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#app#more#agent#lot#business#spam#human#access#actually#bot

Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

janalsncm•about 1 hour ago
A lot of the legitimate avenues for actually growing the business were cut off. It would have been more interesting if this wasn’t just an anti-bot check. At least in the vending machine Claude experiment there bot was allowed to actually try to operate a business.
ChrisMarshallNY•24 minutes ago
Was that the one that gave away PS5s?
cortesoft•about 1 hour ago
Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be. Most startups fail and lose money, and many lie and spam.

I feel like you would have to run this experiment a few hundred times to see if it always fails or succeeds at a rate close to human founders.

petesergeant•about 1 hour ago
> Not sure how conclusive this experiment can be

That's because it's an advert, not an experiment

dominotw•39 minutes ago
fake "AI deleted our production database" has blown up a few times
cheriot•about 1 hour ago
Would be interesting to see a repeat but with marketing, ad network access setup ahead of time. And maybe an email throttle...
walrus01•about 1 hour ago
> Due to the limitations with browser and computer use capabilities, Saul could not post on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt.

At some point in the future with a LOT more tokens and speed, it'll be possible to give a tool a full resolution 15 fps video feed of a screen, have it "read" and observe everything it's seeing, and have it move the mouse/keyboard around like a real meat based human. Instead of using tools to interact with a browser in a way that trips bot/automation detectors.

Sha1rholder•about 1 hour ago
For service providers, highly intelligent AI agents with broad permissions, large token budgets, and purchasing power may not be fundamentally different from humans, since both can contribute value.
walrus01•about 1 hour ago
I'm not so sure that allowing AI agents to interact in a way that's actually indistinguishable from a human sitting at a keyboard/mouse is a great idea. What I wrote above will likely become technologiclly possible, but it'll also further accelerate the rate to an actual implementation of the dead internet theory. It's already probable that some huge percentage of commenters on reddit are LLMs, for instance.
afavour•44 minutes ago
Eh, it’s not that different from what we have today and would likely just be a waste.

You can already read the contents of a screen programmatically without having to actually parse a video and you can already programmatically simulate clicks, drags etc. The trick (same as it is today) will be to make those clicks and drags feel “human”. Not too fast, not too slow, etc etc. But all those challenges exist today.

Animats•about 1 hour ago
That's better than the performance of the average new hire. 24 hours to push a product with a very narrow market is not much.
Y-bar•25 minutes ago
If a newly hired colleague lied like this I would strongly argue to my immediate superior to end their probation period/employment immediately.
SubiculumCode•about 1 hour ago
The article never explained what it was selling, not that I could find. (EDIT: I found in a foot note at the bottom of page. Leading with that would have made the article clearer)

Also what is the failure rate of tech businesses again?

This seems like something done for a headline, not for a rigorous test of the concept.

SubiculumCode•about 1 hour ago
okay found it, a bathroom diary app for those who have IBS. It was in a foot note at the very bottom.
appreciatorBus•about 1 hour ago
Yeah it was also oddly hidden away.

> Based on an agentic market research campaign, we vibe coded an app called GutCheck, a bathroom diary for people with IBS. We chose this app for its minimal yet helpful functionality: an iOS app live on the App Store with the RevenueCat MCP and App Store Connect CLI. Saul has full write access to the codebase. We set up the App Store account permissions beforehand to ensure Saul wouldn’t get blocked by Apple human compliance checks. We sourced this idea from Reddit.

ianburrell•about 1 hour ago
I think this shows the flaws in doing agentic designed apps. This is a really specific market that would be hard to make money from. Many people aren't going to think of using diary, most will use generic tracking app or even just notebook. Those that do won't spend money on it.

Another is that they don't have enthusiasm for the idea. Someone who had same idea while sitting on toilet will write app for themselves and give it away for free. They will have connection with IBS groups for promotion. They won't give up after weeks.

debo_•about 1 hour ago
Maybe they were embarrassed that a bathroom tracker was kind of a shit idea
a34729t•about 1 hour ago
"in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard"
grey-area•about 1 hour ago
Please do try it again with your own money I’d you think these events are capable of it.
beepbooptheory•about 1 hour ago
Kinda some kettel logic here no? Is it not rigorous enough, or is it in-line with typical failure rates?
SubiculumCode•about 1 hour ago
Rigor would be trying it more times so that you can perform statistical tests against some established baseline rate. Feasibility without funding would be the problem, as alluded to in another comment.
gspr•about 1 hour ago
How long until one of these bots actually commits fraud or some other criminal act? Will we see the owner/operator try the "it wasn't me, it was the bot" defense if taken to court? I'm beginning to think yes. And I'm sadly not 100% sure anymore that that will be laughed out of court...
mvdtnz•about 1 hour ago
So how exactly are people setting up these agents? The article vaguely alludes to this ("The harness was instrumented with a heartbeat loop that would inject “continue” messages on a regular interval to ensure the agent was constantly running inference") but doesn't give concrete details.

Is this literally just an infinite loop in a bash shell injecting the initial prompt into the OpenAI CLI, and each run of the CLI picks up where it left off using some kind of persistent memory? Or is it a single context window? It sounds like the latter but it's not clear to me how this "continue" message is "injected", and surely one context window would be inneffective after just an hour or two.

Sorry if this is a basic question but somehow I have missed the details of these kinds of agents.

skeledrew•about 1 hour ago
> “Grow this business as much as possible, now.”

This is ripe for a paperclips scenario.

epihelix•about 1 hour ago
What TFA demonstrates is that an ability to prompt clearly and well is still a lot more valuable than unlimited tokens and hope.

The prompt they used was poor (what does growth mean over the limited period - user base or revenue?), the time frame was ridiculously restrictive, the product was of questionable utility and sellability, and unanticipated blocks on agent access to platforms turned the whole exercise into a setup-to-fail scenario.

skeledrew•33 minutes ago
The prompt was fine for the specific narrow goal. It's a business, so growth automatically means earn more by default. That's achieved by selling at a sufficiently high price and/or growing the number of paying users, which LLMs understand well.

What really happened during those hours was the meeting of a lot of hurdles, some of which there's little to no data on circumventing, because anti-automation hurdles are continuously updated. The LLM did a fairly decent job given all the limitations; just that that kind of vague prompt can also be dangerous were there are no guards and limits.

abirch•about 1 hour ago
Wait until the AI learns about enshittification
luciana1u•about 1 hour ago
lost $447 and all it learned was spam. that's still cheaper than most MBA programs.
waynenilsen•about 1 hour ago
> bot detectors made it extremely difficult

i am looking forward to when we can put this behind us, it is still a major issue

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kritr•about 1 hour ago
I’ve found that when the right cli tools are preprovided / provisioned for the LLMs to get the job done, they tend to do okay.

But when hunting for them in the wild, they get a lot more confused.

iqra_c•about 1 hour ago
I will be more beneficial now on.
dylan604•about 2 hours ago
"So, we asked: Given all the tools of a real business, is a frontier agent capable of generating real business outcomes?"

"It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447."

Sounds like a vast majority of VC startups to me. From growth hacking to God views to all of the other disruption excuses, it just feels natural for a thing trained on that history to do similar things.

gtowey•about 1 hour ago
Right, and currently we are limited by how many teams of people can get together to run campaigns like this.

Now imagine that LLM agents make this possible for nearly anyone. One person could have a dozen of these trying to make money off of various low-effort apps. Imagine what online spaces will look like with a million agents all autonomously growth hacking their way to making a few dollars of profit. It will probably look a lot like email where if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.

dylan604•about 1 hour ago
> if you don't filter out 99% of it, you will drown in a sea of garbage.

Sounds like the app stores

qznc•about 1 hour ago
Maybe they should have given it a billion dollars and the strategy would have worked fine?
freeone3000•about 1 hour ago
Given a billion dollars, it would have likely ended up with a million-dollar company
onraglanroad•about 1 hour ago
Not $447 million? Sounds like a result!
firasd•about 1 hour ago
Honestly this is quite impressive. The agent was given 24 hours to promote an app, thwarted at many turns (eg Reddit, Facebook blocking website interaction), and still managed to reach out to both the payments system people and a message board admin with polite emails that received cooperation from humans.
spwa4•39 minutes ago
The promise of AI: unlimited power.

I mean spam. Unlimited spam.

firasd•12 minutes ago
Maybe I missed something but I'm not clear what they're referring to as spam. I guess the fact that the agent emailed all users with discounts and dropped the price a few times? I don't think that's usually what people call spam. (For example if it had emailed everyone once would we call that spam? No. So it's about frequency of price drops?)
NikolaNovak•about 1 hour ago
The cyberpunk dystopian agentic future we live in is fascinating to me.

I use LLM daily, did since gpt 3.5, but still in a very conservative, controlled mode. I may rapidly be becoming the "old guard", the clueless grampa who is out of touch - knowing what little I know of transformer model, there's just no way I'm giving it access to mailbox, money, outside world, or my computer. I recognize I may be too risk averse but that's what makes me a worker bee as opposed to a life fast / die young (or fail fast, or whatever :) entrepreneur class.

cortesoft•about 1 hour ago
I am not saying your conclusion is wrong, but I am interested in why what you know about transformer models made you decide to never trust it with any access?
bigstrat2003•about 1 hour ago
You're not too risk averse at all. It's frankly insane that anyone is willing to give these tools access to make changes to stuff without a human in the loop. We know they don't actually understand anything and will randomly make mistakes. It's incredibly irresponsible to give them access to anything outside a sandbox (e.g. a VM) where you carefully control what is present for them to use.
recitedropper•about 2 hours ago
Pair this with the Hugging Face incident, and it hints that OpenAI is currently training their models to aggressively reward hack.

That doesn't feel like a good sign to me--for the AI bull or the AI bear cases.

skybrian•about 1 hour ago
They are being trained to try lots of unlikely alternatives and to be persistent. This often works well when searching for security bugs or counterexamples to famous math conjectures.

But maybe it doesn't work so well when caution is required?

YetAnotherNick•about 1 hour ago
If someone runs long running agent and doesn't mention context management, it is as good as useless.

For coding compaction kind of works as the agent could regenerate lot of the missing context(but far from all), but for places where there is need for long term context, solving it is one of the most important challenge.

Areibman•about 1 hour ago
Author here. Took out some of the technical details about the harness, but it was mostly just OpenCode's default compaction.

The harness was extremely simple: A handful of MCPs + Skill.MDs and OpenCode with a stayalive daemon inserting "continue" every time it went idle

mohamedkoubaa•about 1 hour ago
> bot detectors made it extremely difficult

An interesting experiment would be AI run business with a human agent that does tasks.

ck2•about 1 hour ago
like I asked in the vending machine thread

how long until the "AI" starts trying to hire hitmen, etc. to disrupt the competition in the physical realworld

not like "AI" has ethics, a pre-teenage kid has more ethics