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Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

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Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#41

Post by bradarner »

isoprophlex wrote: post #29

An 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…

The hype of Agentic AI is to LLMs what an MBA is to business. Overcomplicating something with language that is pretty common sense.

I've implement countless LLM based "agentic" workflows over the past year. They are simple. It is a series of prompts that maintain state with a targeted output.

The common association with "a floating R2D2" is not helpful.

They are not magic.

The core elements I'm seeing so far are: the prompt(s), a capacity for passing in context, a structure for defining how to move through the prompts, integrating the context into prompts, bridging the non-deterministic -> deterministic divide and callbacks or what-to-do-next

The closest analogy that I find helpful is lambda functions.

What makes them "feel" more complicated is the non-deterministic bits. But, in the end, it is text going in and text coming out.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#42

Post by burningion »

The way I look at Agentic systems is that there are Tools an LLM can call out to, and do work with.

Last week Wednesday I participated in Anthropic's Model Context Protocol hackathon, and built a system with my team partner Zia to automatically search and find restaurants for your dietary preferences and group size.

It also automatically downloads social media of the restaurant to get a vibe for the place.

There's a video of it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6vGrfHFyu8

And a Github repo here: https://github.com/zia-r/gotta-eat

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#43

Post by isoprophlex »

SebaSeba wrote: post #36
isoprophlex wrote: post #29

An 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.

Well you work in the field for a while, and you accumulate anecdotes of colleagues dropping tactical sleep(5000)'s so they can shave some milliseconds of latency each week and keep the boss happy.

I love those stories but I could never do that with a straight face. However, the AI field is such an uphill battle against all the crap that LinkedIn influencers are pushing into the minds of the C-suite... I feel it's okay to get a bit creative to get a win-win here ;)

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#44

Post by bugglebeetle »

Windsurf IDE from Codeium. Still some rough edges, but they’ve beat the Claude UI and Cursor for coding. Their code search is also next-level. Crazy efficiency gains for me for small-to-medium sized projects. Apparently, they have a ton of enterprise customers and are doing fast iteration loops relative to user signals (e.g. accepting diffs).

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#46

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #30

If we're going to have a conversation about agents or agentic it is really important we agree on which definition of those terms we are using for the purpose of this conversation. If you ask two different people in the AI space to define "agent" you almost always get two slightly (or significantly) different definitions! Here are just some of the definitions I've seen over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#47

Post by karmakaze »

simonw wrote: post #33
mistrial9 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It's the same that I've converged on: Agents are LLMs with agency, ie. can effect actions (by being connected to tools, APIs, etc). I break out the offerings into two groups: 1. those that are pre-built for specific tasks/areas (or can be no/low-code scripted using pre-built bits), 2. those that can be custom built to connect to you specific API/actions.

Another version of Agents is described in the paper "Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents"[0] where instead of having one LLM prompted context, you create many that specialize in different areas, and have them communicate to distribute a task. The effect is that the outcome is higher quality than trying to use a single automated LLM.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02957

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#48

Post by beernet »

isoprophlex wrote: post #29

An 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…

Am I the only one who finds these types of comments arrogant? I mean, we get it, you know better and have been doing this for a long time and so forth...Sometimes I feel like it's just about relativizing whatever tech is popular right now. Just to come back two years later and say "oh well I've been telling people about this cool tech two years ago!"

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#49

Post by isoprophlex »

simonw wrote: post #35
isoprophlex wrote: post #29

An 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.

Haha yes, the LLM era is "data science is the hottest new job" all over again.

I guess everything with an algorithm in it is AI if you look at it from enough of a distance...

Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?

#50

Post by dongecko »

We have a couple of systems at work that incorporate LLMs. There are a bunch of RAG chatbots for large documentation collections and a bunch of extract-info-from-email bots. I would none of these call an agent. The one thing that comes close to an agent is a very bot that can query a few different SQL and API data sources. Given a users text query, it decides on its own which tool(s) to use. It can also retry, or re-formulate its task. The agentic parts are mainly done in LangGrah.
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