Comment by javasquip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javasquip | Hacker News Reader

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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 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. Because my target customer is now using an agent to help make a purchase, if I shut my door to their delegated system, I'm telling them to shop somewhere else that does support this.

We are early enough in this evolution to help direct the ship in a way that serves the end user, web owners/creators, and the agent.

I think economic incentives are going to get in the way of that, as is tradition. Amazon’s dev teams in charge of the retail web interface might want to make it easier to sell you more products regardless of interface but there’s always a competing VP with more influence that wants to juice their KPIs by stuffing more advertising down the user’s throat, so they drive top down decisions that impede agents.

It’s almost inevitable since everyone wants more growth and advertising is almost always seen as free money left on the table by decision makers.

I agree! That said, they won't turn down the money through affiliate systems and resellers either.

The economic incentives, the brand control needs, etc. are important dynamics and I don't think it's all in their court alone. It's a combination of where the market goes (the platforms and systems they prefer) and the capabilities unlocked by those platforms.

With that, this evolution will follow the propagation of agent usage. So we will see a lot more initial adoption of AX principles and patterns from developer tools because the software industry has be the most infiltrated by the rise of agentic workflows. As that expands, the nature of markets and meeting user needs will drive adoption of AX.

Yes, but competing with that -- imagine how much easier it would be to phish an agent into buying a product on the user's behalf.

That's my reaction to the GP's comment. Shop owners will not optimize for agent ease of use. They will optimize for convincing agents to make a purchase. This will play out like SEO, with everyone other than the bad actors losing out.

There are a few layers to this worth considering.

- In this world the information delivered to agents should align with content delivered visibly to the human web. This is essentially how the bulk of SEO overloading is detected. There needs to be a way to validate this and establish trust - completely solvable. These techniques penalize these schemes from the outset. (this is probably not the best forum to go too deep into that)

- We're assuming agents have full buying decisions here. I do not believe we will see that as common place for a long time. Even if we did, the same systems for PCA compliance are in play and the interfaces pushed by both payment gateways and shopping carts protect against duplicate purchase attempts. Those attempting to abuse this fall more into the malicious actor camp.

- phishing and malicious actors are going to do what they have always done. There are some very important security, access control, and compliance measures we should put in place for the most sensitive of actions - as we always have where most existing ones still apply. The agent experience and the ecosystem in general will have to evolve to have verifiable trust patterns. So that when a human delegates to an agent to do something, the human can have confidence and ways to validate interactions.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't have all of the answers here but with agents becoming the new entry point or delegation tool for the next generation of digital users, these are questions we have to answer and solve for. It starts by focusing the industry around the domain of this problem, that is AX. How to do it effectively and what needs to evolve to achieve it... that's where the work is.

> 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.

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.

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