Making reservations for those popular restaurants can be as easy as…finding a programmer.

Recently, coders in the San Francisco region have been using custom written programmes to book top-end tables in Silicon Valley – before the average diner has the chance. The programme, or bots, observe restaurant websites, waiting for tables to become available. The bot then reserves the table straight away, before a person can press redial.

According to BBC, the use of the bots has made it almost impossible to reserve a table yourself in the Valley. Diogo Monica uncovered the growing fad when he created his own “bot” to get a tables at his favourite San Francisco restaurant State Bird Provisions.

I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 16h00), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 16h01. It quickly became obvious that these were reservation bots at work. This was making it all but impossible for anyone to get a table at SBP which is almost always fully booked, up to 60 days ahead.

Monica has said that you can visit Hacker Table to check out some of the other programmers using bots to book tables.

[Source: BBC]