When It’s You Against the Bot Makers, You Lose

“This restaurant is amazing!” raves Bon Appétit or a local popular reviewer or all your friends. Reservations quickly become impossible to book at said restaurant no matter how hard you try. Regular people move on to other options. People like Diogo Monica, a programmer who works for Square in San Francisco, build bots to get a reservation. And it turns out that his bot is competing with other bots to book tables.

“You fight fire with fire,” he said. “So I decided to fight back, creating my own.”

And so he did. The days when Diogo couldn’t get a table for love nor money are now a distant memory. His bot is so good at its job that sometimes he gets two or three reservations in his name in the same day — he thinks he’s now been to the restaurant “around 15 times”. But he doesn’t expect to stay top for long. If he wants to keep getting tables at State Bird Provision, he’ll have to constantly modify his bot as rivals are adapted to undercut him.

We’ve heard this story before when it comes to concert tickets, but it still seems just so unfair.

Photo: Phil Campbell

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