Story

Most Friday nights and weekends, my wife and I would spend 30+ minutes scrolling Netflix, vetoing each other's movie suggestions. The intersection of our tastes is pretty small. She's into rom coms and the occasional thriller, and couldn't care less about ratings. I gravitate toward critically acclaimed stuff and 3h+ sagas. Eventually, we would settle on something neither of us really wanted, or a comfort TV show.

So, I built movieagent.io to help us. It's an agent that finds what you're in the mood for tonight. The agent plays the role of an arbiter, and does its best to try and bridge the gap between users. The whole process takes about 2-3 minutes, depending on the level of disagreement (and Anthropic's API load).

The agent asks a few quick questions, then runs "duels", showing you two movies and asking which movie resonates more. Your choices reveal which direction the agent should probe into more.

Finally, the user(s) get 4-5 movies at the end with a personalized recommendation note as to why this particular movie is a good choice for tonight.

It still hit or miss sometimes, but it did help us to a couple of great movie nights.