Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

Post by misja111 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 12:57 PM UTC

_boffin_ wrote: post #19

What i don't understand about "computer use" is why they're not just grabbing the window handles and storing them to determine what should be clicked after the first few iterations of using that a specific application. if a new case / path / whatever is found, drop back to screen grabbing and bounding boxes and then figure the handles that are there and store after. idk.. not really thought out too much, but has to b…

Post by trymamboapp » Wed, May 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

jacktu wrote: post #62

Totally agree. I’ve been building an AI visual tool recently and experimented with both approaches. The latency and c ost of generic "agentic" browser use are absolute dealbreakers for real-time consumer apps right now. Structured APIs (even just chained LLM calls with strict JSON schemas) are not only 40x cheaper, but more importantly, they are deterministic enough to actually build a stable product on top of. Compu…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 06, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

netics01 wrote: post #264

Like MCP, but it seems most AI tools these days are at the stage where they're being built so that AI can somehow operate or control them. Over time, I expect that not only Computer Use, but pretty much all other tools will eventually just become APIs.

Post by ElevenLathe » Wed, May 06, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

GarnetFloride wrote: post #175

zmmmmm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My manager just told me that after 12 years of trying to get one of the founders to understand the difference between dev docs and user docs, they tried getting Claude to do it and he finally got it that they are different. He'd been saying this whole time that customer could just read the dev docs. If they could they wouldn't need our software.

Post by RHSeeger » Wed, May 06, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #251

majormajor wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.