[HN Gopher] The Age of Agent Experience
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The Age of Agent Experience
Author : bobfunk
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-02-07 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stytch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stytch.com)
| jelambs wrote:
| Thank you for sharing!
| abhshkdz wrote:
| Good read, thanks for sharing! I'd love for OAuth to be augmented
| with agent-friendly scopes. Completely agree that it's a standard
| that doesn't need to be reinvented. But in how things are today,
| there's two broad areas where OAuth doesn't quite cut it:
|
| 1) long tail of websites that don't have APIs, so the only way
| for an agent to interact with them on the user's behalf is to log
| in more conventionally, and
|
| 2) even if a website has APIs, there may be tasks to be done that
| are outside the scope of the provided APIs.
|
| Thoughts?
| jelambs wrote:
| author of the post here, yeah this is a really good point. I
| think we're going to see more people investing in building
| OAuth compatible apps and more thorough APIs to support agent
| use cases. but of course, not every site is going to do so, so
| agents will in many cases just be doing screenscraping
| effectively. but I think overtime, users will prefer using
| applications that make it easier and more secure for agents to
| interact with them.
|
| I was an early engineer at Plaid and I think it's an
| interesting parallel, financial data aggregators used to use
| more of a screenscraping model of integration but over the past
| 5+ years, it's moved almost fully to OAuth integrations. would
| expect the adoption curve here to be much steeper than that,
| banks are notoriously slow so would expect tech companies to
| move even more quickly towards OAuth and APIs for agents.
|
| another dimension of this, is that it's quite easy to block ai
| agents screenscraping, we're able to identify with almost 100%
| accuracy open ai's operator, anthropic's computer use api,
| browswerbase, etc. so some sites might choose to block agents
| from screenscraping and require the API path.
|
| all of this is still early too, so excited to see how things
| develop!
| danielbln wrote:
| Interesting, what's are the heuristics for blocking? User
| agent? Something playwright does, metadata like resolution or
| actual behavior?
| sethhochberg wrote:
| The user agent is pretty low hanging fruit, but these days
| even your most standard captchas / bot detection algorithms
| are looking at things like mouse movement patterns - a
| simple bot controlling a mouse might be coded to move the
| cursor from wherever it is to the destination in the
| shortest path possible; a human might try for the shortest
| path, but actually do something that only approximates the
| most direct path based on their dexterity, where the cursor
| began, the mouse they're using, etc.
|
| Tools in this space rely a lot on human use of a computer
| being much slower, less precise, and more variable than
| machine use of a computer.
| bboygravity wrote:
| If website haven't been able to make even consistent logins
| and forms for humans to use, what makes you think they will
| be able to make usable API's for agents to use?
|
| I've tried making a Firefox extension that fills webforms
| using an LLM and the things website makers come up with the
| break their own forms for both humans and agents are just
| insane.
|
| There are probably over a 1000 different ways to ask for
| someone's address that an agent (and/or human) would struggle
| to understand. Just to name an example.
|
| I think agents will be able to get through them easily, but
| NOT because the websites makers are going to do a better job
| at being easier to use.
| xnx wrote:
| The popularity of agents that run from users' devices is going to
| push sites that don't have logins to add them and sites with
| logins to add tougher captchas.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| There are no websites that I visit now that don't have a login
| that I would still visit if they suddenly started putting up
| captchas
| javasquip wrote:
| I think the underlying assumption in this is an important
| question to consider. Should we treat agents as we would have
| treated bots over the decades. I do believe that treating
| agents like traditional bots of old misses an important aspect.
| Traditional bots are doing something with the intent to serve
| some external entities gain (scraping content, attacks, etc.).
| Agents, while leveraging similar systems, are serving a site's
| end consumer. When I use an agent to shop, I'm still the
| customer of the shop. As the shop owner, I want to give the
| best experience therefore it's in my best interest to provide
| an AX that supports them providing a good experience to the end
| user. Because my target customer is now using an agent to help
| make a purchase, if I shut my door to their delegated system,
| I'm telling them to shop somewhere else that does support this.
|
| We are early enough in this evolution to help direct the ship
| in a way that serves the end user, web owners/creators, and the
| agent.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I think economic incentives are going to get in the way of
| that, as is tradition. Amazon's dev teams in charge of the
| retail web interface might want to make it easier to sell you
| more products regardless of interface but there's always a
| competing VP with more influence that wants to juice their
| KPIs by stuffing more advertising down the user's throat, so
| they drive top down decisions that impede agents.
|
| It's almost inevitable since everyone wants more growth and
| advertising is almost always seen as free money left on the
| table by decision makers.
| javasquip wrote:
| I agree! That said, they won't turn down the money through
| affiliate systems and resellers either.
|
| The economic incentives, the brand control needs, etc. are
| important dynamics and I don't think it's all in their
| court alone. It's a combination of where the market goes
| (the platforms and systems they prefer) and the
| capabilities unlocked by those platforms.
|
| With that, this evolution will follow the propagation of
| agent usage. So we will see a lot more initial adoption of
| AX principles and patterns from developer tools because the
| software industry has be the most infiltrated by the rise
| of agentic workflows. As that expands, the nature of
| markets and meeting user needs will drive adoption of AX.
| ori_b wrote:
| Yes, but competing with that -- imagine how much easier it
| would be to phish an agent into buying a product on the
| user's behalf.
| plagiarist wrote:
| That's my reaction to the GP's comment. Shop owners will
| not optimize for agent ease of use. They will optimize
| for convincing agents to make a purchase. This will play
| out like SEO, with everyone other than the bad actors
| losing out.
| javasquip wrote:
| There are a few layers to this worth considering.
|
| - In this world the information delivered to agents
| should align with content delivered visibly to the human
| web. This is essentially how the bulk of SEO overloading
| is detected. There needs to be a way to validate this and
| establish trust - completely solvable. These techniques
| penalize these schemes from the outset. (this is probably
| not the best forum to go too deep into that)
|
| - We're assuming agents have full buying decisions here.
| I do not believe we will see that as common place for a
| long time. Even if we did, the same systems for PCA
| compliance are in play and the interfaces pushed by both
| payment gateways and shopping carts protect against
| duplicate purchase attempts. Those attempting to abuse
| this fall more into the malicious actor camp.
|
| - phishing and malicious actors are going to do what they
| have always done. There are some very important security,
| access control, and compliance measures we should put in
| place for the most sensitive of actions - as we always
| have where most existing ones still apply. The agent
| experience and the ecosystem in general will have to
| evolve to have verifiable trust patterns. So that when a
| human delegates to an agent to do something, the human
| can have confidence and ways to validate interactions.
|
| I'll be the first to admit that I don't have all of the
| answers here but with agents becoming the new entry point
| or delegation tool for the next generation of digital
| users, these are questions we have to answer and solve
| for. It starts by focusing the industry around the domain
| of this problem, that is AX. How to do it effectively and
| what needs to evolve to achieve it... that's where the
| work is.
| wslh wrote:
| I cannot see the difference in the access mechanism between an
| agent and what we use today for APIs consumption. The agent,
| whatever it is, is basically a client, P2P node, etc.
| mtrovo wrote:
| We might live in a world where veto-ed assistants get VIP
| access to use the websites impersonating their owners without
| much second thought as long as you're at least on the paid
| Flash Max Pro(tm) plan.
| vlan0 wrote:
| Ya, webauthn with hardware requirement would kill it too. Gotta
| physically touch it. It'll be gross when someone starts to
| automate that too.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| One time I duct taped a cooked sausage to a USB fan and
| arranged it so the sausage was continually slapping my
| passive touch two-factor authenticator. Is that the kind of
| gross you were talking about?
| xnx wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/this-piece-of-meat-just-
| swip...
| tomjen3 wrote:
| It would also kill it for 99% of humans.
|
| My entire extended family has two yubikeys: My key and my
| spare key.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wouldn't the agent just send a notification to the user's phone
| and say "can you solve this please?"
| whazor wrote:
| Captcha solvers are already quite cheap. AI could make it
| cheaper, but for a single user, I don't think it would make a
| difference.
| maxwellg wrote:
| This is why I'm so bullish on OAuth for sites with logins - you
| get a strong real user identity to tie the agent's behavior
| back to. This means you have (some) proof that the agent is
| helping your end users consume more of your site, and you can
| also revoke access to agents that misbehave.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| We're finally putting the 'agent' in 'user agent'
| tomrod wrote:
| Legit chuckle from me!
| Terr_ wrote:
| And the agent _actually_ works for a large corporation with
| zero fiduciary duty to the user.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| hm. API stands for Application Programming Interface. Which IMO
| is not same as Application Agentic Interface.. similar to how it
| is not Application's Human Interface. Maybe closer than that.
|
| But, parsing documentation? And, believing it blindly? hah. Maybe
| ressurect Semantic web as well..
| bobfunk wrote:
| Yeah interestingly API's in their current form are rarely very
| good for agents. In many cases tools like Operator using a
| virtual browser and screenshotting are better for agent
| interactions than API specs.
|
| This shows we need to build better approaches to agent
| interactions that are not at the level of "run a virtual
| browser", but that encodes much more of the workflows available
| than raw API's do today.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > Maybe ressurect Semantic web as well
|
| This gave me a chuckle. I believe the current hype term along
| this line is "ontologies".
| satisfice wrote:
| AI agents do not have agency. This is just another sloppy and
| disturbing way that AI people show their disrespect or
| incompetence about the nature of humans.
|
| If you think AI has agency then you must think all software has
| agency. AI is just software.
|
| To those of you who say humans are just software: try
| deactivating a human and see what happens. Note that this is a
| different experience than deactivating AI.
| turnsout wrote:
| Not to take the bait on this bit of content marketing ("the
| future of agents is OAuth, says company that sells OAuth
| solution"), but: I disagree with the premise that agents should
| basically use the same APIs and auth mechanisms that humans &
| apps currently use.
|
| I realize there's a strong impulse to not "reinvent the wheel,"
| but what we have currently is unsustainable. Specifically, the
| fact that every API uses a slightly different REST API and its
| own unique authentication & authorization workflow. It worked
| fine for the days when application developers would spend a few
| weeks on each new integration, but it totally breaks down when
| you want to be able to orchestrate an agent across many user-
| defined services.
|
| I think a simple protocol based on JSON and bog-standard public
| key encryption could allow agents to coordinate and spend
| credits/money based on human-defined budgets.
| imcotton wrote:
| I also think OAuth could be used to better serve AX in the age of
| agent, but before the whole industry find the PMF, shall we not
| leave the humans (us) behind? Thus I made one for breaking the
| grip of big IdPs and offer a more secure and easier
| authentication solutions for humans [1].
|
| You can find its dogfooding demo on the Show HN [2].
|
| [1]: https://sign-poc.js.org
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076063
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