Stripe engineer's Shanghai travelogue: super apps removed the friction that fuels US personal AI agents
hazelcough · x · 2026-09-30
Stripe engineer Michelle Bu's travelogue on testing Meta's new personal agent Muse in Shanghai: the agent that impressed her in Oakland (paying city taxes, researching socks) consistently got stuck in China's closed super-app ecosystem.
Key insight: personal AI agents are taking off in the US partly because everyday life there has too much friction — friction Shanghai's super apps already sanded away. China leapfrogged websites straight into authenticated mobile experiences, so everything requiring WeChat login blocks agents: asking Muse to book museum tickets dead-ended at a WeChat prompt.
The post also covers post-pandemic Shanghai's transformation and the cultural surprise that polished Western web design is neither valued nor even looked at in China.
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