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The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

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Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#71

Post by ptero »

pmg101 wrote: post #33
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell management about this, as they're all betting the house on AI agents next year.

Only one of these outcomes will be correct, so worth putting money on it if you think they're wrong a la The Big Short.

While true, the world doesn't end in 2025. While I would also agree that big financial benefits from agents to companies appear unlikely to arrive this year (and the title specifically mentions 2025) I would bet on agents becoming a disruptive technology in the next 5-10 years. My 2c.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#72

Post by john_minsk »

constantcrying wrote: post #51

No, it is not "mathematically impossible". It is empirically implausible. There is no statement in mathematics that says that agents can not have a 99.999% reliability rate. Also, if you look at any human process you will realize that none of them have a 100% reliability rate. Yet, even without that we can manufacture e.g. a plane, something which takes millions of steps, each without a 100% success rate. I actually…

Valid point, however the promise of AI is that it will be able to manufacture a metaphorical “plane” for each and every prompt user inputs I.e. give 100% overall reliability by using all kinds of techniques (testing, decomposing etc) that intelligence can come up with.

So until these techniques are baked into the model by OpenAI, you have to come up with these ideas yourself.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#73

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

infecto wrote: post #37

Link does not work for me but as someone who does a lot of work with LLMs I am also betting against agents. Agents have captivated the minds of groups of people in each large engineering org. I have no idea what their goal is other then they work on “GenAI”. For over a year now they have been working on agents with the promise that the next framework that MSFT or Alphabet publishes will solve their woes. They don’t a…

I think it is a mix of fomo and the 'upside' potential of being able to minimize ( ideally remove ) the expensive "human component". Note, I am merely trying to portray a specific world model.

Preaching to the choir man. We just got custom AI tool ( which manages to have all my industry specific restrictions rendering it kinda pointless, low context making it annoying, and slower than normal, because it now has to go through several layers of approval including 'bias' ).

At the same time, committee bickers over minute change to a process that has effectively no impact on anything of value.

Bonkers.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#74

Post by paradite »

jrexilius wrote: post #50
paradite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously AI generated, if that matters. And I have an AI workflow that generates much better posts than this.

The thing that sucks about it is maybe his english is bad (not his native language) so he relies on LLM output for his posts. Im inclined to cut people slack for this. But the rub is that it is indistinguishable from spam/slop generated for marketing/ads/whatever. Or it's possible that he is one of those people that _realy_ adopted LLMs into _all_ their workflow, I guess, and he thinks the output is good enough as is…

I am not pro or against AI-generated posts. I was just making an observation and testing my AI classifier.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#75

Post by corentin88 »

ptero wrote: post #71
pmg101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only one of these outcomes will be correct, so worth putting money on it if you think they're wrong a la The Big Short.

While true, the world doesn't end in 2025. While I would also agree that big financial benefits from agents to companies appear unlikely to arrive this year (and the title specifically mentions 2025) I would bet on agents becoming a disruptive technology in the next 5-10 years. My 2c.

Why this timeline? What’s missing today that would make it possible in 5-10 years?

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#76

Post by mritchie712 »

> I've built 12+ production AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations

It's hard to make *one* good product (see startup failure rates). You couldn't make 12 (as seemingly a solo dev?) and you're surprised?

we've been working on Definite[0] for 2 years with a small team and it only started getting really good in the past 6 months.

0 - data stack + AI agent: https://www.definite.app/

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#77

Post by fleebee »

jrexilius wrote: post #50
paradite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously AI generated, if that matters. And I have an AI workflow that generates much better posts than this.

The thing that sucks about it is maybe his english is bad (not his native language) so he relies on LLM output for his posts. Im inclined to cut people slack for this. But the rub is that it is indistinguishable from spam/slop generated for marketing/ads/whatever. Or it's possible that he is one of those people that _realy_ adopted LLMs into _all_ their workflow, I guess, and he thinks the output is good enough as is…

The graphs don't line up. I'm inclined to believe they were hallucinated by an LLM and the author either didn't check them or didn't care.

Judging by the other comments this is clearly low-effort AI slop.

> LLMs have certainly damaged trust in general internet reading now, that's for sure.

I hate that this is what we have to deal with now.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#78

Post by RamblingCTO »

I also build agents/ai automation for a living. Coding agents or anything open-ended is just a stupid idea. It's best to have human validated checkpoints, small search spaces and very specific questions/prompts (does this email contain an invoice? YES/NO).

Just because we'd love to have fully intelligent, automatic agents, doesn't mean the tech is here. I don't work on anything that generates content (text, images, code). It's just slob and will bite you in the ass in the long run anyhow.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#79

Post by satyrun »

vntok wrote: post #53
Pasorrijer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're crossing reliability and availability. Reliability means 99.9% of the time when I hand something off to someone else it's what they want. Availability means I'm at my desk and not at the coffee machine. Humans very much are 99.9% accurate, and my deliverable even comes with a list of things I'm not confident about

> Humans very much are 99.9% accurate This is an extraordinary claim, which would require extraordinary evidence to prove. Meanwhile, anyone who spends a few hours with colleagues in a predominantly typing/data entry/data manipulation service (accounting, invoicing, presales, etc.) KNOWS the rate of minor errors is humongous.

Yea exactly.

99.99% is just absurd.

The biggest variable though with all this is that agents don't have to one shot everything like a human because no one is going to pay a human to do the work 5 times over to make sure the results are the same each time. At some point that will be trivial for agents to always be checking the work and looking for errors in the process 24/7.

Re: The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production

#80

Post by globular-toast »

infecto wrote: post #37

Link does not work for me but as someone who does a lot of work with LLMs I am also betting against agents. Agents have captivated the minds of groups of people in each large engineering org. I have no idea what their goal is other then they work on “GenAI”. For over a year now they have been working on agents with the promise that the next framework that MSFT or Alphabet publishes will solve their woes. They don’t a…

I think in general if everyone is talking about a solution and nobody is talking about problems then it's a sign we're in a bubble.

For me the only problem I have is I find typing slow and laborious. I've always said if I could find a way to type less I would take it. That's why I've been using tab completion and refactoring tools etc for years now. So I'm kind of excited about being able to get my thoughts into the computer more quickly.

But having it think for me? That's not a problem I have. Reading and assimilating information? Again, not a problem I have. Too much of this is about trying to apply a solution where there is no problem.

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