Devin is closest for me. I’ve had it implement additional language locales and add dark mode to our UI.
Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#32They're ALL bullshit and there's a technical reason why.
Your rube goldberg contraption that you put together for your borderline-fradulent pitch deck is NOT an assembly-line nor is it a product anyone's gonna buy. Why?
Because cosine similarity search mathematically sucks a* , large context windows, while better, are nowhere close to being fast and practical ( maybe with a small exception of the generic sounding 1M context summaries you now get from gemini flash 2.0 exp ) . You probably don't have any kind of CI/CD setup, no testing at all zero, no benchmarking of accuracy, you probably can't even get lm_eval installed in the first place so no troubleshooting methodoloy, no formal iteration pipeline, you're not putting out a new model every 2 weeks and iterating upon, and YOU at this point probably can't find your own way to your own fkin toilet seat without Cursor's GPS showing your where it is and then writing a whole factory just to open the toilet seat.
You look at the youtube demos and it's just another investor slop to be sold to other sloppy investors. I even asked on uncle Elons twitter if anyone had a demo of agents doing anything in real life, and after 1/4million views the only thing that even worked AT ALL were spambots and Pliny's agent making a sh*tcoin. https://x.com/nisten/status/1808522547169763448
People cook something at home and immediately get delusional thinking they now have an assembly line that's just going to print money... have you ever actually looked at an industrial pasta-maker machine. Do YOU have the skills to make that? I'm sorry but no ammount of shrooms and microdosed-meth pills is gonna get you that.
Agents do not exist yet, they will sooner or later, but right now they're a concept more along the lines of scammy ledger-backed dbs.
You can always prove me wrong with a real life demonstration of an automated tool doing a complex ammount of steps that you'd normally expect an average-ish worker to do for you on a RELIABLE rate basis. I.E. Doing your taxes like your accountant or 10 year old hopefully does.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#33IMO "Agents" are a marketing term, they are simply software that use LLMs somewhere in the backend. Often daisy chained into a series of operations that may involve additional LLM calls or calls to other internal/external services. One we've been using for meeting notes + action items works quite well https://fireflies.ai
no "Agents" have a specific technical meaning.. an engine is connected to tools.. simple example is a bash terminal environment.
Where did you get the idea that "LLM connected to tools" is the one true meaning of the term agents?
(I'm not trying to be accusatory here, just trying to understand how these opinions spread.)
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#34As a side note, while I know of several language model based systems that have been deployed in companies, some companies don't want to talk about it: 1. Its still perceived as an issue of competitive advantage 2. There is a serious concern about backlash. The public's response to finding out that companies have used AI has often not been good (or even reasonable) -- particularly if there was worker replacement relat…
There is a very simple and obvious definition: it's agentic if it uses tool calls to accomplish a task.
This is the only one that makes sense. People want to conflate it with their random vague conceptions of AGI or ASI or make some kind of vague requirement for a certain level of autonomy, but that doesn't make sense.
An agent is an agent and an autonomous agent is an autonomous agent, but a fully autonomous agent is a fully autonomous agent. An AGI is an AGI but an ASI is an ASI.
Somehow using words and qualifiers to mean different specific things is controversial.
The only thing I will say to complicate it though is if you have a workflow and none of the steps give the system an option to select from more than one tool call, then I would suggest that should be called an LLM workflow and not an agent. Because you removed the agency by not giving it more than one option of action to select from.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#35An anecote that helps you maybe: I do contracting work, we're building a text-to-sql automated business analyst. It's quite well-rounded: it tries to recover from errors, allows automatic creation of appropriate visualisations, has a generic "faq" component to help the user understand how to use the tool. The tool is available to some 10.000 b2b users. It's just a bunch of prompts conditionally slapped together in a…
Love that. Reminds me of a time I was asked to build a "machine learning algorithm" driven recommendation system... and eventually I realized that delivering a recommendation system based on one big BM25 search query was fine, and the people asking for it to use "machine learning" didn't actually understand or care about the difference.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#36An anecote that helps you maybe: I do contracting work, we're building a text-to-sql automated business analyst. It's quite well-rounded: it tries to recover from errors, allows automatic creation of appropriate visualisations, has a generic "faq" component to help the user understand how to use the tool. The tool is available to some 10.000 b2b users. It's just a bunch of prompts conditionally slapped together in a…
Sounds awesome. :D For real, the anecdote is hilarious and I find it easy to believe but also sounds cool what you are working on.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#37[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#38They're ALL bullshit and there's a technical reason why. Your rube goldberg contraption that you put together for your borderline-fradulent pitch deck is NOT an assembly-line nor is it a product anyone's gonna buy. Why? Because cosine similarity search mathematically sucks a* , large context windows, while better, are nowhere close to being fast and practical ( maybe with a small exception of the generic sounding 1M…
"Agents do not exist yet, they will sooner or later"
Which definition of agents are you using there?
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#39They're ALL bullshit and there's a technical reason why. Your rube goldberg contraption that you put together for your borderline-fradulent pitch deck is NOT an assembly-line nor is it a product anyone's gonna buy. Why? Because cosine similarity search mathematically sucks a* , large context windows, while better, are nowhere close to being fast and practical ( maybe with a small exception of the generic sounding 1M…
Top notch monday morning rant!
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#40You'd probably have to define agents first. What large / mega caps call agents is LLM + RAG + API Calls to read data and trigger jobs. And there are plenty of those online
Yes, that's what it seems to me also, that often a RAG or similar is branded as an "agent". Though I personally understand an LLM agent as something that takes input x to use in LLM inference and then uses the output from that inference to create a new input for another LLM inference that includes the first output and so on, and repeats this >1 times.
That's an LLM workflow and not an agent if it's on rails created by a predefined workflow and doesn't make tool calls, or does not have any choice in tool calls. The tool calls are what give it agency.