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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

#91

Post by Filligree »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #20
a_bonobo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Claude Code does - it constantly stops and asks you whether you want to proceed, including showing you the suggested changes before they're implemented. Helps with avoiding token waste and 'bad' work.

thats good to hear, theyre on their way there! on a personal note, I'm happy to hear that. I've been apprehensive and haven't tried it, purely due to my fear of the cost.

The standard way to use Claude Code is with a constant-cost subscription; one of their standard website accounts. It’s rate-limited but still generous.

You can also use API tokens, yes, but that’s 5-10x more expensive. So I wouldn’t.

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

#92

Post by rco8786 »

I still don’t even know what an agent is. Everyone seems to have their own definition. And invariably it’s generic vagaries about architecture, responsibilities of the LLM, sub-agents, comparisons to workflows, etc.

But still not once have I seen an actual agent in the wild doing concrete work.

A “No True Agent” problem if you will.

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

#93

Post by csande17 »

johnisgood wrote: post #88
kro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools can be an editor/terminal/dev environment, automatically iterating to testing the changes and refining until a finished product, without a human developer, at least that is what some wish of it.

Oh, okay, I understand it now, especially with the other comment that said Cursor is one. OK, makes sense. Seems like it "just" reduces friction (quite a lot).

Yeah, it's really just a user experience improvement. In particular, it makes AI look a lot better if it can internally retry a bunch of times until it comes up with valid code or whatever, instead of you having to see each error and prompt it to fix it. (Also, sometimes they can do fancy sampling tricks to force the AI to produce a syntactically valid result the first time. Mostly this is just used for simple JSON schemas though.)

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

#94

Post by Filligree »

queenkjuul wrote: post #89
KoolKat23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats good to hear, theyre on their way there! on a personal note, I'm happy to hear that. I've been apprehensive and haven't tried it, purely due to my fear of the cost.

My work has a corporate subscription and on the one hand it's very impressive and on the other i don't actually find it useful.

It’s best at small to medium projects written in a consistent style.

So. It’s a potential superpower for personal projects, yet I don’t see it being very useful in a corporate setting.

I used Claude Code to make this little thing: https://github.com/Baughn/ScriptView

…took me thirty minutes. It wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

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

#95

Post by exe34 »

infecto wrote: post #84
wooque wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That’s a bit reductive and misses the core issue. Of course companies want to reduce headcount or boost productivity, but many are pursuing these initiatives without a clear problem in mind. If the mandate were, say, “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,” that would be a different story. Instead, it often feels like solution-first thinking without a clear target. Edit: not even going to reply to…

> “we’re building X to reduce customer support staff by 20%,”

I've never understood the "do X to increase/decrease Y by Z%". I remember working at McDonalds and the managers worked themselves up into a frenzy to increase "sale of McSlurry by 10%". All it meant was that they nagged people more and sold less of something else. It's not like people's stomachs got 10% larger.

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

#96

Post by neom »

"The real challenge isn't AI capabilities, it's designing tools and feedback systems that agents can actually use effectively." - this part I agree with - I'd been sitting the AI stuff out because I was unclear where I thought the dust would settle or what the market would accept, but recently joined a very small startup focused on building an agent.

I've gone from skeptical to willing to humor to "yeah this is probably right" in about 5 months, basically I believe: if you scope the subject matter very very well, and then focus on the tooling that the model will require to do it's task, you get a high completion rate. There is a reluctance to lean into the non deterministic nature of the models, but actually if you provide really excellent tooling and scope super narrowly, it's generally acceptably good.

This blog post really makes the tooling part seem hard, and, well... it is, but not that hard - we'll see where this all goes, but I remain optimistic.

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

#97

Post by iamjackg »

rco8786 wrote: post #92

I still don’t even know what an agent is. Everyone seems to have their own definition. And invariably it’s generic vagaries about architecture, responsibilities of the LLM, sub-agents, comparisons to workflows, etc. But still not once have I seen an actual agent in the wild doing concrete work. A “No True Agent” problem if you will.

Technically speaking, Claude Code is an agent, for example. It's just a fancy term for an LLM that can call tools in a loop until it thinks it's done with whatever it was tasked to do.

ChatGPT's Deep Research mode is also an agent: it will keep crawling the web and refining things until it feels it has enough material to write a good response.

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

#98

Post by la_fayette »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #78

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, c…

In general I would agree, however the resulting systems of such an approach tend to be "just" expensive workflow systems, which could be done with old tech as well... Where is the real need for anything LLM here?

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

#99

Post by exe34 »

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.

Do you have suggestions on how one would go about doing this? Do you just approach a betting company and make some prediction against some wager?

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

#100

Post by bakugo »

_heimdall wrote: post #28
Retr0id wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can cache the whole inference state, no? They don't go into implementation details but Gemini docs say you get a 75% discount if there's a context-cache hit: https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/contex...

It that just avoids having to send the full context for follow-up requests, right? My understanding is that caching helps to keep the context around but can't avoid the need to process that context over and over during inference.

The initial context processing is also cached, which is why there's a significant discount on the input token cost.
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