I've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution. I highly suspect others will be following suit. I was surprised with how much it felt natural to interact with agents in this way.
Biggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them.
Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month.
Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world.
I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.
> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made.
Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time.
What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When five hundred, five thousand, five million do?
Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too.
If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.
Only way I was able to get a job recently was via one of a few recruitment firms I was working with. Presumably this will become more common. Basically vendors "selling" actual real humans they vetted.
Would you be comfortable sharing some of the recruitment firms that you worked with? I'm a Real Live Human gearing up to reenter the job market, and I've been getting pitches for these via email and LinkedIn but my difficulty has been in knowing which of THOSE are Real Live Humans and not just vivecoded bots spamming employers with my resume on my behalf (which feels ineffective, but also more importantly, like an unprofessional faux pas that I'd rather not be associated with)
We are doing AI screening. Candidate works with AI for 15 minutes and session is recorded. We review real output not AI generated resume. If candidate can get AI to apply and produce meaningful output then maybe we should hire that candidate. Currently outputs are manually reviewed but easy enought to have AI screen outputs.
The inundation of AI applications is shitty, but I think this side of the coin—AI interviewer—is even worse. This is degrading for a human applicant, and after the very immediate term it’s probably not going to be very useful. Instead of grinding leetcode, people are going to be grinding the AI interview, which is depressing to even consider. Not only that, but there’s also going to be an arms race of AI tools that can ace the AI interview for you.
Your comment reminds me of the move to packet-switched and routed networks, which were much more complicated than connecting wires end to end. And yet…
The only way that argument makes sense is when inverted. Packet switched networks did not compete with loose wires hand placed by polite women. They competed with circuit switched networks which emulated that network architecture.
And packet switched network equipment were much, much, much more simple than their time divisioned counterparts. On the same budget you could run an order of magnitude fatter pipes using ethernet switches rather than ATM switches. That's also why they won.
Simpler and cheaper architecture end-to-end means the same budget can be spent more wisely. That's usually what wins in an open market.
And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
Besides technological progress which has nothing to do with this effect and would have happened anyway, what's the value that we didn't have 30 years ago?
It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all. No value in something like that! Don’t tell me it’s inaccurate, I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic , which of course you couldn’t and even if you did, you would most likely not want to since you would get a lot of “you don’t actually want that, you want this unrelated thing, trust me I am better than you”. Just remember StackOverflow (depending on how young you are perhaps you never even heard of that given how much AI has eclipsed it)!
>It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all.
Because the importance of this is all about perspective. It wasn't like these systems created this information out of thin air. They were trained on something. That means the answers they are giving you have been available for decades. You just needed the know-how to find that information and synthesize the answers yourself. To many of us, it's like going from the old physical card catalogs to a modern digital system that would have seemed like sci-fi to a prior generation too. It's definitely more efficient and easier to use, but people acting like it's revolutionary seem to be suggesting that the old system didn't exist or wasn't usable with a little effort.
> You just needed the know-how to find that information and synthesize the answers yourself.
So easy , right?? No one needs a machine that can do that automatically over huge amounts of data and that can clearly communicate results in a way the user can clearly understand in their preferred language!
> I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic
You can believe anything you want.
I can also believe that the only thing that has gone up in the last 30 years is billionaires' worth, and amount of idiots saying things they don't know anything about.
I strongly believe this. Don't tell me it's inaccurate.
The meaningful comparison is that technologies are not industries. What even is the internet industry? There was a brief time in the 1990’s when that was a thing, just like AI will be subsumed as a technology in actual industries in the next decade.
It's greed at the top pushing the market into insanity. "AI" vendors are dangling the carrot of "eliminate manpower" in front of the manpower-owning class and they are throwing everything they have at it. The wealth that's been thrown into this hole could have payed for a couple million work-years of developers.
Insanity in the market is drawing in profit-seekers. "Greed at the top pushing the market into insanity" isn't really something that can happen: greedy folks are adept at leveraging incentive structures that have already emerged, but very bad at trying to purposefully shift macro-level incentives at a grand scale (which is something that humans in general are quite bad at).
If AGI is the next evolutionary goal, its the difference between being stuck and not.
Wealth is also only relevant in a capitalistic system, which we invented. It could easily be that all other species never created capitalism and are therefore waiting for us somewere which we will not reach because we are stuck on 'wealth'.
And if we are stuck in a local minimum, it might seem that GPT-2 broke us out of there.
Or LLMs will end up being the local optimum we organize society around and sacrifice everything to, and end up not being the child dream of infinite wealth and benefits the AI boosters believe in. laissez-faire capitalism tends to result in power concentration and the creation of a distinct class of hyper-wealthy and powerful individuals with close to infinite power to dictate the future. That’s pretty much the situation we are in.
If the current AI bet turns out to not be the next revolution, what’s the plan? What will be the pivot? What happens to all the capex and commitments, the reputation of all the people who promised that was the journey to the holly land? The answer is that there is no plan, AI has to work to justify the system itself. It’s almost a natural result of the economical and ideological system we conceived.
It’s really not that different from blockchains, though at least LLMs have some actual use cases. But there is a complete disconnect between the actual ROI and the vision sold by the AI folks
All this massive massive massive compute can be used for different types of machine learning. Nuclear Fusion physics simulation, neural networks for every other use case etc.
I'm not sure if we needed AI/ML for breaking the memory wall.
But yeah we will see how the society will respond to more and more and more automatisation.
ML/AI/Robotics is for sure the next automatisation revolution.
The reverse is happening in many places: since agents don't view ads or pay, and do steal content, there's a huge demand to block them. Cloudflare now offer this as a service.
Do you have even an example of this (one should ask for measurable data openness) or are you just making stuff up? Everything around has/is becoming more closed and I have one example: Reddit. It is not impossible to read without an account (account-walled).
I have a friend who works in B2B eCommerce specifically with some projects in D2C and they're saying that SEO is mostly a dead end now. It's all about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
So if someone is looking for a 18V cordless drill for drilling into concrete, they'll most likely ask an agent. If your site has bad AEO/GEO, the product pages are either impossible to read by an agent or the data is badly formatted -> the agent won't recommend your product, resulting in a lost sale.
Like SEO gave us OpenGraph and similar common tools to provide data in a machine readable form, AEO/GEO will force data to be readable by agents.
Some sites like Consumer Reports block all crawlers, so we'll see how that goes for them.
I don't know which part of the world you are in, but in the one I am in, commerce websites are hostile to proper SEO and even crawlers. (ie: Shoppy and Lazada, there is literally a market to buy their and it's very expensive for search).
Most every country uses a combination of capitalism and non-capitalism, including the US. The closest to a non-capitalist country would be North Korea.
> In a non capitalistic system, it might just not affect real humans negativly at all only positive
Is there a country where a 'non capitalistic system' has been tried now or in the past that you're thinking of?
> If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.
I'm sure mainframe time-share providers in the '60s and '70s were salivating at the possibility of computers mediating most business tasks, too, completely unaware of the microcomputer revolution that was about to happen.
Very much this - we are firmly at the centralised stage - when I have truly local AI running on my devices, my cost will be the energy they use - if I use open source models. I follow a guy on instagram who is doing this today, with old mobile phones and Raspberry Pi - for now I'll stick to my free Perplexity account, but looking forward to being self-sufficient one day.
> but looking forward to being self-sufficient one day.
I don't know how much experimentation you're doing with local AI, but that day may be sooner than you think. The ecosystem is evolving extremely rapidly.
I'm only on the edges to be honest and watching others - I'm not as technical as I once was, and I don't have the time I'd like to invest in this right now - too many competing hobbies.
Looking forward to the day this becomes very very easy for the likes of me.
Someone in the early '80s could have also said "we do live in this era" in response to someone pointing at an Apple II or original IBM PC and seeing it as something that would ultimately upend the mainframe market entirely.
In fact, we're already further along than that in terms of local AI. I'm currently able to get usable results at 8-10 tokens/sec using open-weight models on my laptop's integrated GPU, running on battery power. A $4,000 DGX Spark (less than what an IBM PC cost at launch in inflation-adjusted dollars) can get 3-5 times the inferencing performance with models 3-5x larger.
MCP servers everywhere rather. You automate your life with a bot, the bot interacts with the world through MCP servers (or their successor). The MCP servers themselves may have been implemented by bots but AI to AI is unnecessary wasteful.
I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible.
The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.
It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.
This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.
The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.
On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.
Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware.
Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.
> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests.
LLM costs are already pretty cheap (regardless of whether someone believes they'll continue falling).
For a recent example, see a relatively powerful LLM like DeepSeek Flash, where you can get a million tokens for $0.20. And if someone is OK with their task being batched (instead of executing it right now), that can lower prices too.
At some places I've worked, we still get a quote anyway. This may come as a shock to the purchasing team, maybe not, but it's always come back with the price on the website. Just the SOP for us I guess
You have to show the bean counters the quotes/bids you received and justify why one was used over the other when the cheapest option wasn't used. You can't put "price on the website" into the bean counter's files.
If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars).
If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that.
The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious.
The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say.
A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed.
Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.
Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents.
On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.
A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that.
One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.
I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying.
The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.
That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so.
*Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.
IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens.
If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.
> the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia
Everyone upstream of the AI labs should be showing a positive result, that includes all the companies needed to actually build the chips and the datacenters around it. If they aren't too incompetent, they should end up with a pile of cash regardless of where their stock goes when the bubble pops.
And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender.
I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic.
I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths.
for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.
What's the difference between this and how its been done till now?
When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth.
If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders
I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.
> I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month.
So using a bot is almost like having an employee, but instead of a fixed salary, or even an hourly rate, they will just invoice you for whatever they think is necessary to do the tasks you give them? And agents can be very creative when coming up with ways to spend tokens...
It was the software updates that prevented OpenClaw working for me. OpenClaw broke every update for a month, so I gave up and moved to Hermes.
Right now Grok Bot looks a lot easier to get started and maintain with a simpler UI (arguably better), but OpenClaw and Hermes give you more configurability and choice.
Grok Bot is really built on a different paradigm to OpenClaw/Hermes so hard to say it succeeds where those two fail, because fundamentally, one offers the convenience of SaaS, while the others offer the freedom and ownership of open source.
The token usage is really interesting. I would imagine the most efficient thing is to keep the state of everything persisted, and past the cache expiration window, to automatically start a new session with the previously persisted state instead of just a long running conversation.
If someone solves this part of continual effective compaction + selective resetting at cache expiry, they're going to make a ton of money. Right now, only the token insensitive can use these sweet features.
I think you are right saying that we will have more of this, but I don't really understand the upside is of this in the context of the work you described.
> The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag
That seems like something codex could just have done on my laptop. Am I wrong?
Yeah Buzz is rough still, but something valuable it offers that Grok Bot doesn't is human-to-human communication.
It seems like Grok Bot is just a personal agent swarm. Which is useful to be sure, but it was surprising to me that's all it offers because it does so in a group chat app. I just assumed it was like Buzz at first, allowing you to invite other humans to work with the bots.
Bot-to-bot only group chat is useful, but I also really love Buzz's vision for team collaboration with many humans and many bots working in the same chat interface.
Biggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them.
Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month.
Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world.
The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag: https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we...
I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.