Ask HN: If agentic AI is the future, why is every startup shipping a dashboard? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If agentic AI is the future, why is every startup shipping a dashboard?

1 pointATechGuy8 comments

There's a lot of talk about agentic systems that AI can take actions, run workflows, and operate autonomously. However, when I look at AI startups, most of them seem to be building dashboards: analytics panels, control screens, monitoring tools.

If the goal is autonomous agents, why are we still shipping dashboards? Is this a trust issue, a sales issue, or something deeper about how companies adopt new tech?

Curious what you think.

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I think the goal, at least for now, is to simply let the AI do the work and humans should only monitor the end results, thus the dashboards.

I have the same debated working on my self-hosted analytics platform[0], where I am torn between implementing more features to build better dashboards and working on the AI features that simply generate insights and crunch numbers, so you won't even have to look at a dashboard.

That being said, people simply like seeing numbers go up...

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com

Thanks for your insights!

QQ: does uxwizz also show AI agents visiting websites? have you seen traffic from AI agents?

I currently do not automatically detect the agents themselves, and most of the bot traffic is ignored, but for the traffic that is not ignored it usually shows as a 0s session (so you can filter for all sessions that have a 0s replay, which are usually bots).

I am still torn whether I should actually track bots/AI traffic or simply drop it, maybe I will add a toggle in the setting, maybe it's at least interesting to see how much spam the website gets and coming from where.

Oh, and as for the agents themselves browsing the website, if the agent uses an actual browser with JS enabled (like headless puppeteer), then you would actually be able to see how the agent browsed the website.

Yes, but how can you tell if it was an agent with full browser?

If they don't set the proper UserAgent, it's not trivial.

You could add some JS to test it and store it as a tag, maybe using something like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78629469/407650

That's a good start I'd say, but I agree with you that detection is not trivial. I wonder if there's enough value in distinguishing between AI agents (with full browser) and humans. What use cases would it enable?

For the distinguishing part, it's hard to tell if it can be done anyway, as the agent browsers are still new and constantly changing, and it's up to them if they will correctly identify themselves or not (same as with crawler/bots, the main indication is still the source IP address).

There could be use cases, like tracking if your content was stolen/parsed by an AI, maybe future pay-per-request for LLMs, etc.

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