Agentic shopping turns errands asynchronous

I've started doing some agentic shopping through Codex.

I have a little shopping directory with a few Markdown files that keep track of my preferences, and the agent drives Amazon when I need to buy something.

The obvious use case is pretty boring. I need coffee, so I tell it to buy the same coffee I bought last time.

But I'm realizing the useful part isn't really the clicking.

Shopping sites are designed to distract you. I go to Amazon for coffee and it shows me upsells, recommendations, bright colors, and a dozen reasons to look at something else. Then the price seems higher than I remember, so I start comparison shopping. Maybe I should check the reviews too. Ten minutes later I'm doing research on a purchase I already thought I'd decided.

That whole process used to be synchronous. I was in Amazon, clicking around and thinking about coffee instead of doing anything else.

Now I drop into the shopping tab, say I need coffee, and go back to whatever I was doing. When the agent needs me, the tab turns red and pops back into my attention. I answer the question and leave again.

It also does a surprisingly good job with the parts of shopping that actually require judgment. I recently had it compare the reviews for two products. One was cheaper, but the agent noticed a pattern of people saying it failed after about six months.

That's exactly the kind of thing I would've wanted to know, without spending my own afternoon digging through reviews to find it.

Agentic shopping isn't just a faster way to use Amazon. It turns a distracting errand into an asynchronous process that only asks for my attention when there's actually a decision to make.