[aerhardt]

A question I've been asking myself and which I honestly want to put out there - and I apologize in advance, because you will see me repeat it in other threads, out of genuine curiosity:

Does your life have so much friction that you need a digital agent to act on your behalf?

Some of the use cases I saw on the OpenClaw website, like "checking me into a flight", are non-issues for me.

I work in business automation, but paradoxically I don't think too much about annoyances in my private life. Everything feels rather frictionless.

In business, I see opportunities to solve friction and that's how I make money, but even then, often there are barriers that are very hard to surmount:

(a) problems are complex to solve and require complex solutions such as deterministic or ML systems that LLMs are not even close to being able to create ad-hoc

(b) entrenched processes and incumbent organizations create moats that are hard to cross (ex: LinkedIn makes automation very hard)

(c) some degree of friction, in some cases, may actually be useful!

I imagine there are similar dynamics in the consumer space, but more than anything, I may not be seeing issues with such a critical eye (I like to relax after work, after all)

So, do you have problems in your private life that you'd want to take on the risks - and friction - of maintaining these agents?

[ethbr1]

Similar CV, similar take. My guess? Anyone involved in automation for >2 years at the enterprise levels knows in their gut all the silent, sudden, annoying ways automation can fail and so has a higher internal bar for "must save this much time to be worth automating."

That said, old beliefs should be challenged by new technological capabilities!

If LLM based automation is (a) less fragile and (b) quicker to develop, then that bar should be lowered.

[RevEng]

I don't get it either. I even sat down to try it out and see what it's all about, but I can't think of a single thing in my life that I want an agent to automate.

Summarizing news? No, I'd rather just read it. Besides, it's hard to say what will or won't be interesting at any given moment.

Reply to emails? No, I want to make sure I say what I mean to say and I don't see why I would tell the whole story to an LLM just so it could rephrase it all.

Trade stocks? Dear God no! That's a good way to lose my life savings, and if the solution is to just put in a little then what's the point?

Every video and post I see talking about all the things they have automated with agents are things I would never want. Most of them describe content farms - look at what's hot on Twitter, generate a video, post to Reddit, etc. Others like preparing a morning summary are neat and all but so what? If my life was so hectic that I needed a personal assistant to take my calls and book my meetings, I'd hire one.

Seriously, what is the thing that agents can do that every ordinary person just can't live without?

[wolvesechoes]

Do not underestimate the modern marketing and its capability to create needs that didn't exist before.

It is not about removing friction, it is about convincing that friction existed in a first place