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Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com

153 points · 162 comments · simianwords

  1. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
    I ask this in every thread on muse / OpenClaw / whatever platform. I’ve never gotten a clear answer beyond “yeah me too”:

    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?

    1. simianwords · · focus · HN ↗
      I made appointment with my doctor and haircut all using chatgpt. Also bought some stuff on a local website.

      I hate having to work through random UI. I just wanna get stuff done.

    2. NullifyNAN · · focus · HN ↗
      I use coding agents to fill out dunkin donuts surveys for me
    3. takerofnaps · · focus · HN ↗
      I agree with you. I also wouldn't trust it calling on my behalf or doing the majority of what people say it can do. Putting aside it making mistakes and not even being beneficial, I definitely wouldn't want meta of all companies to have the relevant information to do those things.
    4. mariusae · · focus · HN ↗
      For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways:

      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.)

      1. Freak_NL · · focus · HN ↗
        Keeping track of your kids' homework is your concern? Doesn't it only become your concern, briefly, when the school contacts you about your kid not getting their homework done?
        1. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
          As a parent people from prior generations do not get the current situation. I actually agree that this is a useful use of the agentic work tools - and it’s the only case I mentioned above I’ve used it for successfully, if not saving of time.

          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.

          1. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
            Btw I did this Muse, giving it the ability to use its cred vault to log into her school information system and read through all the crap and other websites and collate the homework’s and their due dates, adding to my child’s calendar when they’re due and a reminder the day before with a link to the calendar. I had model the workflow formally (I do this with all LLMs for procedures) and set it up to run daily. We shall see!

            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.

        2. pavel_lishin · · focus · HN ↗
          I'm not the person you're asking, but in general, I would also stay on top of my child's obligations - homework, chores, etc. I don't want the first sign of trouble to be a call from a teacher, or the complete absence of clean clothes for them to wear in the morning.

          You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation

          1. mkjs · · focus · HN ↗
            You equally don't teach them responsibility by always being there as the backstop though. I think missing a couple of homeworks is quite a low-stakes thing that can teach them a lot about responsibility, failure, and how to recover from it.

            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.

            1. pavel_lishin · · focus · HN ↗
              Oh, sure. I'm not saying I'd remind her about every piece of homework. But I want to know if she's starting to not do it.
              1. Freak_NL · · focus · HN ↗
                There is quite a large gap between checking in with your kid and having an AI analyse their homework and assignments and raising an alarm if anything appears to slip. The latter is a solid WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP on the helicopter parent spectrum.

                Missing homework once or twice is part of life and a really good life lesson with low risk besides.

      2. rkagerer · · focus · HN ↗
        As someone who doesn't have kids and was last in school decades ago....

        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)

        1. nasmorn · · focus · HN ↗
          But nowadays kids are expected to check 2-4 platforms plus their notes and there is no guaranteed time when they know it will be there. It is like the worlds worst paid disfunctional work place and one of my kids schools literally uses teams for one third of their assignments. In word format so sometimes kids overwrite it.

          If you don’t accept the terms your kids life is just even harder.

    5. strulovich · · focus · HN ↗
      - find piece to buy to repair an appliance

      - 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.

      1. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
        But aren’t all of these currently fully achievable with normal chat these days?
        1. sigmar · · focus · HN ↗
          Travel research is so much better with an asynchronous agent than with normal LLM chat. You can just let it hack away for an hour looking over options and browsing different websites.
    6. 98codes · · focus · HN ↗
      At home? Not really, no.

      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.

    7. Miner49er · · focus · HN ↗
      Instinct contacted Oracle support for me and got movement on a ticket that had been stuck.

      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

    8. 8note · · focus · HN ↗
      i just have the claude scheduled job kinda tool running, but at the grocery store i can spot something and think of a meal, then ask claude if any nearby grocery stores have other key elements to the meal on sale.

      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

      1. watwut · · focus · HN ↗
        Doesnt it then adds work? I buy ingredients for dinner in the store I am at. If they dont have everything, I just do different meal. Saves time and effort compared to visiting multiple stores.
    9. fadhilkurnia · · focus · HN ↗
      I just used it today to find and reserve a parking spot in SF.

      Previously, I used Claude to gather AWS invoices for reimbursement purposes.

    10. fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
      > use cases that have actually improved your life in some measurable way?

      "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.

      1. nancyminusone · · focus · HN ↗
        >in some imperceptible way

        How do you know it has or has not improved your situation if imperceptible?

      2. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
        Measurement doesn’t have to be in a metric space, it can be relative. This tree is taller than that bush is a measurement. I am happier today than yesterday because of my agentic harness is a measurement. A metric space is in some ways useful but neither necessary nor superior to a relative measurement.
    11. vineyardmike · · focus · HN ↗
      I find it useful, so here are some concrete examples from last few days.

      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".

      1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

        [deleted]

    12. pfeifemc · · focus · HN ↗
      Just in the last three hours, Muse helped me make progress on my go-to-market plan, drafted me a script for my demo video, and went and listed 50 high value creators in my target market that i can go interact with and ask for product feedback. It could even DM them for me if I wanted to. It's the first time a product like this has actually shocked me... it closes the gap between decision and action. I'm hooked.

      I still have to do the work, but everything's all teed up for me.

      1. Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
        "It even registered a new HN account today to impersonate a human and post this ad!"
    13. brookst · · focus · HN ↗
      In the past few days:

      - 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.

      1. malshe · · focus · HN ↗
        > Got claude connected to plaid via MCP

        I would like to check this out. My expenses are getting out of hand.

        1. brookst · · focus · HN ↗
          Well, with EXTREME cautions (read the readme): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brookstalley&#x2F;bankmachine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brookstalley&#x2F;bankmachine
          1. malshe · · focus · HN ↗
            Thanks! I will check it out
      2. fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
        I do all these things but use codex, which lets me use git for settings etc and I end up building software I can re-use. Am I wrong?
        1. brookst · · focus · HN ↗
          Why wrong? Seems reasonable.
    14. christina97 · · focus · HN ↗
      I use Claude Code often for entirely non-code things: the harness concept is super helpful for going through documents etc.

      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.

    15. zhivota · · focus · HN ↗
      I&#x27;m not using a platform but I set up a telegram bot that is backed by AI (DeepSeek flash tokens are almost too cheap to meter) that handles my strength training workouts. It reminds me of the days workout, takes my feedback on each exercise difficulty and adjusts it for the next round, handles injury rehab prescriptions, and so on.

      I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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