Posted by simianwords 21 hours ago
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.
From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way.
Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.
It is my personally optimistic perspective on AI that it will mediate all interactions with 3P who are acting in their own interest and not mine. Ie, “my” agent.
Nobody will blindly trust Amazon to buy products when they know Amazon cannot and will not truly suggest the best product for the consumer.
Alexa was supposed to be the voice gateway to purchasing. But nobody trusts the result Alexa picks because it will not default to the best value to the user - only the best value to Amazon.
Recently it was estimated that Amazon makes $30-80 billion(!) per year off not showing you the economically best results by deliberately disallowing sorting on $ per unit [1] to force sellers into ads. Amongst other tactics (ex. filter by country of origin).
AI agents can sort on $ / unit to easily find you the best deal, rendering Amazon's various forms of paid placement irrelevant.
Extend this to filtering Chinese slop brands (also not able to be filtered) and the significant portion of revenue starts looking like knocking back margins to the 3-5% range. Basically an existential threat.
Amazon cannot allow AI agents and maintain current margins.
It's not the consumers of the AI, or the consumers of the real businesses? It just seems like everyone things "if they build it" it'll come.
But it's clear Amazon cares about how it's costomers have to view all the items as both upsells and advertising, and a bot is going to either be _really_ into it or act much like ublockorigin does.
But either way, no company making money on costumer direct sales sees a real benefit to allowing a bot to easily bypass all the necessary details.
Whether it's advertisement, liabilities, manufacturer's recommendations; a bot will ignore these things and generate a costumer expectation that suddenly the producer has to live up to.
Then you'll tell me: YEAH, that's why you need a MCP friendly website.
And I'll tell you: that's how the mafia works.
https://marketplace.openship.org
It’s an interoperable marketplace that uses MCP-UI to connect to seller websites directly. It brings the storefront and cart directly into the chat.
I want to buy what I want to buy, and I will never buy things that I do not want to buy. If the time ever comes that I am tricked into buying the wrong thing from Amazon, then I'm sending it back on their dime.
If that means that only 3 things fit, then I only want to see exactly 3 things. If that means that 0 things fit, then 0 is also a valid result. In response to these results, I can then elect to soften my constraints at my own volition.
But an Amazon search typically results endless pages of vaguely-related products that represent a jumbled mess of things largely do not fit or only-sorta fit the broad concept of what I intend to purchase.
When I want a 4300 Kelvin D2S HID headlight bulb for my car, then that's all that I want to find when I search for it. I do not want results for LEDs. I do not want selective yellow bulbs. I do not want 5000k or 6500k or 10000k. I do not want an "upgrade" kit, nor D2R bulbs, nor D3S. None of those things are useful to me.
The list of things that I do not want is infinite, and when Amazon presents a seemingly-infinite list of them then that represents the opposite of usefulness.
I only want to peruse listings that match. I require no more and no less than this in order to be satisfied. There is no possible amount of additional noise that can ever dissuade me from seeking the thing that I very specifically desire.
A modern LLM can weed out and separate the bad results from the good ones and give me an easier time of making a purchase decision, but it can only do so when it is not blocked from the start.
That ship has long since sailed for every search product. Companies have long-since learned that intent-based results are much more profitable (why show an empty result page when you can show something for people to buy or click on?), but it is also often genuinely useful when your search is not perfect or what you want doesn't actually exist. I agree that it is annoying when you really truly do only want something very specific and the ranking prioritizes the wrong things (e.g., sponsored results, more profitable items, etc.) over exact matches, but can you honestly and truly say you've never found any value from intent search algorithms?
When I want oolong tea bags and I search for "oolong tea bags," then I definitely don't want to be shown bulk green tea instead.
If I want to find any kind of tea instead of specifically oolong -- if, perchance, I wish to peruse the broader market of available tea -- then I'm very capable of removing "oolong" and/or "bags" from my search prompt.
---
I can look around and observe that the ship has sailed, but that doesn't mean I'll ever be happy with the outcome or accepting of any notion that the situation is anything other than hostile.
Can you recognize that it gets between me and my willingness to spend money?
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
“advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
“the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model...”
https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...
Note: they even explain why advertising funded search makes things worse for customers and for advertisers. Worse search finds more ads and thus more dollars, resulting in both worsening search results over time AND less value for ad money over time.
Your alternative interfaces exist and have always existed: Go to a physical store, order by phone, order through the OEM website, order through an Amazon competitor, etc.
For all the complaints, it's nice to see HN hasn't changed that much.
On the next episode of Oppressed Hackers: We get a load of a guy who had the nerve to say that it was possible to drink a glass of water.
Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly. You can go right now to a store built from bricks and purchase goods.
Correct
> Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly
Sortof? It probably doesn’t have a monopoly in any segment that matters, but it does have many illegal monopolies (as defined by US FCR and the Sherman Act).
Evidence: Amazon has been found guilty of being an illegal monopoly multiple times already.
I'm using Claude for everything from finances to dinner planning to project planning. If Amazon doesn't let Claude search and buy, I'm not abandoning Claude, I'm abandoning Amazon.
As long as my actions are as simple as possible, I don't care whether Claude is searching 5000 online retailers or only 4999, minus Amazon. I'm certainly not going to say "ok, this project requires buying 13 things for about $500, but I don't see amazon in the list, so let me go manually search for each one on Amazon and see if they might have a better price or something."
This is Walmart / Apple Pay all over again. Yes, near-monopolies, lots of power. But they got there by making things easy for consumers. Making things difficult to force consumer behavior never ends well.
The same would be true for someone shopping for one $10 item.
Half the time I can't even find the category page. And if I do find it, the filters will just be useless anyway.
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.
This could mean the long term viability of my open claw bot to shop for me- that openai / google etc won't control AI, and I'll still just be able to use a model via API to do what's actually in my own self-interest.
It's also trivial for Amazon competitors to pop up in this potential AI future. Maybe you only sell door knobs, but all you need to do is set up a mostly text-based API designed for AI consumption and you're in business. If you offer the door knob for 10 cents less, why wouldn't the AI agents buy from you?
Right now making an Amazon competitor will fail mainly because humans are lazy and can't be bother to check other sites. AI might change that.
Agreed. But that's where Amazon needs some thrashing from users, competitors and regulators to start with.
It's how they killed the competition.
Otherwise people could just use local agents on their own machine controlling their existing browser/logins as they likely already do, without issues.
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.
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.
The other issue is overpromising delivery times and vastly underperforming once the order is placed. The worst is when I purchase something that I want urgently. Let's say the price is $23. Amazon suggests buying something cheap to make it $25 and get overnight delivery. So I add some Chobani product from Amazon Fresh. The next morning I wake up to see Chobani delivered while the item I want is delayed until the next day. This has happened 3-4 times now so I have become wiser. But what a crappy customer experience from Amazon!
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?
- Dusted off a 3d printer that wasn't being used enough, largely because of the tax of setting up profiles for materials and each print. That was fun once, I'm too busy now. Was able to get claude to use MCP and configure the slicer just right for the job and filaments.
- Needed to get IPTV/etc set up for football season. If you've done this you know what a pain it is, how EPG's don't always work right, finding the 50 channels you care about out of 80k channels is a nightmare, etc. Pointed claude at my utility server, it got Dispatcharr configured, wrote scripts to parse channel guides from sources not covered in the EPG, scheduled to update daily, deployed.
- I'm considering getting back to 3D printed clay, which is fun but challenging. Based on a thread here on HN, had claude go investigate using FPGAs (which it would program) for a realtime flow modulation system that would remove the variability from slight changes in viscosity within a batch of clay. Not sure I'll pull the trigger but I have a much deeper understanding of the solution.
- Realized I was paying like $30/mo to RocketMoney and Copilot (finance, not MS), for rare usage and basically just occasional "find subscriptions I forgot about" usage. Got claude connected to plaid via MCP, found more than those other two ever did, got it to set up cron to send me email weekly with current subscriptions and any price changes.
That's literally in the past 4-5 days. I find great value there, YMMV of course.
I would like to check this out. My expenses are getting out of hand.
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.
Also, as others have said, it's easy to take a picture of a flier, and say "add to my calendar".
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.
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.)
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)
If you don’t accept the terms your kids life is just even harder.
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.
Overall it was not bad. The cred vault is useful. But I’m not giving meta any information that I wouldn’t otherwise be fine with disseminating and I feel the burden the school puts on us vs the information loss is worth the trade.
Thanks! First meaningful use of an OpenClaw like system.
You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation
A lot of kids now seem to go into adulthood having never been allowed to fail, and it can really mess them up the first time it inevitably happens.
Missing homework once or twice is part of life and a really good life lesson with low risk besides.
- 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.
I'm now considering putting a coding harness inside it so I can actually ask it to improve itself on the fly, since I realized that having to switch to my laptop just to give a short feedback is a bit silly, why not right through the bot?
It's working well so far and helps with my tendency to forget my workout program for days at a time since it pings me daily.
I think these Claw-type harnesses are basically this for somewhat less technical folks. If eg Muse has been able to make this work smoothly from your phone for completely non-techy people, then that seems like an incredible product.
I still have to do the work, but everything's all teed up for me.
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
Previously, I used Claude to gather AWS invoices for reimbursement purposes.
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
"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.
How do you know it has or has not improved your situation if imperceptible?
I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.
The return rate for AI-purchased products is probably much higher than when a human reviews the page and makes the decision. There are going to be a lot of returns ranging from "I didn't mean to order this" to "It's not what I thought I ordered" because someone asked their agent to do something and an box showed up at their door 3 days later with something they would not have purchased if they were driving the browser.
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.
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.
There is, it’s called an API
I wish services would get over trying to block how their customers want to use (or NOT use) their websites.
I get captchas when trying to do google searches if I'm not logged in. Or a lot of the time its "please wait a moment. Don't refresh the page" (the google results will then never load until you refresh the page). A few weeks ago I couldn't get past a cloudflare checkbox on a modern iPhone, and I'm not on a VPN or anything either. Yesterday I tried to visit an old reddit thread I had bookmarked and got "You've been blocked by network security," without a chance to even attempt a captcha.
What are bots doing to get past all of these?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/lg-to-ban-residential-pr...
The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it.
They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data.
Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages.
In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.