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

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31–40 of 81 posts

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

#31
I don't still understand what really the hype is here, agent is just "A SMART FUNCTION CALLING ROUTER" at ground level, nothing more nothing less

Can be called as smart bot or bot 2.0 or something, but agent is way too much. Nothing really is agentic in agents

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

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds alright, but I'm having difficulty imagining a situation where a business wants to produce a quote with novel element types / parameterizations not yet seen before without a human hand in the loop.

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

#33
I'm not exactly clear what you're asking. Where do you draw the line between "workflow automation" and "doing work"? To me it just seems like a spectrum with rapidly moving goal posts.

A decade ago, enterprises had quite a lot of roles involving essentially moving data from one ERP screen to another. From what I'm seeing, these roles seem to be quickly disappearing, with a combination of proper API-based automation, GUI automation and most recently LLM "agents" in crucial steps.

And on a very different note, I as a developer could ask an AI tool such as Aider or Windsurf to perform a big refactoring or other code change, working autonomously across code changes and shell commands until it passes all tests - this is agentic behavior that I didn't have even a year ago.

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

#34

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.

> I need an AI agent to continuously ask questions of PMs or stakeholders until the requirements are less vague.

They’ll just get mad at the AI and tell it to stop asking so many questions. As they already do to humans.

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

#35
post #8

I've created agents for the following: - ICP / Sales Agent: I hired an offshore resource and built a GPT that they can send titles and other identifiers to, and it would say if it was in our ICP or not. I created it for a specific process that has outlined steps and FAQ from that person on things they have encountered, I plan on adding more questions and answers. This was super helpful on saving time on answering que…

Those sound like basic LLM workflows with nothing agentic about it.

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

#36

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 ).

Perfect exemple of what op is asking. This is just a demo. What problems does it solve for you or your clients so that you make money ?

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

#38

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 ).

This is what OP is explicitly not asking for—it's just a demo of a theoretical case, Temporal showing how a company that's hyped up on AI agents could use your platform to do agent-y things.

OP wants to know if anyone is actually using this stuff productively, not if anyone has tech demos. We've all seen more than enough tech demos.

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

#39

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.

I’m a pm, today I built a working mockup with windsurf (golang + wails + vuejs +duckd). Windsurf uses codeium, branded as the first agentic IDE.

Your requirements will improve, not sure if in the long I still need developers to build the actual software.

The development process with windsurf is a bit like throwing a dice, hoping for a 6. A lot of trial and error, but if you check the git log, you see about 15 minutes between commit per feature request. Windsurf does a good job to summarize the entire feature request chat into a short git commit message. Every git commit reads like a user story.

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

#40

Here’s a a talk from a month ago that covers a few use cases that are definitely beyond simple glorified workflow automation. https://youtu.be/SpKtpW9TGF0?si=TRE6o7FfzCmhBuZq

This is a demo. OP is asking for examples of usage in production, where the agent is actually doing work.

It's also not really what people are promising with "agentic" because there's a human prompting and assisting it the entire time.

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