I mean, this debate is about immigration, right? So current location doesn't super matter, assuming you can amortize the cost of relocating a plumber across several years' worth of plumbing work.
I trust that my colleagues are not going to do stupid things with their accounts, I cannot say the same for agents, and making their own accounts that you’re still responsible for seems like you’ve just moved the problem rather than actually resolving it, since ultimately, you’re still responsible for their actions.
Are agentic systems like these making correct decisions more often than humans really unthinkable? A comment like what you just wrote was unimaginable 5 years ago
How so? Each human is a different "model", and its constrained to the physical world. What are we going to do? Put whole corporations in jail, shareholders included?
Limit what they can do?
The "it went sideways" scenario for 100k agents spawned across the world using the same bad model is completely different from humans going sideways.
The power imbalance will ensure that this is unlikely to happen, in much the same way that people generally don’t trust that massive corporate entities have their best interest at heart but might have some regard for their colleagues wellbeing.
Work environments usually already have strict controls on financial accounts for very obvious reasons. This does result in stupid "why do I need director approval to buy a stapler?" stories, but the alternative risks all sorts of internal and external frauds.
(a notable achievement of SaaS and now AI has been to totally circumvent spending controls. You might not be able to spend $10 on a USB cable without a purchase order, but you can run up an AI bill of arbitrary size and in some places are encouraged to!)
It seems clear that LLMs significantly change threat model math, but this observation alone does not explain how or why; the asymmetry that you’re describing is a property of pre-LLM software as well.
Same ratio of imbalance, just with matching multipliers distributed to each side, and everybody is probably worse off because of it: I cite post-LLM-ATS hiring/job hunting.
Each of those examples varies widely, and I don't think most people would treat each of them the same way.
In general when the stakes are higher and the ambiguity of outcome is less clear, secondary signals become more important.
Concretely: I don't give a shit if my housecleaner doesn't make their own bed as long as they make mine; the outcome I need is easy to verify and the stakes are fairly low so the secondary signal doesn't matter very much. Conversely, I care a lot if the therapist I'm relying on to help me manage my depression is visibly unable to manage their own; the outcome I need has a slow feedback loop and the stakes are high so I'm much more likely to rely on secondary signals like "is this person able to manage their own mood successfully?"
In your version of the therapist example, you don't trust them to do their job because they are failing to do their job. This is fine by me. My issue is with punishing people at their job over actions taken outside of their job, as in the example under discussion.
> It doesn't know if 1 person made all those requests, or N.
FWIW this is highly unlikely to be true.
It's true that the upstream provider won't know it's _you_ per se, but most LLM providers strongly encourage proxies like OpenRouter to distinguish between downstream clients for security and performance reasons.
Fair point. Would be good to hear from OpenRouter folks on how they handle the safety identifier.
For prompt caching, they already say they permit it, and do not consider it "logging" (i.e. if you have zero retention turned on, it will still go to providers who do prompt caching).
OpenRouter tells you if they submit with your user ID or anonymously if you hover over one of the icons on the provider, eg OpenAI has "OpenRouter submits API requests to this provider with an anonymous user ID.", Azure OpenAI on the other hand has "OpenRouter submits API requests to this provider anonymously.".
But does "anonymous user ID" mean that they make a user ID for you, and it's sticky? If I make a request today and another tomorrow, the same anonymous user ID is sent each time? Or do they keep changing it?
I believe they are static user ids that only OpenRouter knows is you (the anonymous part. Static id is required for any cached pricing. If the user id changes each request, it would be a massive security hole to reuse that cache between requests with different user ids.
Without caching, it would make sense to be per-request (more like a transaction-id, and would make sense to be) as this could then be tied internally back to a user while maintaining external anonymity, but unfortunately I don’t believe that is the case.
I took the trouble of logging in to HN to call bullshit on this whole thread. The reason these teenagers aren’t building standalone apps is generally because they know that web apps are the future. Moreover, there are dozens of new travel planning startups every year (YC regularly funds them!) and they seem to discover the same thing that Microsoft did—the real reason they stopped updating this magical app—which is that everybody wants better travel apps but nobody wants to pay for it.
I’m sure someone will crack the code someday and I’m glad they will keep trying, but I refuse to accept the premise that $100 Apple developer accounts are their primary impediment.
$100 is $100, you seem to comment from a position of privilege. When I learned programming, in my early 20s, that was close to my monthly salary. Granted I've been a paid programmer for more than 15 years now and I make more than that, but, even so, seeing as app development is not what brings me money it looks like a waste to me to throw $100 at something each year so that I'd have the privilege of running my code on a piece of hardware I already own.
And let's say that maybe I'm a cheap bastard, but the reality remains that $100 is still a lot of money for a lot of young people around the world who have just gotten into programming.
No way my parents would have forked over $100 to me on some computer thing they didn't understand. Being able to spend your parents money on the internet as a kid is rare.
Maybe web apps are going to be used for commercial things but nothing beats the power of being able to write your own tools, and its just so easy to do that locally as its always been. A little bash script or some python goes far.
