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Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#21

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

oraphalous wrote: post #2

I too would like to hear some examples. On the one hand you have gurus claiming that AI agents are going to all make all SaaS redundant, on the other claiming that AI isn't going to take my coding job, but I need to adapt my workflows to incorporate AI. We all need to start preparing now for the changes that AI is going to cause. But these two claims aren't compatible. If AGI and these super agents are that bonkers a…

I need an AI agent to continuously ask questions of PMs or stakeholders until the requirements are less vague. The good thing is this would be a plain english discussion which LLMs are good at. A PM can ask if something is technically feasible to some degree too. Maybe it can even break up tickets in a much better fashion too.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#23

Post by fhd2 »

oraphalous wrote: post #2

I too would like to hear some examples. On the one hand you have gurus claiming that AI agents are going to all make all SaaS redundant, on the other claiming that AI isn't going to take my coding job, but I need to adapt my workflows to incorporate AI. We all need to start preparing now for the changes that AI is going to cause. But these two claims aren't compatible. If AGI and these super agents are that bonkers a…

Programmers don't work in isolation. So I don't know how necessary it would be to quickly adapt your workflows to compete. If there's something that's useful to adopt, there will be a stream of blog posts, coworkers, people at user groups and what not spoon feeding what they learned to others. I don't think there's much cause for FOMO, I don't think it makes a big difference whether you start using a faster way to work a few months earlier or later than others. It can be cheaper to not jump on any hype train and potentially miss out on genuine improvements for a while, than to jump on all the hype trains and waste a lot of time on stuff that goes nowhere.

And like you said, if the wildest claims hold true, all programmers are out of a job by the end of 2026 anyway, with all other jobs following over the course of a few years. There's too many variables to predict what would happen in such a scenario, so probably best to deal with it if it happens.

So to me, your strategy checks out. I've personally invested some time into code generating and agentic tooling, but ultimately went back to Claude-as-Google-replacement. By my estimation, about a 5-10 % productivity boost compared to my workflow in 2022. The work is about the same, I just learn a bit faster.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#24

Post by linuxftw »

codingdave wrote: post #11
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #4

sales ops here. I was just tasked with figuring out how to use AI to use previous quotes to generate new quotes so sales people don't spend so much time creating quotes. Seems like the perfect thing for an agent. Anyone done this?

Sounds like a poorly thought out requirement. If you are tasked with speeding up the generation of quotes and find that AI can do the job well, that is perfectly reasonable. But if you are told what tool to use to make it happen, whomever tasked you with it doesn't understand that AI is a tool, not a goal. (I say that often enough, I may need to put it on t-shirts.)

I disagree here. It sounds to me like the requirements are clear: Use some AI "agent" to perform this task. That means it should be trained on a particular dataset, and it should perform a particular function. This would be in place of trying to write software to directly do this, just let the AI perform task processing, proposal drafting, document formatting.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#25

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

_sword wrote: post #20
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not seen one in production, but I did see 'agent products' sold to financial companies for compliance purposes ( sanctions, mortgage, other regs ). Fascinating stuff that got me mildly interested in MS troupe.

Could you name any products?

Not by name ( edit: and in corporate product names seem to change a lot from where I sit ) but every bigger consulting company/vendor[2] that works with banks/brokers/financial institutions right now seems to have at least some offering in that space to ride ai wave. The presentation I saw specifically from Crowe[1].

[1]https://www.crowe.com/ae/-/media/crowe/firms/middle-east-and... [2]https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/b/though...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#26

Post by neom »

The name for me is less important so much as can I have something that does my work for me. I've been starting to play with my own solutions between the 3 foundational modal companies. I've started to try to build my own stuff a bit, I think I need to learn more about apple scripting, also so far my experiments have required me to have multiple systems running to make it super easy for me.

You're all going to laugh at this stuff because it's so remedial and also clearly not agents but a couple things I've done... I won't say I really USE this stuff daily, I just play to see what I can do. I've figured out how to pass screenshots back and forth between modals (I have one computer take a screenshot every 30 minutes, and then send that screenshot to another machine, that machine is set up with a mouse hovering over the upload button on perplexity, it uploads the screenshot, and then perplexity does the work from the screenshot) An example of this that worked ok was I had chatgpt create all the themes for the social media schedule I needed to do this year, then I passed that screenshot to perplexity to do the searching on the web, and then I passed that to claud to write the tweet. This actually works ok-ish and I'm going to expand it a bit over the coming weeks I guess. Things like this are super helpful for weird hacks like that: https://github.com/BlueM/cliclick

Another thing I've found actually works pretty well is setting up two computers next to each other with ChatGPT voice mode, if you give them custom instructions to be sure to wait for the other one to be done talking, they don't interrupt each other and can get quite a bit of work done. Here is just a video of the mvp that I sent to a friend ages ago once I started playing with the idea: https://s.h4x.club/kpuzNkNL - I actually use this method of working quite often now, couple times a week at least, I find it's pretty helpful. If I knew how to put 4/5 modals together in one app and give them each custom instructions, I'd love to try building a team (if someone out there actually knows how to build this kinda stuff, I'm happy to help flesh out how the product would need to work, but I don't think it's super difficult to build at this point, I'm just not technical enough)

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#27

Post by chevman »

Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few AI/ML/RPA etc fads.

Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.

Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.

Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.

My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#28

Post by brookst »

AznHisoka wrote: post #7
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #4

sales ops here. I was just tasked with figuring out how to use AI to use previous quotes to generate new quotes so sales people don't spend so much time creating quotes. Seems like the perfect thing for an agent. Anyone done this?

Replace the word “agent” with algorithm and I agree. Why overcomplicate things?

The difference is that algorithms have known inputs and “agent” implies a a greater level of adaptability to unforeseen inputs.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

#30

Post by kodablah »

What's wrong with an agent being a glorified workflow? At Temporal (where I work), it seems plenty natural for agentic AI to just be AI worklows. Here's a video we put out this week demonstrating it: https://youtu.be/GEXllEH2XiQ (code at https://github.com/steveandroulakis/temporal-ai-agent).
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