alt Hacker NewsBasically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
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Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
But if I use the AI bot, I’m burning tokens.
“Get me a burrito. Ok cool are there any other places? Ok but how about ones under 50 minutes delivery? Ok now of those which has higher than 4.5 stars? Alright that one looks good, can I get a large lamb burrito with extra salsa and guac? Ok they don’t do lamb that’s fine, beef is good. They don’t do a large size, that’s alright go with a small. Yes confirm payment.”
Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want - we’ve had people paid 300k working on the optimal visual interface for this for probably 30 years, just trying to improve the sale rate 2%.
Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
I would not trust the AI to order food off of these websites for me because the labeled data itself is pretty much shit. Lots of dishes are unlabeled, have really bad pictures or no pictures at all, and the worse is the ones that have AI generated descriptions which are often wrong or not helpful. I'm totally fine with letting it just use my saved credit cards and delivery address (I assume the AI doesn't see them) but I can't trust it to order the food I actually want.
E: As an example (n = 1 etc): I am vegetarian. I have never ordered meat dishes, ever. Yet all of these food delivery apps suggest meat dishes for me.
Remember when Amazon thought that people would say "buy me more paper towels" to their Echo? And of course they didn't because that's insane.
I use AI like a mad man to find what I need on Amazon or other websites.
For example, got a new washing machine, had to find adapters, it is so easy to have it find it for me, and then show me a few options. And understand what I need.
Just had it search for bubble wrap and break down what is most cost effective and gets it to me in 2 to 3 days. So easy, and got me off Amazon.
Food? No way, Food is a pleasure if I am ordering it and a splurge. I don't need a machine to help me pick out what taste good. Maybe translate some things if I'm struggling in that language.
The problem with AI assistants in general is that humans barely ever know what they want and the promise is that AI can intuit/predict what we want. It can't. People like to shop. It's easier to shop with our eyes than our ears. Personal assistants, as far as I can tell, have one use case and that is doing mundane chores like e-mail summaries. But to do that, you have to give them access to everything, so it becomes a transaction of privacy. And I think a lot of people are paranoid. Plus each one is a little token bonfire that is probably costing them money.
And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.
I don't use doordash or buy food like that but I'm definitely using them to find me and buy me clothes that fit me and I want in Vinted and other European marketplaces. To make insurance claims, to check my bank statements, etc.
I would be very surprised if it turns out I'm the only one
In my opinion, I think might have to do more with the dark patterns that are created by these apps. DoorDash, Uber. You place an order and there's all these hidden things that get added in you don't really see. You don't really get to recognize unless you do it manually. It's it's trickery in a way. They they try to gouge and get extra fees and costs in there where you can find ways around it if you're clever and able to do so. So using an agent, that just gives them an advantage because then you end up paying the overinflated price and fees plus tokens on top of everything else. See what people are looking for nowadays is actually ways to lower costs. Inflation is too high, and I think people are starting to realize that. They're trying to find ways and find cheaper ways to do things.
Because they dont work. End of the story.
The other day I want to have a 1m cable extension male/female for a XH1.25 It is impossible to find one, because you only find kits to make your own, or a 20 or 30cm one.
I tried with several free LLM, so that they can likely watch much more than I can do and filter all kits, and give the cable I want.
Not a single one was able to provide with a link I could use from my location. They kept suggesting that I shall try these "searches", or products, that were not exactly what I asked.
It is a very simple query, and to be fair, it should be solved at the search box, but it isn't.
The truth is that, if I would let it do it without checking now I would have paid for a kit to make the cable or something else that is not what I want.
> DoorDash only rolled out its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector less than a month ago. ... Without that kind of linkup—which is still only available to a small number of “early beta partners” and mainly used to streamline corporate lunch orders
So it's available to almost no one anyway. Misleading title.
Long-time lurker here. I'm probably something of an anomaly at HN because I don't work in anything remotely related to tech - I'm actually a screenwriter. But I enjoy spending time here because the quality of the discourse reminds me of Reddit back in the day.
I consistently get the feeling that I must have a rather more humanist and enchanted view of the world compared to some of you. I see a lot of hyper-rationalist, data-first discussion of the practical issues connected to AI agents when it comes to ordering takeout, but it seems very clear to me that the main reason no-one wants to use AI for this is because a human being's relationship with food - and sourcing food - is really quite ancient and meaningful. In today's hyper-connected world ordering a burger has become almost comically disconnected from hunting for a wild boar, but they are still the same thing in spirit. And handing that over to an LLM equates to the loss of a significant aspect of the human experience.
I think this applies to a lot of use cases of AI that are doomed to fail - not least anything that seeks to replace a human being's creative potential. Why would anyone want to give that up? It's such an important part of existing.
Ordering off DoorDash seems to me like the worst possible case for agents (or Alexa voice speakers before them.)
I need to see the full menu, with prices and picture of the food and options. Having an agent in the middle is just going to slow me down.
Why would I want this? Why would anyone want this? Just seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Is fast food/delivery food so frequently used that this is now warranted?
Even at my most gluttonous, many years ago, I would order maybe a single takeaway every other week, and when I did that, I'd want to be in complete control to browse and try new things. The only use case I can see for AI is as an alternative to traditional search to work out what some unknown ingredient is, however if I recall, most takeaway apps are just pictures with a name.
People who eat fast food more than once a week need to seriously assess how bad this food is for them. It's overly salted, oily and greasy junk with next to no nutritional value. And for what is it, it is ridiculously expensive. The people that eat it often are stuck in a trap.
For less than half of the cost of the lowest value takeaway (around £20.00, although I've seen people carrying bags with receipts up to £50!), you can buy a whole chicken, potatoes and vegetables, which can cover up to 3 or 4 meals. £10 for 3 meals or £20-50 for 1. You just need to put things in ovens and pots and wait, the same as you have to tap on your phone and wait.
Recently I needed to book a table for 16 for a rehearsal dinner. I used ChatGPT work to find availabilities and create an html doc of only restaurants that could handle our party size, with pictures, menu comparisons, locations, and approximate prices. It knocked the task out of the park and I went with one of the recommended restaurants.
That said, the last mile, the bit where I paid, I called the kitchen manager and talked to them. Even if I trusted ChatGPT with this part, I like building a rapport with who’s serving me and my family food, and it’s a special occasion so I know they want to nail the experience. ChatGPT saved me so many hours of work and research and replaced Google, yelp, and so many other random services.
I don’t think agents are going to work with DoorDash they’re going to replace DoorDash - taking their core competency of helping me discover and choose what’s new and interesting to me, what restaurant is open and meets my criteria and let me stay connected with the people rather than building a wall between me and them
For me, the best use of AI is making bespoke software connecting systems and devices that have no business being connected but I find value in so I can have a unique interface for all my tech and hobbies. Not sure how that gets translated to the everyday man but it sure isn't "bring me food".
Many points were raised, but I believe that key term for what people do when preparing fo buying decison is they prepare "overview" of situation. Price spectrum, sizes, wanted/liked/unlocked ingredients any parameters.
You can't make proper overview without actually browsing menu of one or two providers. AI at best can sloppify you with wall of text or table that you actually don't want to read, because menus and UI are actually better design than random markdown output.
Then AIncsn have tool to output good summary of menu, but people will not trust that this choice was in their interest rather than minmaxing algo of whoever controls agent.
I think eventually demand for this is gonna pick up. I order the same thing every single time(though on a local alternative & not doordash) and I totally wish I could have an agent drive that. At my lunch time ask me if it can order the usual, I say yes it places the order, monitors it - essentially make sure I get my lunch brought to me without - the cognitive overload from interacting with these food delivery apps or in some cases speaking with the delivery people. Yeah - chat might not be the right interface for that there's the MCP and I think more people if they knoew how powerful that was would be excited about the possibilities of building custom workflows
I actually do it twice every day. I gave it my preference and time. Occasionally I steer it to order “something with fish” or “big portion because im hungry”
When I have demoed the use of agents, I usually do it with an agent combining multiple applications' results. Something like: "We're having a family gathering at grandma's. Which of us can stop in at the drugstore to pick up her prescriptions on the way without adding a lot to our travel time?"
Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.
I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.
Similar concept as with shopping, where the selling point is "your agent will do all your shopping for you"
But the wide consensus from most of the industry (including AI people) is that agent shopping is useful for stuff you don't like to shop for (like groceries, computer parts, ad-hoc supplies like paper towels)
But for clothes, and interesting things, where the experience is akin to window shopping, scrolling and imagining what you look like in a particular shirt is actually an integral part of the experience.
Guessing that doordash/ubereats has a part of that appeal, where you get to imagine/visualize the food before you order it.
Just because text isn't the best interface for agentic commerce doesn't mean agentic commerce is dead. The way I'm building my open-source marketplace[0], each store's storefront and cart are rendered right in the chat through MCP UI. So you can ask the agent to change something in your cart or add something, but you also have a real cart in the UI that you can tap and edit directly.
This has always been an ai use case that made no sense to me. The UI for ordering food is good, it's visual, it shows you the food you're getting and how much it costs. There's no reason for a chat interface to be an upgrade here. Chat interfaces only have an advantage when you need the nuance of language. It's good at the things where trying to build a UI for it would collapse into an incoherent jumble of visual language.
You would imagine maybe personal agents like instinct would drive up this usage. But why order food through 5 text messages when you could do it in five taps?
Some of these use case feel so imaginary that lot of people just don't get why would some other people do them. Like with food delivery I want to select specifically what I want and evaluate if the price is right. Same goes for ordering most stuff or deciding on vacation.
Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...
"I want to order food from this restaurant"
"Sure, here's 10 options for different food from this restaurant that you totally couldn't have found just by searching for their website instead of writing this prompt!"
Maybe people enjoy ordering food themselves?
There are many things that agents can do that I would rather do myself.
I do run agents like Meta Muse and Google Spark just to experiment with them, but those are just short experiences.
Bots and tech are testing humanity's levels of desire for laziness and how much they are ready to pay for buying that laziness. Turns out that the desire is limitless. As someone said, the ultimate luxury is in having maximum laziness - not having to move, talk, think or use senses - the state of being a rock.
I use AI to shop all the time. I make it find the cheapest option.
I also use it to book ubers and uber eats but I check the result first.
I don't understand this logic.
It's going to take time, but it'll happen.
I work for a payment processor and there's been talk from the bigwigs about making the platform "Ready for agentic commerce".
I have never seen so little enthusiasm for a project before in my entire professional life, and I've worked on some real dud projects. Literally nobody cares to even pretend they think this crap is useful, any discussion I've ever heard on the topic is people memeing on it. As far as I can tell not even the execs talking about it give a shit, which to me shows how utterly useless the whole agentic commerce crap is
I would use it if they let me, but you have to be approved for access to their cli and mcp is only for companies. I've had my agent place orders but clicking around with computer use takes longer than ordering by hand.
My hot take is capitalism can't deliver a "order one pepperoni pizza" product.
This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now: - Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20. - Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc. - Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20. - On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.
Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.
Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.
Not surprising in hindsight.
It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.
Agents are good for complex purchases with lots of hidden fees like hotels. Less useful for burgers, though I'd definitely try it for a large catering order.
This is kind of a moot article because up until a month a go when DoorDash released their MCP, their bot detection was getting in the way of agentic ordering.
I know people that have been automating their Doordash orders even before modern AI was a thing. When done right the server cannot tell.
I built https://bit.recipes to facilitate my agent ordering my groceries (saves ~60 mins of family annoyance a week). it’s really meant to apply more rails and human/family collaboration, rather than a pure AI play or anything
IQ level of clients may have something to do with it.
Because the DoorDash app is so simple, delightful, intuitive?
Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.
But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.
And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.
DoorDash seems like a resource anti-optimization that would be made irrelevant by an AI agent managing one's meals. An unofficial HEB MCP [0]—that's cooking with gas!
0. https://github.com/mgwalkerjr95/texas-grocery-mcp
* No affiliation with the above repo, but I'm considering trying it out.
2026, re-inventing APIs with 3 levels more indirection \_(ツ)_/ and calling it "innovative"
its not hard to order food without AI
its not hard to prepare food without AI
its not hard to "do X without AI" for about 99.99999% of all different possible cases of X
Give a random chatbot pushed by fomo idiots access to all your personal data and the ability to spend your fucking money? you deserve what you get if you're dumb enough to do that.
Why are people even using doordash in 2026? It is pretty much the embodiment of capitalism ruining everything except the shareholder's wallets
Another way to say it might be - the current version or approach of AI Agents don't do much for users in that use case.
While I'm sure there is a place for AI on the food prep side of things, I think it misses the point on the ordering side. While a lot of people want something different, they don't want it to be that different and it's just easier and faster to choose it themselves.
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People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.