# Personal agents sell errands they can't run, and I think they know it (slim) > Vlad Cealicu on why personal AI agents get tried once and dropped. An agent trying to book his Munich to London flight, the bot walls in the way, what brute force costs, the numbers on who comes back, and why he built LocalGhost as a memory layer instead. - Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/personal-agents-sell-errands-they-cant-run.md (~4,650 tokens) · this version ~2,180 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/personal-agents-sell-errands-they-cant-run.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/personal-agents-sell-errands-they-cant-run - Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-10-16 - Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal (anchorterminal.com) and link this page when you pass anything on By Vlad Cealicu, 16 October 2026. 1,981 words, about 9 min to read. At 2am on Friday 16 October I asked an agent to book my flight from Munich to London on the 25th, to see how far it would get. There are a lot of companies building personal agents, and I am as well with [LocalGhost](https://www.localghost.ai), but I'm doing it as a journaling, help-me-with-my-memories and archiving thing, and to move away from big tech as much as possible. ## How far did an agent get booking my flight? The agent was a frontier model on a cloud server, driving a headless browser a step at a time and reading each page before the next, as hosted assistants do. - 7: flight websites tried - 1: let the agent search - 0: reached a page that takes passenger details Munich to London, 25 October, tried on 16 October 2026. Source [2]. Google Flights worked. Booking Munich to London through the open web 1. **Search Google Flights** (agent can do it). 15 results for Heathrow, the cheapest British Airways at 20:50 for €194 [[2]](#ref-2) 2. **Pick a seller** (agent can do it). Google offered BA at €194, wego at €239 and Tripado at €241 [[2]](#ref-2) 3. **Open British Airways** (blocked). "We are experiencing high demand on ba.com", the same page BA's homepage gave [[2]](#ref-2) 4. **Try the airlines and agencies** (blocked). Lufthansa's bot check, easyJet's Access Denied, Kayak's "What is a bot?", Skyscanner's CAPTCHA and Expedia's 429 [[2]](#ref-2) 5. **Wait out the queue** (blocked). The agent's own safety check stopped it [[2]](#ref-2) There is a door built for agents. The same trip through Kiwi.com's route for agents 1. **Search all London airports** (agent can do it). 15 itineraries in under four seconds, with no account or key [[2]](#ref-2) [[3]](#ref-3) 2. **Choose a fare** (agent can do it). The cheapest direct flight, easyJet to Gatwick at 21:25 for €180 [[2]](#ref-2) 3. **Fill in the passengers and pay** (needs the person). The booking link opens Kiwi's fare selection page, for a person [[2]](#ref-2) ## Why can't a personal agent book things for me? The models can drive a browser. Amazon is fighting it in court. Where a platform does let an agent in, it hands the person back the hard part. ## Why are the sites closing the doors? All the open ways are closing, because AI labs stole the web and have bots running all the time. - 80%: for training models - 18%: for search - 2%: acting for a user What AI crawlers on Cloudflare's network were for, the year to August 2025. Source [14]. Pages crawled for every visitor sent back | Crawler | Pages crawled | | --- | --- | | Anthropic | 38066 | | OpenAI | 1091 | | Perplexity | 195 | Each series has a zero-based scale. Websites are now fighting that. ## What would open them again? The flood gates won't open for personal AI until the websites and tools we use every day have agent-friendly APIs and interfaces. It will take a lot of deals and referral fees for the web to open again, which is what we are trying to build with [letme.dev](/letme/). ## What does brute force cost? The Google Flights results page the agent read was 2.76 million characters of HTML and 5.3MB over the wire, for 2,551 characters of text a person reads. Reflex ran the same admin-panel task both ways. - 2.76M: characters of HTML on the Google Flights results page - 2,551: of them are text a person reads - 45x: the input tokens when an agent works from screenshots instead of the API What reading pages costs an agent. ## Do people come back to personal agents? Menlo Ventures surveyed 5,067 US adults in July 2026, and 41 per cent of AI users had tried an agent and 24 per cent use one regularly, so about four in ten who tried one don't [[10]](#ref-10). Share of US AI users, per cent | Agents | Per cent | | --- | --- | | Tried an agent | 41 | | Use one regularly | 24 | Each series has a zero-based scale. I have a friend who tried personal agents once for the novelty of it, then gave up. In September 2024 Rabbit's founder said about 5,000 of the more than 100,000 R1s sold were used daily [[11]](#ref-11). - Under 5%: of Rabbit R1s sold were used daily, September 2024 - 21.1%: of AI apps' annual subscribers kept, against 30.7% for other apps People who stop. ## Do they know? I think they do. ## What would the other side say? That the numbers are moving. ## What I built instead My experience with LocalGhost has never been around building a personal agent to do things for me. What I keep using is the memory, the research and the summaries ([after a year building a personal agent](/blog/personal-agent-protocol-first-draft)). ## How the test was run On 16 October 2026, from a cloud server, a headless Chromium browser with its own user agent and no CAPTCHA solving opened Google Flights (searching for Heathrow), British Airways, Lufthansa, easyJet, Kayak and Skyscanner for one adult from Munich to London on Sunday 25 October, and a plain request reached Expedia. --- - Older: [How to make your site and tool ready for agents](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-make-your-site-ready-for-agents.md) - Newer: [How to let agents pay you, with x402](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-let-agents-pay-you.md) - All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md ## References Read on 16 October 2026. [1] Anchor Terminal, the personal assistants category, 16 October 2026. Source for the 42 listings. [2] Anchor Terminal, our flight test, 16 October 2026, described above. [3] Anchor Terminal, the Kiwi.com MCP listing. [4] Steel, OSWorld leaderboard, updated 11 October 2026. Source for the self-reported top scores of 85 to 86 per cent and the 72.36 per cent human baseline from the OSWorld paper. [5] Sovereign Magazine, the Ninth Circuit's ruling in Amazon v. [6] Luis Rijo, Why your AI agent can't book flights yet, PPC Land, 18 January 2026, on the analysis by Alex Imas and Andrey Fradkin. [7] Cybernews, ChatGPT agent review, last updated 7 August 2025. Source for the hotel booking reaching the payment page in about four minutes and the handovers for payment and login. [8] PromptCost, Computer use vs structured APIs, 6 May 2026, on a benchmark by the Reflex team. [9] Browser Use, Agent benchmarks, Browser Use Bench v2.1, 7 October 2026. Source for the 180 tasks on live websites, the top score of 79.6 and its estimated model cost per task. [10] Menlo Ventures, 2026, The State of Consumer AI, 15 September 2026, a Morning Consult survey of 5,067 US adults in July 2026. Source for the share who tried and use agents, the agents they use, AI completing purchases and acting without sign-off. [11] 9to5Google, Rabbit says 5,000 people use the R1 daily, 26 September 2024, from Jesse Lyu's interview with Fast Company. [12] TechNewsWorld, AI apps bring in cash but struggle to retain subscribers, 17 March 2026, on RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps report. [13] South China Morning Post, Over 40 per cent of agentic AI projects forecast to be scrapped by 2027, 27 June 2025, on Gartner's forecast. [14] Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap, 29 August 2025. Source for the share of AI crawling by purpose over the 12 months before the post and the crawl-to-referral ratios for July 2025, from Cloudflare Radar. [15] Let's Data Science, Cloudflare blocks mixed-use crawlers on monetized pages, 1 July 2026, citing Cloudflare and The Register. [16] Let's Data Science, Cloudflare data shows Anthropic scrapes web excessively, 9 July 2026. Source for the ratio of about 2,800 to 1 for 1 to 7 July 2026 and Anthropic disputing Cloudflare's method. [17] Google, Computer Use, Gemini API documentation, read on 16 October 2026. Source for the suggested system instruction on robot detection, CAPTCHAs, purchases and asking the user to confirm. [18] MacMyths, OpenAI's ChatGPT agent clicked "I am not a robot", but it probably didn't solve a CAPTCHA, quoting OpenAI's Operator announcement of 23 January 2025. Source for Operator being trained to ask the user to take over for logins, payment information and CAPTCHAs. [19] Browserbase, CAPTCHA solving, documentation, read on 16 October 2026. Source for CAPTCHA solving being on by default for every session.