Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlesabarnes | Hacker News Reader

These agent assistants are really appealing to the optimist within me, but I have a hard time making the trust leap. What are people using these "personal assistant" agents for?

View on HN

Organizing photos. Compiling hockey schedules. Giving out my home address to strangers.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/meta-agent-muse-conc...

it's quite useful for some of my personal usecases honestly, especially with having a sandbox and computer use -- from being on my tailnet to handle tasks on my machines with CLI and doing routine repo work on my github to ordering periodic groceries from comparing apps, managing my calendar, scheduling calls, etc, largely if there's any task that's loopable and isn't, it's a waste, I just describe what I need and how often and they just do it with me saying yes each time.

I got my dad instinct and he's maintaining websites with voice notes through whatsapp which is and insane UX comfort for him.

Not using assistants, but I had it do quarterly reporting. Gave it the password to my webbased accounting software which does not have an API. Told it to write a CLI for itself to access the administration. I only did the bank exports to CSV. Told it to look in my Thunderbird mailbox to find invoices and let it do the quarterly reporting. Main issue: Many foreign vendors don't use invoices, which means my Dutch, invoice-centric accounting software kinda sucks for international import-heavy operations.

While I'm still wary, I hope to one day make use of them to offset my ADHD-like tendencies. Normally you'd have friends or family for that, but in my case a proactive bot would be a more readily available and reliable solution...

Tbh, I still see labs demoing "reservations" or "email triaging" as the best use-cases. Definitely sure there are many niche ones too, but I'm still not sold on these.

I’m not best friends with this stuff yet either; but sometimes to me it’s a nice layer of abstraction for everything and anything regarding your digital life.

You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com