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Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#41

Post by furyofantares »

Agents are possible basically because the input to the LLM and the output of the LLM are both text. The loop is trivially closed.

But they're universally garbage because they require the LLM to do a lot of things that LLMs are completely incompetent at. It's just way too early to expect to be able to remove that work and have it be done by an LLM.

The fact is LLMs are useful because they easily do some work that you're terrible at, and you easily do a lot of work that it's terrible at, and this makes the LLM a good tool because you+LLM is better than either part of that equation alone.

It's natural to think of the things that come effortlessly to you as easy, and to not even notice you're doing any work. But that doesn't change the fact that the LLM is completely incompetent at many of these things. It's way too early to remove the human from the loop.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#43

Post by chenxi9649 »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

Yea that's a good point.

Now I am curious, what are some tasks that can accept a model that is at 80% as good as a human, but is 100x cheaper?(or, 100x faster?)

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#44

Post by chenxi9649 »

Qwero wrote: post #38
PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

I use already a few ai tools even without perfect accuracy. And a LLM who only needs to call to a few API calls isn't hard. Very little need perfect accuracy and for that we still have classical software.

curious to know, which tools do you use and how do you use em?

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#45

Post by skywhopper »

Qwero wrote: post #38
PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

I use already a few ai tools even without perfect accuracy. And a LLM who only needs to call to a few API calls isn't hard. Very little need perfect accuracy and for that we still have classical software.

You use them successfully because your human mind can filter out the junk. It would only take one inaccurate API call that charges your credit card $10k or sells your car for 10 cents to cause a lot of damage to your life.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#46

Post by chenxi9649 »

alexawarrior3 wrote: post #2

None of these I've seen actually works in practice. Having used LLMs for software development the past year or so, even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work. I've got to go back and forth with the LLM to get anything useful and even then have to substantially modify it. I really hope there are some big advancements soon and this doesn't just collapse into another AI winter,…

>even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work

This is certainly true for more complex code generation. But there are a lot of "rote" work that I do use GPT to generate, and I feel like those have really improved my productivity.

The other use case for AI-assisted coding is that it _really_ helps me learn certain stuff. Whether it's a new language, or code that someone else wrote. Often times I know what I want done, but I don't know the corresponding utility functions in that language, and AI will not only be able to generate it for me but also through the process teach me about the existence of those things.(some of which are wrong lol, but it's correct enough for me to keep that behavior)

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#47

Post by deathmonger5000 »

rosspackard wrote: post #34
deathmonger5000 wrote: post #26

I taught https://github.com/KillianLucas/open-interpreter how to use https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr Then I asked it to add a test suite to a rails side project. It created missing factories, corrected a broken test database configuration, and wrote tests for the classes and controllers that I asked it to. I didn't have to get involved with mundane details. I did have to intervene here and there, but not much.…

What do you mean when you use the word taught for open-interpreter? Looking at the OI docs wasn't too helpful. "I did spend a non-trivial amount of time fiddling with the prompts" was it writing prompts? I am really interested and this seems like a cool use case that I want to explore. Could you share the prompts on a github gist?

I think I have the prompts still, but not on my work machine. I'll look tonight and edit this comment with whatever I can find.

I actually forked OI and baked in a prompt that was something like "Promptr is a CLI etc. etc., give Promptr conceptual instructions to make codebase and configuration changes". I think I put this in the system message that OI uses on every request to the OpenAI API.

Once I had OI using Promptr then I worked on a prompt for OI that was something like "create a test suite for the rails in ~/rails-app - use rspec, use this or that dependency, etc.".

Thanks for your interest! I'll try to add more details later.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#48

Post by spenczar5 »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

> The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that for most tasks accuracy has to be very high for it be productizable.

I think that ChatGPT's success might be partly attributable to its chat interface. For whatever reason, a lot of people - including me! - are much more forgiving of inconsistencies, slip-ups, and inaccuracies when in a conversational format. Kind of like how you might forgive a real human for making a mistake in conversation.

I don't think that's necessarily good, and might not have much connection to attempts to build new non-conversational products on top of LLMs, but maybe it has some explanatory power for the current situation.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#50

Post by chenxi9649 »

dongecko wrote: post #27

The company I work for has tons of documentation and regulations for several areas. In some areas the documents are well over a thousand and for the ease of use of these documents we build RAG based chat bots. This is why I have been playing with RAG systems on the scale of "build completely from scratch" to "connect the services in Azure". The retrieval part of a RAG is vital for good/reliable answers and if you bui…

Interesting, it seems that using an LLM as an agent to help with knowledge retrieval is one concrete use case that I've seen people do repeatedly.

It also feels like we are at a bottle neck when it comes to the knowledge retrieval problem. I wonder if the "solution" to all of these is just a smarter foundational model, which will come out of 100x more compute, which will cost approximately 7 trillion dollars.

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