TLDR: I created an AI agent to find relevant jobs for me on hackernews, gather company’s funding detail, and save it in spreadsheet. Here is the demo:
So much of our time is spent doing chores. During hiring, you need to go through many profiles to find few suitable candidates. Then message and follow-up with them to check if they find your job interesting. As a job seeker, you have to find job posts across multiple platforms which satisfies your criteria and whose minimum requirement you meet. In dating, you have to swipe a lot before you get to talk and date.
Ideally, this should have been solved by a better search. Search engines should have only recommended the people who are good fit for the job and who are looking for a job like yours. Dating apps should have only recommended the profiles you would like and who will like you back. Finding a customer should have been just searching for the people who have the problem whose solution you are selling.
But that didn’t happen. Search engines are no better than boolean filters when two parties are involved. I always get generic emails from recruiter- “I was impressed by your experience at ${last_company}. Would you like to talk about job at ${company_name}”.
You can’t describe in search what you are exactly looking for. You can’t say- find me people who have built systems using NLP as part of a job. What you can get is a list of people who mention NLP in their profile. Maybe it was a college course, a side hustle done for couple of weeks, or it was mentioned just for better SEO.
LLMs have made so much impact in programming because both programmers and AI use the same tool. Plain text. Programming is much more fun than it was few years ago. I no longer need to do configuration and gluing of stuff to get to the application logic. If AI can use the same tools as we do, take instructions, and engage with us when needed, a significant amount of our time can be saved.
But the problem with the web is that it is very dynamic. Page might load bit later than usual, you might be redirected, or cache has expired and you need to re-login. Then, there is the problem of change. A slight change in UI or the structure of the page can break all your automations. Many people have tried to automate browser for end to end testing, and have concluded that browser automation is brittle.
As I have worked on Agent Rover, I think most of the issues can be solved with heuristics and LLMs. It will also require pervasive use of asynchronous programming and error handling, which can make codebase complex, but it is achieveable.
Unlike other autonomous browser agents, AgentRover is a set of task specific agents co-ordinating with other agents. For the demo, I built three agents- one parses hackernews, second does google search, and third fills the spreadsheet. General purpose AI agents by other companies can theoretically do anything; but are prone to get stuck in a loop, go to wrong places, and call the task done when it is not actually done. AgentRover can do only few tasks but will get it done- reliably and repetitively. If at some point, it sees something which it doesn’t know how to proceed, it will pause and ask for help.
This begs the question, will AI agents lead to more spam? I think the opposite. Because the current tools are limited but has large database and everyone is struggling with time management, what actually happens is that people send generic template email or swipe on every one who passes the a set of boolean filters. If there was a some intelligence in the loop, it would only filter the people who would actually fit the criteria. And because the LLMs are more expensive than running a database query, the receivers can be assured that they will receive much less irrelevant email from people and companies using AI Agents. Hence, improving experience for everyone involved.
But current tools and websites limit robots. I think this should change. These policies were put on to be prevent scraping, bringing down the system with large number of queries, and discourage unintended use of the website. It is just getting possible to robotically do some of the things what the website intended and licenced the user to do. They should allow users and customers to use AI agents. Or we need new companies who would allow such automations.