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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me I will never understand why people are so eager to use these things

I run an personal AI agent locally (hermes), and use a combination of local models and whatever model I can get for a reasonable price (usually deepseek).

After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family.

I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way.

I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.

Whenever this comes up, all I ever see are hand-wavy responses like this. "It does everything", "it changes your life." But how exactly? Because I can only see this being true for the terminally online.

That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...

I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database. I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.

Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).

Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.

Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.

I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...). I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.

It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me. As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.

Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.

I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).

I don't think "it does everything" or that it has "changed my life", but all of those examples are chores, things that I don't particularly enjoy doing; and if something can take it off my plate, then it's useful for me.

Your thermostat and non-standard battery are examples of LLMs being helpful.

As for the rest, that is a lot of tokens burned to keep a fridge stocked.

It doesn't burn that many tokens, as most of the code is deterministic.

Receipt emails are in a predictable format, so codex built scripts to parse the emails. If there is a receipt email it doesn't recognise, it will use an LLM to build a parser for that kind of email once.

The agent also "self improves", so after asking once to get items to restock, it wrote a skill with the query it used in, so it doesn't burn tokens figuring it out again.

I was impressed that after it logged into my supermarket account, it inspected the network traffic and discovered a GraphQL API, and used that (instead of screen scraping); much more economic.

I've averaged 2.6 cents a day in token costs over the last month.

Thanks for your detailed answers. Although none of what you posted even remotely interests me as something I’d be interested in doing on a computer, it is absolutely fascinating to see details about how others are using LLMs and turning their computers into these “assistants.”

Yeah it’s not for everyone, it reminds me of the automation xkcd comic [1]

For me my motivation is that I’m working 9-5, my children go to bed at 8pm, and I don’t have my phone on me so I can spend time with them.

Once they’re asleep, I’ve got 2 hours to spend with my partner before bed. I’d rather actually spend time with her rather than checking if we have enough kitchen roll.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1319/

Thanks for the details. Maybe I remain too conservative.

When i run out of something to buy from the store, i type it in the notes app on my phone

When I need to change the channel, I just get up and walk over to the television.

I understand what you’re getting at, but that example doesn’t bode well for you. The remote control increased convenience at the cost of making us more sedentary and lowering our attention spans. It was not a good trade.

I was thinking that I actually use grocery shopping as a recovery activity. I could cut it out but don't feel the need that much. It's not that I feel I'd do something incredible instead (which requires energy and/or recovery time of its own)...

I am the opposite. I work with LLMs all the time but don’t use them much at all personally. Not for lack of trying, I’ve tried several times with different frameworks and I just can’t find a use case that is remotely worth it.

I think the promise of personal AI agents is incredible, and they can already be super useful. But we haven't even begun to figure out the safety side for a mass audience.

Even as an experienced developer, sandboxing an agent is not trivial. The idea of my aunt, who has her passwords on a post-it-note on her monitor and forwards me scam emails using these things is terrifying.

That's pretty much what Openpod.live is doing

Oh I convinced now!

I'll use personal agents for my laundry now. Thanks mate for the samples given

If the AI companies would actually automate laundry, managing my dishwasher, clean my house I would be so willing to praise them as the best thing ever created. Instead we are getting the most over engineered automation stack ever conceptualized. And it’s by design not reliable

> automate laundry, managing my dishwasher, clean my house

You can actually hire a person to do these things and it will likely be cheaper than any technological solution.

no need to be rude, see my reply to a sibling comment for examples

You cannot understand it because you are possibly thinking of it from a utility perspective? People just do things because it's cool or keep themselves entertained. Mostly to keep themselves entertained.

I believe that in the fullness of time we will see that by the mid/late-2020s our society was completely information-saturated/overloaded, and hence why turning to these personal AI agents was seen by most as an easy decision (if not downright necessary to gain a feeling of control again over their lives).

Most peers (Millennial knowledge workers) I talk to these days constantly discuss the feeling of "being overwhelmed", and I suspect a lot of it is just the info-sphere.

Neil Postman predicted some of this many decades ago in "Informing Ourselves to Death", where he argued that increasing the speed, volume, and accessibility of information would not necessarily improve society (i.e. information without context/judgment and institutional scaffolding can become socially destructive).

I really feel like we live in that world, and hence the rise of these AI agents as a potential "solution" to that.

For the same reason people buy shiny new cars, bikes, keyboards....you name it. The novelty and sometimes bragging rights in the circles they inhabit.

Yea I think that's about as far as the usefulness goes for personal use

My personal assistant is treating exactly like a personal assistant - which means it has its own email, phone number, etc. It runs on OpenClaw.

My biggest use case is to coordinate groups. For example I tend to do big travel trips with like 4-15 people. Having an assistant coordinate group payments ("split this bill and get everyone's venmo accounts"), signups ("who wants to do horseback riding?"), takes all of "work" out of vacations.

I will NOT let it touch anything that it could unintentionally (or intentionally) leak sensitive personal info. So, anything that has a credit card, bank account, etc. is pretty much offlimits.

i understand the adoption for these things is off the charts.

usage-time growing fast, with tasks and cron jobs.

in the last spacex earnings report (few hours ago), Elon said he thinks their grok-bot will next year make up most of their AI inference usage across their datacenters.

basically he tried to imply these bots/personal-agents get lots of usage once users start customizing them. and it is bringing in a lot of money in API usage.

Because a lot of money is being poured into fear mongering campaigns that if you don’t you will *puts flashlight below chin* “be left behind”.

No one ever answers why that’s bad, though, or behind what. Turns out it’s behind in the procession walking towards the cliff. Maybe not such a bad idea to stay behind on that one.

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