The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.
Less friction = more shopping = more profits.
That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile).
If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.
It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.
In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.
Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.
Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.
Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.
I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:
Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?
I find it useful, so here are some concrete examples from last few days.
As a baseline which many skeptics will have a hard time accepting for their own usage - I think there is a correlation between utility and trust (even which is not truly earned). If you don't let it capture memories and learn about you, and you don't connect it to external tools like email, it's less useful. But I think of it usually like a ChatGPT w/ extra tools and knowledge.
I just moved, and last night I asked my agent how to test how safe the soil in my (urban) garden was, and it found some warnings from my city government, and suggested a particular test service that is available in my area. Since it knows exactly where I live, it was able to find recent warnings of contamination in my neighborhood, and suggest specific chemicals to test for.
Additionally, I give it (read only) access to my email, and it'll ~2x a day notify me of some important email. I'm working with a contractor, and getting emails from them bumped, or getting emails about AWS usage alerts pulled out of inbox and notify me directly is super helpful for filtering the noise of my crazy email volume of 99% spam.
For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways:
1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things.
2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)
As someone who doesn't have kids and was last in school decades ago....
Do those School Learning Management Systems tell you everyday what homework your kid is expected to complete? Do you feel such a granular degree of monitoring and direction has impacted your child's opportunity to build character, intrinsic responsibility and self-management skills?
When I was a kid, teachers gave out assignments, and the student was responsible for keeping track of them, staying on top of progress, and handing in by the deadline. If a problem arose that wasn't an isolated incident or resolvable directly between the student and teacher, the feedback would flow at a much higher level e.g. scheduled parent-teacher interviews or via a phone call.
And what do parents do who don't accept the terms and conditions of said educational platforms? (e.g. due to overly broad privacy clauses or one-sided indemnities and the like)
But nowadays kids are expected to check 2-4 platforms plus their notes and there is no guaranteed time when they know it will be there. It is like the worlds worst paid disfunctional work place and one of my kids schools literally uses teams for one third of their assignments. In word format so sometimes kids overwrite it.
If you don’t accept the terms your kids life is just even harder.
Keeping track of your kids' homework is your concern? Doesn't it only become your concern, briefly, when the school contacts you about your kid not getting their homework done?
As a parent people from prior generations do not get the current situation. I actually agree that this is a useful use of the agentic work tools - and it’s the only case I mentioned above I’ve used it for successfully, if not saving of time.
Homework isn’t assigned in class any more. It’s posted on dozens of inscrutable websites in weird UX’s that are impossible for any single human to understand. Children are mystified, parents confused, teachers at their wits end.
A few times a week children miss some website or queue from some system, teachers can’t get things to share properly, this needs tending, they need to photograph this and upload that to this place as well as that but not the other one.
It’s truly remarkably astounding. I have serious doubts frontier models can navigate it either honestly. But this is in fact where I see the most chance of using these tools.
“Computers at school” is the worst idea ever, and no one who hasn’t experienced the clusterfuck of middle school in 2026 can understand it. It makes the world of the movie Brazil seem utopian.
I'm not the person you're asking, but in general, I would also stay on top of my child's obligations - homework, chores, etc. I don't want the first sign of trouble to be a call from a teacher, or the complete absence of clean clothes for them to wear in the morning.
You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation
At work? I've got ADHD, so the idea of making a to-do list is fine but keeping it up to date was a challenge. I've created a set of agentic skills that comes through the last 36 hours of emails, meetings, chats, and gathers up all the work I volunteered to do (or was told to do), triages them across urgency/impact, and sorts them into Do/Defer/Schedule/Delegate piles.
Last, I created an app to give a UI to this data to see and act on it all, including a way to flag a to-do that was found and enter why I thought the status or categorization was wrong. On the next run, a review skill reads those comments, makes changes to the other skills accordingly, and sends me an email with details of the changes, and the commit I can use to roll back the change if I'd like.
I've been running it since April and while there were a lot of updates at first, I haven't had to flag anything for review in months, and I get to feel a whole lot better about managing my to-do pile.
I'm looking at open-sourcing it, but since I created it with work resources on work time, I need to jump through a few hoops first.
I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.
i just have the claude scheduled job kinda tool running, but at the grocery store i can spot something and think of a meal, then ask claude if any nearby grocery stores have other key elements to the meal on sale.
its pretty handy.
i was trying to get a nice setup for finding what shows are happening around me, but theres just too much stuff, and im not having a good hook time for when i check
Doesnt it then adds work? I buy ingredients for dinner in the store I am at. If they dont have everything, I just do different meal. Saves time and effort compared to visiting multiple stores.
Instinct contacted Oracle support for me and got movement on a ticket that had been stuck.
It's nice as like an interactive note keeper. I tell it thoughts/ideas I have and it stores them in markdown.
I'm having Muse record a local radio show (no online archives), transcribe it, and send me the transcription after the show. Hasn't ran yet, but if it actually works it'll help me keep up with local news.
This is all stuff I could do myself or do with other apps/code, but I wouldn't have time or would rather not
> use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
"actually" and "measurable" are, to pardon the Claudism, load bearing. If something made my life better in some imperceptible way that makes me happy, why the need to force metric on it? Not having to call Comcast to fake threaten to cancel service made me THREE happier and SEVEN less angsty. That pretty picture made me FOUR smilier. It makes me wonder if we can't just have nice things.
That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it.
Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.
It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.
The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.
What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".
I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.
The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.
That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.
It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants.
Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
With AI's capable of defeating every captcha short of ARC-AGI, I don't know how this cat-and-mouse game will continue. Services (now banks, later Amazon) will require attested hardware, but even that can be put in the hands of a robot.
I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.
No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.
It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
The real big question is what happens to display advertising revenue on Amazon, if even a fraction of its traffic moves to these agents.
Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits.
Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.
No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.
The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.
I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.
This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.
This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.
I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on.
Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.
These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.
And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.
Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website?
I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?
But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.
Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.
Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
In theory, legislation could help. If there were a pro-consumer movement in government.
Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.
Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)
Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
> On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control
The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
It’s an optimistic view on AI - brings power to the people by mediating all the garbage.
I’ve already used it to handle customer support request calls. I see 30+ minute hold+conversation times and generally the issue gets resolved. That is hugely empowering.
OK according to game theory, if this is correct, why even put up a fight? You have nothing to gain by fighting. Just accept it and play along. Make your damn MCP. You have 100,000 engineers. Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
> Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.
Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items
This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata
The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.
Less friction = more shopping = more profits.
That used to be a concept companies like Amazon understood well. (As well as companies like Google in the context of web browsing and keeping it user-friendly as opposed to user-hostile).
If the bots mean customers are getting a better deal elsewhere, then you're doing something wrong elsewhere in your business model and need to go address that. Or eventually free market economics will, no matter how big an artificial moat you try to build.
But how can they serve product suggestions this way?
Right. Agents represent a direct attack on a significant portion Amazon's revenue model.
It makes total sense for Amazon to block agents. It sucks having to manually check multiple sites for prices and delivery of something you want so is easier just to use Amazon which is usually very good. If people start using agents Amazon is less likely to get the sale and are more vulnerable to competition. Better to kill this trend off asap.
Sounds like Amazon is trying to use its monopoly position to give it an competitive advantage over smaller stores.
In general, preventing consumers from having fully featured AIs (especially local ones) will be worth about 10 trillion dollars to companies. That's my prediction.
Amazon is one example. If my basement AI drives my browser and never clicks an ad, Amazon loses big.
Or, the ad industry in general -- imagine the basement AI filtering out all ads at the analog level so nobody in my house ever sees an ad, and no software update can change that.
Or other optimizations. Right now companies enjoy a power imbalance because they have people who ruthlessly optimize 24/7 to save a buck. I can't do the same, because I have to work, and also prefer to spend my personal time with family -- a foolish thing to do in a capitalist society, at least from a capital perspective. Imagine I have an AI wheeling and dealing on my behalf 24/7 too. Especially in an age of online shopping and product deliveries, my AI will absolutely order from your competitor to save a penny, my AI will absolutely spend 400 hours disputing a medical bill I don't think is right, barely an inconvenience to me.
[delayed]
I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:
Does anyone have any meaningful use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
I’ve tried hard and beyond filling out some tedious forms in about the same time and energy as just doing it myself, I’ve not personally. I’ve tried hard. So I figure it’s probably my lack of creativity given the prevalence of fans. But every time I ask, I get no meaningful responses. So it makes me wonder if all the fans are just product managers on those products?
I find it useful, so here are some concrete examples from last few days.
As a baseline which many skeptics will have a hard time accepting for their own usage - I think there is a correlation between utility and trust (even which is not truly earned). If you don't let it capture memories and learn about you, and you don't connect it to external tools like email, it's less useful. But I think of it usually like a ChatGPT w/ extra tools and knowledge.
I just moved, and last night I asked my agent how to test how safe the soil in my (urban) garden was, and it found some warnings from my city government, and suggested a particular test service that is available in my area. Since it knows exactly where I live, it was able to find recent warnings of contamination in my neighborhood, and suggest specific chemicals to test for.
Additionally, I give it (read only) access to my email, and it'll ~2x a day notify me of some important email. I'm working with a contractor, and getting emails from them bumped, or getting emails about AWS usage alerts pulled out of inbox and notify me directly is super helpful for filtering the noise of my crazy email volume of 99% spam.
For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways:
1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things. 2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)
As someone who doesn't have kids and was last in school decades ago....
Do those School Learning Management Systems tell you everyday what homework your kid is expected to complete? Do you feel such a granular degree of monitoring and direction has impacted your child's opportunity to build character, intrinsic responsibility and self-management skills?
When I was a kid, teachers gave out assignments, and the student was responsible for keeping track of them, staying on top of progress, and handing in by the deadline. If a problem arose that wasn't an isolated incident or resolvable directly between the student and teacher, the feedback would flow at a much higher level e.g. scheduled parent-teacher interviews or via a phone call.
And what do parents do who don't accept the terms and conditions of said educational platforms? (e.g. due to overly broad privacy clauses or one-sided indemnities and the like)
But nowadays kids are expected to check 2-4 platforms plus their notes and there is no guaranteed time when they know it will be there. It is like the worlds worst paid disfunctional work place and one of my kids schools literally uses teams for one third of their assignments. In word format so sometimes kids overwrite it.
If you don’t accept the terms your kids life is just even harder.
Keeping track of your kids' homework is your concern? Doesn't it only become your concern, briefly, when the school contacts you about your kid not getting their homework done?
As a parent people from prior generations do not get the current situation. I actually agree that this is a useful use of the agentic work tools - and it’s the only case I mentioned above I’ve used it for successfully, if not saving of time.
Homework isn’t assigned in class any more. It’s posted on dozens of inscrutable websites in weird UX’s that are impossible for any single human to understand. Children are mystified, parents confused, teachers at their wits end.
A few times a week children miss some website or queue from some system, teachers can’t get things to share properly, this needs tending, they need to photograph this and upload that to this place as well as that but not the other one.
It’s truly remarkably astounding. I have serious doubts frontier models can navigate it either honestly. But this is in fact where I see the most chance of using these tools.
“Computers at school” is the worst idea ever, and no one who hasn’t experienced the clusterfuck of middle school in 2026 can understand it. It makes the world of the movie Brazil seem utopian.
I'm not the person you're asking, but in general, I would also stay on top of my child's obligations - homework, chores, etc. I don't want the first sign of trouble to be a call from a teacher, or the complete absence of clean clothes for them to wear in the morning.
You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation
At home? Not really, no.
At work? I've got ADHD, so the idea of making a to-do list is fine but keeping it up to date was a challenge. I've created a set of agentic skills that comes through the last 36 hours of emails, meetings, chats, and gathers up all the work I volunteered to do (or was told to do), triages them across urgency/impact, and sorts them into Do/Defer/Schedule/Delegate piles.
Last, I created an app to give a UI to this data to see and act on it all, including a way to flag a to-do that was found and enter why I thought the status or categorization was wrong. On the next run, a review skill reads those comments, makes changes to the other skills accordingly, and sends me an email with details of the changes, and the commit I can use to roll back the change if I'd like.
I've been running it since April and while there were a lot of updates at first, I haven't had to flag anything for review in months, and I get to feel a whole lot better about managing my to-do pile.
I'm looking at open-sourcing it, but since I created it with work resources on work time, I need to jump through a few hoops first.
I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.
- find piece to buy to repair an appliance
- travel research for places where I need an apartment with requirements one cannot just filter for
- gardening tips based on photos of my plants
- financial planning (similar tips to what I would get for more money, without paying per hour until I know much more)
- take photo of all physical spam and have me removed from the list
and many more…
If the access to this product went away I will survive, but it will be annoying and waste my time.
But aren’t all of these currently fully achievable with normal chat these days?
I just used it today to find and reserve a parking spot in SF.
Previously, I used Claude to gather AWS invoices for reimbursement purposes.
i just have the claude scheduled job kinda tool running, but at the grocery store i can spot something and think of a meal, then ask claude if any nearby grocery stores have other key elements to the meal on sale.
its pretty handy.
i was trying to get a nice setup for finding what shows are happening around me, but theres just too much stuff, and im not having a good hook time for when i check
Doesnt it then adds work? I buy ingredients for dinner in the store I am at. If they dont have everything, I just do different meal. Saves time and effort compared to visiting multiple stores.
I use coding agents to fill out dunkin donuts surveys for me
Instinct contacted Oracle support for me and got movement on a ticket that had been stuck.
It's nice as like an interactive note keeper. I tell it thoughts/ideas I have and it stores them in markdown.
I'm having Muse record a local radio show (no online archives), transcribe it, and send me the transcription after the show. Hasn't ran yet, but if it actually works it'll help me keep up with local news.
This is all stuff I could do myself or do with other apps/code, but I wouldn't have time or would rather not
> use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?
"actually" and "measurable" are, to pardon the Claudism, load bearing. If something made my life better in some imperceptible way that makes me happy, why the need to force metric on it? Not having to call Comcast to fake threaten to cancel service made me THREE happier and SEVEN less angsty. That pretty picture made me FOUR smilier. It makes me wonder if we can't just have nice things.
I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website.
I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.
Why is it even Meta's job to announce that an AI agent is being used? Is there a law that actually forces them to make that known?
Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.
That's irrelevant from Amazon's perspective. If an agent is popular enough and has some fingerprint they can identify, they have a strong incentive to block it.
Agents that scrape and digest web data are entirely anathema to brand-reliant and advertising-reliant vendors and marketplaces. Even human assistants could be trusted to develop brand attachment and respond to advertising meant to shape their preferences. And while LLM agents are still manipulable, that's a frontier that nobody really knows how to navigate effectively yet, at least not to the degree of optimization modern vendors and marketplaces (especially Amazon) have acheived.
It's quaint to imagine what AI agents might do for consumers in the naive internet that preceded their emergence (if you ignore their vulnerabilities and flaws), but that's not what they'll be able to achieve as that same internet responds to them -- at least not at Meta scale. It's not very different than how social media companies once offered, and then aggressively withdrew and policed, API's to their graphs and feeds. Those open API's simply aren't compatible with the business objectives that keep these companies running, no matter what cool and profoundly user-friendly things could be built on them.
The same kind of incompatibility applies to AI agents when it comes to e-commerce. It won't be a permitted thing until, and except for where, vendors/marketplaces can assert control over the agents themselves and manipulate them to ends comparable to what they can achieve with human consumer sentiment already.
What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".
I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.
The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.
I guess it’s more that Amazon’s server queries for an answer and intentionally obfuscating a bad one comes across as lying.
What do you mean? Declaring the agent is transparency. You should be congratulating Meta for their rare good deed.
There's a difference between automated industrial scale scraping and well-behaved agents acting on the behalf of individuals. Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them, so sites just block known datacenter IPs and throw out the baby with the bathwater.
That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.
That said, eventually a site blocking all agents would be like blocking all search engines, something that hurts more than it helps as agentic interactions become "the norm". WebMCP or similar support will likely be a basic expectation at some point.
It's worse than that, they will block all agents and specifically make exceptions for maybe 2 search engines per country. Thereby strengthening existing players and weakening all incumbants.
Cloudflare for instance does allow indexing by Google and Bing I think by default, but does challenge other bots. Double check me I am speaking from memory.
> Right now there isn't a robust, standard way to distinguish between them
There is, it’s called an API
> That's a main advantage of running your own local claw setup using your residential connection -- difficult/impossible to block.
https://aws.amazon.com/waf/features/bot-control/
With AI's capable of defeating every captcha short of ARC-AGI, I don't know how this cat-and-mouse game will continue. Services (now banks, later Amazon) will require attested hardware, but even that can be put in the hands of a robot.
I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.
I'm really enjoying muse+have used it to make some amazon orders. This is a big bummer to me, in future I'll find an alternative to amazon OR find an alternative to muse.
No matter what I'll continue to use some AI agent and some shopping provider.
I’ve been purchasing more and more stuff from Walmart (good interaction with ChatGPT) and other stores.
It’s clear why Amazon is doing this from a business perspective, but this is a stop gap for them. They will need figure out a better plan for people using their agents.
Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.
I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.
Agreed, that really sucks.
We should blame Google for this, and not Amazon. Google added this data from your email to your advertisement profile and used it to increase their own revenue.
But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.
Amazon is genuinely unusable since forcing their own Rufus agent. A 300LOC userscript is the minimum to get it functioning again.
This is straightforward to counter. Meatbag-as-a-service to hit the Buy button.
And so the cat and mouse game carries on...
That's already a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_shopper
The real big question is what happens to display advertising revenue on Amazon, if even a fraction of its traffic moves to these agents.
Amazon ads is a relatively large portion of its retail profits.
Display ads are meaningless to agents. And agentic commerce is a huge threat to Amazon’s profitability.
No wonders, Amazon is actively banning these agents. but for how long is this even viable? Do we simply move our shopping to more agent friendly destinations? Is this an opportunity for Walmart to finally reclaim it’s throne?
This is why the chrome driver plugin and similar tools are so important. The site shouldn't know or care if its me or my agent working on my behalf.
It is a money grab from Amazon I'm sure. They want to make a deal with meta to get paid for access. Maybe also worried about liability I imagine on accidental unauthorized purchases?
Returns cost money and if an agent generates more returns and hitting the margins or seller retention then that's something that's likely going to get increased scrutiny.
The generally quoted return rate is 5% to 15% (and it varies by category). If Muse identified purchases are generating returns of 10% to 30%, then amazon is probably going to crack down on it. (Amazon Sellers pay from 30% to 50% for customer returns from their own pockets. https://medium.com/@myrealprofit/how-much-do-refunds-really-... )
Thank you Amazon for standing up for everyman Rufus. We don't need AI agent from evil ad giants.
How do you know they are standing up for users? From where I'm sitting it looks like they just are trying to protect Alexa Shopping's revenue and/or monopoly.
I assume it was sarcasm, Rufus is an Amazon AI product.
And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."
Ha. Amazon's in-app AI agent is called Rufus. It's incredibly annoying, and they love directing you to an 'Ask Rufus' page where you watch an AI agent not-quite-finish repeating your search terms back at you before you realize you're not actually on your search results page, and then spend some additional time trying to find the link to take you to said search results page.
I assume somewhere there's a team hitting their AI query KPI's due to this, but I really wish they'd shut off a few server racks and save everyone the annoyance instead.
There was internal JIRA ticket to rename Rufus -> Doofus as to dramatically improve performance and sentiment among shoppers on Amazon site.
We should see this improved version soon.
Amazon: famously not evil ad giant.
This is not them standing up for the small guy, this is them seeing their actual profit center in retail (advertisement and paid promotion) evaporating if human beings never view their listings.
Agents don't click through or interact with ads or get influenced by things like lightning deals, snap promotions, "others who bought X bought Y" and such the same way a human does. This is likely a large portion of the reasoning.
This is just going to get worse before it gets better. More large sites are likely going to block or attempt to block agents because they're so reliant on ads for revenue or exploiting human psychology.
Yeah subscriptions are another big one. So many profits today are generated by bleeding off customers that just can't deal with the hoops they need to jump through to get unsubscribed. Tasking that to an agent would destroy the whole model.
You’re deluded if you think it’s as an easy as ‘send agent task, hey Presto - done’.
It’s funny watching all these large tech firms with so much resource commit the sin of innovation: starting with the tech and not the customer + economics of it all.
I get it. It’s tempting and alluring. But no - reimagining something takes a lot more work than sticky taping an agent on. Impatiently waiting for all this agent stuff to fek off.
its not going anywhere. Agents are the future.
Its a very good point. There are lots of orgs in company's whose whole job is to push shit from all possible points in the website - its probably called "real estate" internally.
These orgs have a lot to lose. But the company? Not so much, they will make it up and more - agents are great to use.
And yes ads are hard to place because agents let you bypass all this and give you a nice filtered view of exactly what you need.
Where do you think the world will head? Maybe Amazon will sell their inventory for agents at a hefty API price?
There's a lot to discuss here - agentic commerce, IMO, is where things are heading. I'm completely convinced that people _want_ to shop using agents. But I want to understand the dynamics at play here: will underlying inventory providers like Amazon give up control and allow agents to use their website?
I find this question very interesting and I want to predict where things will head. On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control on how their website is used. Ideally they'd like to control the full end to end experience. What happens to the work they put in their UI? All those endless A/B experiments to make the buttons look perfect?
But on the other hand - this is where things are heading. They can't stop agents from using their website. Not for long. And they have a lot to gain because overall purchases will increase since. They can accept it and create a plugin and try to offer as much "branding" as possible inside it. Or they can completely go against agents and block it.
Then you have to wonder, what really is the moat here? Amazon's logistics and its relations with partners and customers (return policy etc) and the trust it brings. The UI part dissolves and is no longer important.
Maybe they want only an allowed list of agents access to Amazon? Maybe that's where things are heading? They sign deals with maybe just OpenAI (for example)? Its not like Amazon makes their own agent + model. I would hate it things fragment this much.
In theory, legislation could help. If there were a pro-consumer movement in government.
Something like declaring agents as representatives of consumers and blocking them violates ADA or just shouldn’t be allowed unless they are abusive.
Lacking that, it seems it’ll be an arms race between offense and defense. At some point, computer control probably wins (running my browser, on my computer, is pretty difficult to detect with reasonable f1 score)
Anything is possible I suppose... I don't see a path that leads to Amazon actually further controlling the shopping experience inside a browser (where a local agent might have control that they can't reliably detect), short of forcing users into some kind of hardware-based attestation solution or something, but even that is not foolproof.
> On one hand Amazon has a lot to lose by giving up control
The everyday person is told to get over it and accept that AI is here so adapt or die. Companies start reducing headcounts to be replaced with AI. So now, a company is having to accept that people are using AI in ways they don't like so they should adapt or die as well too, right? I have no tears to shed if Amazon loses control. Also, it'll be one billionaire battling another billionaire at that point, and I'm kind of okay with that chaos. My world is no longer in my control so fuck 'em is my stance
It’s an optimistic view on AI - brings power to the people by mediating all the garbage.
I’ve already used it to handle customer support request calls. I see 30+ minute hold+conversation times and generally the issue gets resolved. That is hugely empowering.
OK according to game theory, if this is correct, why even put up a fight? You have nothing to gain by fighting. Just accept it and play along. Make your damn MCP. You have 100,000 engineers. Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
> Why can't connect Amazon to ChatGPT today? I don't know.
They just don't want to, because there's no ads. The human gets removed from the loop of visiting the site entirely. And it doesn't say Amazon all over it.
Amazon cant hold this off for the long run, nobody wants to scroll through a list of two hundred near identical packages of toilet paper. Agents will intermediate, and they will remove demand for low value items
This is already solved by the existence of hundreds of other stores that actually do some level of filtering and curation of products. I don't know why we want to play some cat and mouse game of getting an LLM to find the best toilet paper on Amazon versus just finding a reliable source of toilet paper to begin with.
Theh will probably consolidate more. Less choices even if they are worse is also easier for llms to do. Just look at how they pick technologies to use. Almost always the same for a given model.
Amazon is just trying to get you to use their agent, so they're not anti-agent, just anti-someone-else's
I would hate it if every company comes up with their own agent and only their agent is allowed to access the API. EU do your thing instead of cookie banners plz.
that's what they're going to do, trying to get $20 out of the average person is terrible compared to giving away your product for free and getting an endless supply of metadata