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The Age of Agent Experience

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Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#3

Post by abhshkdz »

Good read, thanks for sharing! I'd love for OAuth to be augmented with agent-friendly scopes. Completely agree that it's a standard that doesn't need to be reinvented. But in how things are today, there's two broad areas where OAuth doesn't quite cut it:

1) long tail of websites that don't have APIs, so the only way for an agent to interact with them on the user's behalf is to log in more conventionally, and

2) even if a website has APIs, there may be tasks to be done that are outside the scope of the provided APIs.

Thoughts?

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#4

Post by xnx »

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.

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#6

Post by svilen_dobrev »

hm. API stands for Application Programming Interface. Which IMO is not same as Application Agentic Interface.. similar to how it is not Application's Human Interface. Maybe closer than that.

But, parsing documentation? And, believing it blindly? hah. Maybe ressurect Semantic web as well..

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#7

Post by bobfunk »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #6

hm. API stands for Application Programming Interface. Which IMO is not same as Application Agentic Interface.. similar to how it is not Application's Human Interface. Maybe closer than that. But, parsing documentation? And, believing it blindly? hah. Maybe ressurect Semantic web as well..

Yeah interestingly API's in their current form are rarely very good for agents. In many cases tools like Operator using a virtual browser and screenshotting are better for agent interactions than API specs.

This shows we need to build better approaches to agent interactions that are not at the level of "run a virtual browser", but that encodes much more of the workflows available than raw API's do today.

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#8

Post by jelambs »

abhshkdz wrote: post #3

Good read, thanks for sharing! I'd love for OAuth to be augmented with agent-friendly scopes. Completely agree that it's a standard that doesn't need to be reinvented. But in how things are today, there's two broad areas where OAuth doesn't quite cut it: 1) long tail of websites that don't have APIs, so the only way for an agent to interact with them on the user's behalf is to log in more conventionally, and 2) even…

author of the post here, yeah this is a really good point. I think we're going to see more people investing in building OAuth compatible apps and more thorough APIs to support agent use cases. but of course, not every site is going to do so, so agents will in many cases just be doing screenscraping effectively. but I think overtime, users will prefer using applications that make it easier and more secure for agents to interact with them.

I was an early engineer at Plaid and I think it's an interesting parallel, financial data aggregators used to use more of a screenscraping model of integration but over the past 5+ years, it's moved almost fully to OAuth integrations. would expect the adoption curve here to be much steeper than that, banks are notoriously slow so would expect tech companies to move even more quickly towards OAuth and APIs for agents.

another dimension of this, is that it's quite easy to block ai agents screenscraping, we're able to identify with almost 100% accuracy open ai's operator, anthropic's computer use api, browswerbase, etc. so some sites might choose to block agents from screenscraping and require the API path.

all of this is still early too, so excited to see how things develop!

Re: The Age of Agent Experience

#10

Post by 8338550bff96 »

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.

There are no websites that I visit now that don't have a login that I would still visit if they suddenly started putting up captchas
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