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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?

#41

Post by theptip »

kodablah wrote: post #30

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 interesting stuff, and a great stepping stone. I think the excitement around true agents will come when the AI can author the workflow pipeline, so to speak, in response to a request.

This is an area where terminology is in flux but I think of weak agents as mostly-hardcoded, eg if you wrote a flight booking bot that can converse with you about flight options then go do the booking - but you specified the APIs and workflow engine. Strong agents can self-directedly follow long range goals over long time frames, eg “run this business unit for me” or “manage my portfolio”.

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

#43

Post by jondwillis »

ako wrote: post #39
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How… do I find PMs like you? Literally have never worked with a single one that bothered to understand the technology they are building on top of at a deep enough level.

Maybe I just need to teach the ones I work with that it is now possible to trivially prototype many ideas without much or any coding skill.

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

#44

Post by whamlastxmas »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #21
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.

As a PM, ChatGPT is great at helping me write tickets in a structured format from me just giving it a single sloppy sentence. I of course review it to make sure it’s understanding me properly. But having to explicitly write stuff like intended behaviors when submitting bugs can be really laborious, though I understand why engineers sometimes need that level of clarity (having been one myself for 15 years)

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

#45

Post by th0ma5 »

Amazing that at nearing the 50 comment mark and there only seems to be people who have successfully created tutorial examples? And some other things that could be done with more purpose specific traditional solutions. And some people showing love for the concepts. This is probably the bleakest I've seen a Ask HN thread considering this is where all the money is going. I think one stark thing that maybe isn't being addressed is that the value of the models is being completely controlled by the model creators or else there would be at least one story by now of success that doesn't involve merely making the LLM products available to customers as a middle entity.

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

#47

Post by th0ma5 »

jondwillis wrote: post #43
ako wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How… do I find PMs like you? Literally have never worked with a single one that bothered to understand the technology they are building on top of at a deep enough level. Maybe I just need to teach the ones I work with that it is now possible to trivially prototype many ideas without much or any coding skill.

Most PMs resist this because then they know the understanding of the requirements falls upon them at that point and this has been traditionally the role of architects, analysts, developers, other stakeholders etc and if you replace them with an LLM, well, it doesn't have the ability to be a true stakeholder in this way.

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

#49

Post by th0ma5 »

deadbabe wrote: post #42

How can people tolerate the non-deterministic nature of AI agents in critical production workflows?

That's the secret here that everyone knows so well you can't even really say it because it doesn't add anything, but, you can't I wouldn't think.

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

#50

Post by jimkri »

PhilippGille wrote: post #12
Lionga wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just simple glorified workflow automation? Shouldn't "agents" do and decide what to do themselves based on the holy prophecy of VC and AI Startups ?

Yes, for example from Anthropic's definition [1]: > Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths. > Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

This is helpful, thanks for sharing that.
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