The Age of Agent Experience • Hacker News Board

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#41

Post by bronco21016 » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 2:18 AM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #22

xnx wrote: post #4

The popularity of agents that run from users' devices is going to push sites that don't have logins to add them and sites with logins to add tougher captchas.

Wouldn't the agent just send a notification to the user's phone and say "can you solve this please?"

Apparently this is how the "automated" solvers work. Would love to find a source describing how all of this works. One website I frequent uses Datadome and their captcha has a timer on it. I'm assuming this is a factor in "human-ness". Are we all going to be tied to our phones solving captchas as fast as possible?

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#42

Post by Covenant0028 » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 7:34 AM UTC

javasquip wrote: post #16

xnx wrote: post #4

The popularity of agents that run from users' devices is going to push sites that don't have logins to add them and sites with logins to add tougher captchas.

I think the underlying assumption in this is an important question to consider. Should we treat agents as we would have treated bots over the decades. I do believe that treating agents like traditional bots of old misses an important aspect. Traditional bots are doing something with the intent to serve some external entities gain (scraping content, attacks, etc.). Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving…

> Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving a site's end consumer. When I use an agent to shop, I'm still the customer of the shop. As the shop owner, I want to give the best experience therefore it's in my best interest to provide an AX that supports them providing a good experience to the end user.

This is fine until the agent decides to order something the customer did not want. This is inherent to the concept of an agent. Due to the probabilistic nature of LLMs, and the fact that no agent will ever be perfectly able to predict exactly what you want at the time you want, this scenario is inevitable.

As the shop owner, this would result in an increased numbers of returns. You could recommend that the user must approve the purchase, but given that you do not define these agents, there is no way for you to ensure that the user is actually following your advice.

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#43

Post by Covenant0028 » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 7:36 AM UTC

IncreasePosts wrote: post #22

xnx wrote: post #4

The popularity of agents that run from users' devices is going to push sites that don't have logins to add them and sites with logins to add tougher captchas.

Wouldn't the agent just send a notification to the user's phone and say "can you solve this please?"

It's more likely that the user will need to ask the agent to solve the CAPTCHA, because right now AI bots are better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans are.

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#44

Post by hacker7070 » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 12:23 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #17

xnx wrote: post #4

The popularity of agents that run from users' devices is going to push sites that don't have logins to add them and sites with logins to add tougher captchas.

I cannot see the difference in the access mechanism between an agent and what we use today for APIs consumption. The agent, whatever it is, is basically a client, P2P node, etc.

Exactly I also believe that UI would get redundant. In fact agents don't even need to make decisions looking at visual like we use web. Imagine your browser being an agent that takes decisions, it knows which get requests to fetch data from and how to make payments too.

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#45

Post by javasquip » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

Covenant0028 wrote: post #42

javasquip wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the underlying assumption in this is an important question to consider. Should we treat agents as we would have treated bots over the decades. I do believe that treating agents like traditional bots of old misses an important aspect. Traditional bots are doing something with the intent to serve some external entities gain (scraping content, attacks, etc.). Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving…

> Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving a site's end consumer. When I use an agent to shop, I'm still the customer of the shop. As the shop owner, I want to give the best experience therefore it's in my best interest to provide an AX that supports them providing a good experience to the end user. This is fine until the agent decides to order something the customer did not want. This is inherent to the…

There are ways to ensure that the end user provides authorization. While the shop owner does not control the agent it does control purchase authorization - primitively that could look like requiring a pin/cvv, confirming via text sent code, etc. This concept can recursively assume that an agent can do these things on the user's behalf but this is where limits come in, compliance regulations, etc. It's not in the shop's or the agent's interest to integrate poorly within these flows. That said, this is where we should establish the conventions that we can enforce consistency and compliance as well as validate them. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that an agent must prove they are operating correctly before they can initiate actions such as purchase requests and then the agent's authority is known and can be held accountable for misuse.