CEO recently. I think it was for their customer service team if I'm not mistaken, they threw their existing docs at an LLM and it was all over the place because policies were poorly documented and defined. The team is now documenting everything from scratch, focusing on outcomes rather than process - TBD if it works out.

Companies really want to use AI because they can cut the workforce. But today's AI is generally not able to fill in the gaps in processes and documentation a human could. Hence the renewed focus on formalizing everything properly because it's the only way it will work.

LLMs will never be able to replace humans in that way IMO. No matter how clever they seem to become, it is only text prediction.

That's the main reason I hesitate to ever call it AI. They are ML for sure, but I don't see how intelligence fits into LLMs.

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#257

Post by misja111 »

titzer wrote: post #167
zhxiaoliang wrote: post #145

I'm always skeptical of the whole "computer use" concept. It's like hiring someone and inviting him to your house and telling him to go ahead, feel free to sleep on the bed, use the toilet, eat whatever is in the fridge, watch the TV, and oh here are the combinations for the safe... and that someone you hire is a monkey.

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Are we really having an AI fart around with a mouse and clicking on things to accomplish stuff because we're not capable of making one kind of software query and command another piece of software? It kind of boggles my mind.

There are several cases where this is not possible or desirable:

- you are using AI as an E2E testing tool and it's a requirement to not just test the API but also the workings of the UI

- you are using some third party tool and want to automate its usage

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#259

Post by windexh8er »

cco wrote: post #191
angry_octet wrote: post #111

Great guidance hidden in here for making it expensive for agents to navigate your website. Move elements on screen as the mouse moves, force natural mouse movement to make the UI work, change the button labels in the JS to be randomly named every visit, force scrolling to the bottom of the screen to check for hidden extra tasks... Hang on, that sounds like common corporate SaaS apps.

You can have both! haha We built isagent.dev for exactly this reason, serve human content to humans, serve agent optimized content to agents.

Do people really need or want more bandaids?

Re: Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

#260

Post by trollbridge »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #185
bloppe wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend at a faang was talking about the "massive overhauls to make everything ready for ai". I asked for an example. He said "basically just documenting the shit out of everything" I guess that just never occurred to anybody before.

There was a recent effort at work to make it possible for agents to provide up-to-date help on how to do various admin/setup tasks. A very sensible goal: We already have lots of documentation, the problem is that it's scattered everywhere and mostly out of date. Turns out the new solution amounted to someone manually going through it all and painstakingly preparing some Markdown files for consumption by said agent. S…

The evolution of Markdown into a programming language has been an interesting one to behold.
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