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Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.

> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.

Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.

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I just can’t see this ever being common. It sounds terrible. Imagine phoning a number, a person answers and you attempt to relay and negotiate a food delivery order through them, in what world is that better than browsing an app? We don’t have to imagine, this is what we used to do. It sucked and almost everyone stopped doing it in favour of browsing an app. It’s just a superior interface for that sort of thing, it’s already as good as it needs to be.

Different use cases, if the apps don't offer what you need because it's uncommon or custom, then the call is superior, apps can't offer every option, so you default back to messaging and a back and forth, at which point you do want realtime communication

I am not sure what kind of restaurant you're thinking about where it is impossible to put every food option into an app.

If you think about the logistics of running a decent kitchen, the set is quite limited in the first place.

So you need to know exactly what you want to order? People rarely order food like that in my opinion. The majority of the time people like to browse menus and consider the options. In that scenario the voice chat interface is absolutely terrible. “Remind me again of the option you presented to me 3 minutes ago? No not that one, list them again. No I don’t need to know the full item description with all ingredients, just be brief!” and so on. It’s just not an efficient way to relay that type of data.

Funny, I much prefer ordering food by phone call than using apps or websites. I find it much quicker and less error prone.

This is common because there's probably some other, major time savings things that your wife is able to spend money on that lets her have a reliable stock of food that she can plan and prepare for her lunch.

AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect. When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch and not wait 30 or 45 minutes for someone else's delivery time frame to match yours.

Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.

Meal prep takes your time. Meal delivery is asynchronous. If you don't have the time to meal prep, then you don't.

> AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect.

It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).

Only when framed that way. Different strokes for different folks. Some people actually enjoy cooking. Being in the room and providing for people. Thinking about the recipe and how it came out this time vs last time, and what to change next time to make it just so. Being taken to a Michelin star restaurant is an experience that I will never forget.

>like chilling with netflix

For me cooking is meditative enough that it can be included in "chilling with netflix". :D

>When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch

Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dummy. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)

I was already making the food - That's why there's leftovers. The marginal time needed to have leftovers is not a significant increase when already making food anyway.

I understand the convenience, and I'm explaining that if you are smart enough to plan ahead once in a while, convenience is overblown.

Habit + planning + preparing food in bulk can save a lot of time and money. If you're already in the kitchen preparing a Sunday evening meal, you can scale that up a bit and have a few extra lunches ready without much additional effort.

> There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.

Are you arguing against observed reality? People have not been using AI assistants to buy things. Remember all those smart devices they sold trying to do exactly that? None of them are being used that way.

>Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely.

Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.

You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.

> My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.

Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".

(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)

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