Cursor’s agent in the Composer workflow will check the linter as well as run tests in the “yolo” mode.
What makes it an agent is the feedback loop of making a change and then seeing the results and making further changes.
Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#52How 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.
Not sure why it’s a secret, it’s a pretty big limitation, basically means AI agents are just a good tool for problem domains where mistakes can be tolerated or where no better alternative exists because the problem space is too vast to create solutions that work predictably 100% of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#53Amazing 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 ad…
I share your impression. For something that is hyped that much, it does not seem to have much real world use.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#54I 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 wo…
> And like you said, if the wildest claims hold true, all programmers are our 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 much this. AGI is the equivalent of a nuclear apocalypse in many ways—it's unlikely, not unlikely enough for comfort, but also totally not worth preparing for because there's basically no way to predict what preparations would actually be helpful, nor is it obvious that you'd even want to survive it if it happened.
The expected value of prepping for it isn't worth the investment, so it's better to do what most of us already do for nuclear war and pretty much pretend it won't happen.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#55Most “agents” are just starter prompts + a small set of tools that they can use to respond to things, like access to a database. They’re workflow automation
By that definition, humans doing tasks are workflow automation.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#56I like this distinction from automation by Bartosz Pucek: At its core, an Agent is software that can: Take in a task description Break it down into steps Execute those steps using available tools Adapt its approach based on feedback The key distinction from traditional automation: Agents handle variance and uncertainty by replanning rather than failing when their happy path breaks. Source: https://newsletter.pucek.co…
This seems impossibly broad. Realistically an agent would only be able to take tasks for whatever limited domain it can execute on.
So either every approach it does has to be hard coded or it would be able to use a bunch of very generic modules to plan and execute an approach.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#57Unfortunately I'm one of those who haven't working stuff but hopefully will have one soon enough.
My thought process on agentic work is following- treating them for input-output operations to merge with deterministic processes.
To be more specific- from what I see in my non-tech industry, when you try to implement process management, people are quite good and terrible at implementing agreed processes at the same time. They are great at detecting deviation from process - when exception is needed and terrible to do same thing 1000th time in a row.
So on high level, I think agents should address automation, and detect when there is deviation from the process. In which case a human person should take over.
Tldr - I don't thing agentic workflows without human will be there any time soon. But we will have 2 human + agents replacing 10 human team
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#58What'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.
I fear I'll come off as a shill, but I've seen dozens of company uses of AI in workflows in the real world. Agents are just orchestrating multiple AI steps basically (granted not all of them are using AI to _pick_ the step to take which is often what "agentic" is seen as). Some are listed at https://temporal.io/in-use alongside the many non-AI things, e.g. https://temporal.io/resources/case-studies/bugcrowd, https://temporal.io/resources/on-demand/arc-xp-washington-po..., https://temporal.io/resources/on-demand/practical-tactical-a..., and more and more. All those companies use AI workflows in real world cases, and there are many more. I only showed the tutorial to agree with OP that it is just workflows with fuzzier steps and that's ok.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#59What'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 ?
Replied to another in this thread, but basically https://temporal.io/in-use lists many, AI and not.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?
#60I like this distinction from automation by Bartosz Pucek: At its core, an Agent is software that can: Take in a task description Break it down into steps Execute those steps using available tools Adapt its approach based on feedback The key distinction from traditional automation: Agents handle variance and uncertainty by replanning rather than failing when their happy path breaks. Source: https://newsletter.pucek.co…
so is there a real checkable example of one that's doing work?