Is scale what we're discussing though?
e.g. a prompt of "fetch <article URL> and summarise it for me" is very close to what a human would be doing with a web browser, and doesn't seem to involve any kind of scaling issue.
Is scale what we're discussing though?
e.g. a prompt of "fetch <article URL> and summarise it for me" is very close to what a human would be doing with a web browser, and doesn't seem to involve any kind of scaling issue.
Sure, but all the time I'll ask Claude a question, and then I'll see it fetch 5-10 different URLs to come up with answer. I certainly would not be fetching those URLs at that rate if I were doing it myself. I would probably be visiting those pages, one by one, over the span of 10-20 minutes.
That's the scale argument.
As would I when researching anything myself. I'll do a web search, and if I see some highly relevant results, I'll middle-click them so they open in a new tab, and I'll easily do 5+ at a time, before then going to read the first one.
Same with browsing HN, btw. I have a row of 9 HN tabs open, all of them opened at the same time, as I scrolled the front page and middle-clicked on thread link to anything interesting.
It’s easy to write instructions that have the agent check once every fifteen minutes, or even once an hour, in perpetuity, which never sleeps. And people do write such instructions. A human can’t do that by hand for very long.
The problem is that it is hard to distinguish your one off (which seems perfectly fine) from the tidal wave of bad actors.