"Roadmap" works sometimes, but there's definitely some guess-work. Clarifying with followup questions in chat is pretty valuable, and we're considering presenting the user with multiple plans to choose from when we're unsure.
Interesting -- we've definitely been building only on top of APIs. We've looked at automated form filling in the past, so it's something we're thinking about.
1. Yes! This is useful for parsing unstructured data or inferring an argument (sometimes we can simply define a static data transformation through jq).
2. Anything too complex (e.g. 5+ steps) tends to be unreliable. Also, any workflow where potential failure/unexpected behavior is too risky to leave up to an LLM.
3. The only actions we take are with our user's tools, so many workflows are simply organizing their information between their apps. However, e.g. gmails could be sent externally so we have guardrails/sanity checks to mitigate risk there.
We do a fixed number of retries, including redoing any AI arguments. We've thought about making it atomic/more durable -- it's tricky, given that most steps interact with external systems e.g. Google Sheets, and while not typically "destructive" (Google Sheets has version history), undo-ing is often difficult.
Zapier is definitely trying, but they're not there yet. That feature unfortunately doesn't do much to configure the blocks for you (it just selects which to use) -- you're largely left to sift through the same menus to set it up.
Zapier has actual experienced software engineers and real budgets, would not rule out their ability to perform the same: text to IFTTT like auto-execution. Or consider your company right now, your current company is essentially a single team at Zapier, and you've got some free-way to mix research and product development. I suspect this is more an acquisition target -- small team develops larger idea in better way, Zapier says thanks and hooks it into their own stack, networks, and customers.
It took Zapier ~12 years to become a ~$5B company and build the book of revenue supporting such a valuation. For the right price, certainly, cash out (time value of money/time). But it's also reasonable to build and see how far you can run organically, depending on what you're optimizing for as a founder. You might be able to run faster because you're not carrying a decade of technical architecture to today's market, regardless of current cashflow and engineering capacity.
Zapier is a great company from a product and financial fundamentals perspective, big fan in all honesty, but I wouldn't sell upstarts short (that they can't execute).
That's the whole point of a startup. And we know startups fail. And Zapier is a YC company. This is a 2 person team using LLMs, I doubt they are building their own, nor building some "foundational connect-the-internet" agent nor have built for any scale beyond an internship. Still, they are definitely going to make something, and good luck to them.
Zapier is working on something very similar! We actually did our live launch at the same event as them for their new chat product -- https://central.zapier.com/. We think our UX is actually a lot simpler than there's is at the moment, since they're focusing on fine-grained control.
Also, the best way for them to do this would be pretty close to a ground-up rewrite -- both in terms of frontend/interface, but their model of integrations/connectors is not really compatible with allowing AI to take a bigger role in data transformations.
Zapier is already trying! We actually did our live launch at the same event as them for their new chat product -- https://central.zapier.com/. At the moment though, they're pretty focused on fine-grained control and GUI configurability, which makes a lot of sense for their existing technical user-base. We're focusing on a super simple UX for less technical users.
