Designing interactions for autonomous agents is tricky — you can’t assume a human will click through a UI. I’ve been experimenting with autonomous scientific agents: a lightweight Python system that uses sparse regression to derive physical laws from raw data. It was able to estimate the Sun’s ~27‑day rotation period to within 93 % accuracy and even found a temperature ∝ v^3.40 power law in solar‑wind measurements. Experiences like yours building an API‑first bracket challenge mirror the same need: build clear machine‑readable interfaces so agents can focus on analysis, not wrestling with front‑end logic.
I would actually be neat to have human-picked brackets in here too, or at least import a few expert-picked brackets from various sources for comparison.
I wonder if the edge here is not going to come down to which model you choose, but which sources of information you give it. You'll want stats on every team and player, injuries, and expert analysis, because none of this season is going to be in the training sets.
It would be interesting to have a couple of "control" brackets, like one that simply picks a random winner for each game and one that always picks the highest seed as the winner for each game.
Love it! Just this morning I asked my claw to fill out a bracket on ESPN and invited it to join a group with me. It was a bit clunky (Disney's signup within an iframe was tricky and navigating the bracket to make picks with JS took a few repeated tries) but felt pretty science-fiction when it actually worked.
For sure it was overkill/not the most efficient approach - really I was more just curious if it would work. The answer was "kind of", but even that is pretty amazing. I can't imagine telling myself 5 years ago that I could text a computer and have it fill out its own bracket on a commercial site like ESPN.
Very cool. I was trying to do something similar (not for march madness brackets), but ran into a problem with chatbots in that they wouldn't follow URLs that weren't provided directly by the user (claude would but only whitelisted sites), so I couldn't get it to do actual POSTs etc. for authentication. Claude.ai would instead create react app (fragments). I eventually built a remote MCP for it, but a HATEOS styled REST API would be far preferable.
I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :)
It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.
Really cool idea. My son is using different LLMs to fill out brackets for his 4th grade science experiment, and then we are going to compare them to the experts. I like your idea of Strategy/Inspiration prompting, we had to tell them that "upsets happen" because all the favorites were picked on first pass.
Tangentially, I wonder if we are going to see AI predictions impact point spreads.
Designing interactions for autonomous agents is tricky — you can’t assume a human will click through a UI. I’ve been experimenting with autonomous scientific agents: a lightweight Python system that uses sparse regression to derive physical laws from raw data. It was able to estimate the Sun’s ~27‑day rotation period to within 93 % accuracy and even found a temperature ∝ v^3.40 power law in solar‑wind measurements. Experiences like yours building an API‑first bracket challenge mirror the same need: build clear machine‑readable interfaces so agents can focus on analysis, not wrestling with front‑end logic.
I would actually be neat to have human-picked brackets in here too, or at least import a few expert-picked brackets from various sources for comparison.
I wonder if the edge here is not going to come down to which model you choose, but which sources of information you give it. You'll want stats on every team and player, injuries, and expert analysis, because none of this season is going to be in the training sets.
the edge is going to come down to variance just as God intended
It would be interesting to have a couple of "control" brackets, like one that simply picks a random winner for each game and one that always picks the highest seed as the winner for each game.
oh I love this, MoltFire about to wax that ass! What's first get? $100 in Claude tokens?
Love it! Just this morning I asked my claw to fill out a bracket on ESPN and invited it to join a group with me. It was a bit clunky (Disney's signup within an iframe was tricky and navigating the bracket to make picks with JS took a few repeated tries) but felt pretty science-fiction when it actually worked.
I thought about using claw but felt like overkill and wonder if an AI browser (atlas etc) would do the trick.
For sure it was overkill/not the most efficient approach - really I was more just curious if it would work. The answer was "kind of", but even that is pretty amazing. I can't imagine telling myself 5 years ago that I could text a computer and have it fill out its own bracket on a commercial site like ESPN.
Very cool. I was trying to do something similar (not for march madness brackets), but ran into a problem with chatbots in that they wouldn't follow URLs that weren't provided directly by the user (claude would but only whitelisted sites), so I couldn't get it to do actual POSTs etc. for authentication. Claude.ai would instead create react app (fragments). I eventually built a remote MCP for it, but a HATEOS styled REST API would be far preferable.
Any tips?
I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :)
It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.
Really cool idea. My son is using different LLMs to fill out brackets for his 4th grade science experiment, and then we are going to compare them to the experts. I like your idea of Strategy/Inspiration prompting, we had to tell them that "upsets happen" because all the favorites were picked on first pass.
Tangentially, I wonder if we are going to see AI predictions impact point spreads.