One of the promises underwriting the AI boom is that software will be able to use computers on our behalf. At the low end, this looks like the “deep research” tools AI firms have already released that search the web and synthesize information on your behalf, attempting to automate the task of using Google. More theoretically, it might mean models trained to use productivity software in a work context, which may then be used to attempt to automate increasingly complicated jobs. In between, you’ve got the stuff that companies like Google and OpenAI keep touting in demos: AI that can book flights for you, AI that can get you a reservation, AI that can comparison-shop for you. As a category of “agentic” behavior, this sort of stuff is both ambitious and conceptually funny — the great big intel

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