One thing that makes me hate LLMs is that they are not even close to the powerful technology a helpful AI would be. I think we have way too low expectations for what agents should be.
If I ask a model “what is the flattest city in the world”, it will do a quick google search, read the first 3 results and write a generic, uninteresting response (likely telling me how it depends on the definition, blablabla).
If I wanted something as lame as that I would do the search myself. Instead a meaningful assistant would look for raw data, define methodologies, do its own calculation, handle the nuances in a helpful way, compare to the known literature on the topic, then provide the response in a nice, easy to parse way.
What we currently have is an extremely lazy redditor that has to be forced to actually engage seriously with the topic at hand instead of defaulting to the most common stereotypes and generic facts. It has to be told to ignore blog slop and unreliable sources, to not take marketing claims for granted, etc. I have to argue with it to do its work and not stop after reading 10% of a document, constantly check it’s not following its own goals, verify it’s not skipping corners (it does, and will lie about doing it).
If you automate the babysitting (aka agentic stuff), you end up with an extremely inefficient and expensive Goldberg machine and still have babysitting to do! I can of course spend the time to create a perfect prompt where I specify exactly what I want and how it should be done, but at that point I’m way better doing it myself