6 ms·

What to build instead of AI agents

ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
This is all going to be solved by better models. Building agents is building for a world that doesn't quite exist yet, but probably will in a year or two. Building some big heuristic engine that strings together LLM calls (which is what this blog advocates for) is essentially a bet against progress in ai. I'm not taking that bet, and neither are any of the major players.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  There are perverse incentives against admitting that the AI boom music is probably stopping and grabbing a chair, better to keep stringing along investors with more AGI thought leadership.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    This comment has nothing to do with either the comment it replies to or the original post, neither of which have anything whatsoever to do with "AGI thought leadership".
    - bGl2YW5j 1y ago
      There's an implication in the messaging of most of these blogs that LLMs and the approach the blog describes, is verging on AGI.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        No, there isn't. People talk about AGI, including the CEOs of frontier model companies, but this isn't a post about that; it's very specifically a post about the workaday applications of LLMs as they exist today. (I don't think AGI will ever exist and don't care about it either way.)
- tptacek 1y ago
  Maybe! But it seems like it's points well taken today. The important thing I think to keep in mind is that LLM calls themselves, anything that's happening inside the LLM, is stochastic. Even with drastically better models, I still can't tell myself a story that I can rely on specific outputs from an LLM call. Their outputs today are strong enough for a variety of tasks, when LLMs are part of the fabric of a program's logic --- in agent systems --- you need an expert human involved to notice when things go off the rails.
- snek_case 1y ago
  I've been reviewing papers for NeurIPS and I can tell you that many of the submissions are using various strategies to string together LLM calls for various purposes. It tends to work better when you give the LLMs some specific narrow subtask to do rather than expecting them to be in the driver's seat.
- mccoyb 1y ago
  What do "better models" and "progress in ai" mean to you? Without more information, it's impossible to respond sincerely or precisely.
- m82labs 1y ago
  So for people building real things today are you saying instead of stringing prompts together with logic we should just sit on our hands for a year and wait for the models to catch up to the agent paradigm?
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
    if you are in a competitive market you will lose with this approach
- malfist 1y ago
  People have been saying "solved by better models" for 5 years now. Still waiting on it.
- imhoguy 1y ago
  I think that world will be abandoned by most of the sane people. Who personaly loves AI output? It it next level enshitification engine, see example in the article - spam...cough...salesbot.
transcriptase 1y ago
I love that there are somehow authorities on tech that realistically they could have 1-2 years experience with tops. It’s the reverse of the “seeking coder with 10 years of experience in a 2 year old language” meme.
- noosphr 1y ago
  I've been building what's called ai agents since gpt3 came out. There are plenty of other people who did the same thing. That's five years now. If you can't be an expert after 5 years then there is no such thing as experts. Of course agents is now a buzzword that means nothing so there is that.
  - GPerson 1y ago
    5 years is barely a beginner in lots of fields.
    - hinterlands 1y ago
      More to the point, it's a field where we're constantly told that our experiences from a month ago are in no way relevant and that the latest thing is fundamentally different to what we know. Should expertise degrade just as quickly?
      - lmm 1y ago
        Yes. The worst company I worked for was the one that allowed the guy who was a programming expert from like 30 years ago to make all important decisions.
    - tokioyoyo 1y ago
      Don't take it wrong way, but it's software. It's not that deep for 99% of cases.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    curious what did you build? experience only counts if you are shipping right?
dmezzetti 1y ago
This article is missing an even more important point: you don't always need to start with an LLM, plain old coding still solves a lot of problems.
- riku_iki 1y ago
  but you can't build 5B startup in 10 months with plain old coding..
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Is coding the bottleneck there?
    - thimabi 1y ago
      Without it being attached to the AI hype, it surely is. In the current tech landscape, there’s a tendency to stuff AI into everything, so anything that doesn’t include it ends up being left behind.
  - dmezzetti 1y ago
    There are plenty of AI companies solving interesting problems and possibly worth it. But most problems are more simple than that and that hasn't changed.
  - imhoguy 1y ago
    you can build AI unicorn without AI even: builder.ai /s
    - gsky 1y ago
      Some media outlets pushed that for clicks. According to an employee who worked there that they built some ai models and used AI.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  It's funny how when I talk to ML practitioners who have experience & work in the field they're the most pragmatic voices, like our staff developer on the ML team: "if you can solve the problem algorithmically you should definitely do that!"
rvz 1y ago
Imagine playing the AI agent and scraper cat-and-mouse game all for Cloudflare to block them all by default all to navigate web pages and waste millions worth of tokens just to operate a computer. The move by Cloudflare will totally ruin the AI scraper and the AI agent hype.
- oceanplexian 1y ago
  I don’t see how CloudFlare is going to realistically block someone who is trying hard enough. They’ll just get the agent to operate a browser with vision and it’s over. CAPTCHAs were already obsolete like 2-3 years ago.
  - rsanek 1y ago
    they don't have to make it impossible, just expensive enough for it to not be worth it. using vision is a perfect example.
- iphone_elegance 1y ago
  Eh, if you control the browser or provide a good plugin you can just have users scrape for you
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  The funny thing is that a lot of people want the AI to scrape their public website. The same people that likely wrote all of their marketing content with ChatGPT.
mccoyb 1y ago
Building agents has been fun for me, but it's clear that there are serious problems with "context engineering" that must be overcome with new ideas. In particular, no matter how big the context window size is increased - one must curate what the agent sees: agents don't have very effective filters on what is relevant to supercharge them on tasks, and so (a) you must leave *.md files strewn about to help guide them and (b) you must put them into roles. The *.md system is essentially a rudimentary memory system, but it could get be made significantly more robust, and could involve e.g. constructing programs and models (in natural language) on the fly, guided by interactions with the user. What Claude Code has taught me is that steering an agent via a test suite is an extremely powerful reinforcement mechanism (the feedback loop leads to success, most of the time) -- and I'm hopeful that new thinking will extend this into the other "soft skills" that an agent needs to become an increasingly effective collaborator.
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  I’ve found managing the context is most of the challenge: - creating the right context for parallel and recursive tasks; - removing some steps (eg, editing its previous response) to show only the corrected output; - showing it its own output as my comment, when I want a response; Etc.
  - mccoyb 1y ago
    I've also found that relying on agents to build their own context _poisons_ it ... that it's necessary to curate it constantly. There's kind of a <1 multiplicative thing going on, where I can ask the agent to e.g. update CLAUDE.mds or TODO.mds in a somewhat precise way, and the agent will multiply my request in a lot of changes which (on the surface) appear well and good ... but if I repeat this process a number of times _without manual curation of the text_, I end up with "lower quality" than I started with (assuming I wrote the initial CLAUDE.md). Obvious: while the agent can multiply the amount of work I can do, there's a multiplicative reduction in quality, which means I need to account for that (I have to add "time doing curation")
    - prmph 1y ago
mindwok 1y ago
I'm not yet convinced (though I remain open to the idea) that AI agents are going to be a widely adopted pattern in the way people on LinkedIn suggest. The way I use AI today is by keeping a pretty tight leash on it, a la Claude Code and Cursor. Not because the models aren't good enough, but because I like to weigh in frequently to provide taste and direction. Giving the AI more agency isn't necessarily desirable, because I want to provide that taste. Maybe that'll change as I do more and new ergonomics reveal themselves, but right now I don't really want AI that's too agentic. Otherwise, I kind of lose connection to it.
- thimabi 1y ago
  Do you think that, over time, knowing how the models behave, simply providing more/better context and instructions can fill this gap of wanting to provide taste and direction to the models’ outputs and actions? My experience is that, for many workflows, well-done “prompt engineering” is more than enough to make AI models behave more like we’d like without constantly needing us to weight in.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    taste cannot be reduced to a bunch of instructions.
  - mindwok 1y ago
    I suppose it's possible, although the models would have to have a really nuanced understanding about my tastes and even then it seems doubtful. If we use a real world analogy, think of someone like an architect designing your house. I'm still going to be heavily involved in the design of my house, regardless of how skilled and tasteful the architect is. It's fundamentally an expression of myself - delegating that basically destroys the point of the exercise. I feel the same for a lot of the stuff I'm building with AI now.
    - thimabi 1y ago
      Can you share some examples of things you’ve been building with AI? From your comments, I’d venture a guess that you see your AI-assisted work as a creative endeavor — an expression of your creativity. I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up for AI to make innovative jokes, poems and the like. Yet for things that can converge on specific guidelines for matters of taste and preferences, like coding, I’ve been increasingly impressed by how well AI models adapt to our human wishes, even when expressed in ever longer prompts.
deadbabe 1y ago
A key thing we may be forced to admit someday is that AI agents are really just expensive temporary glue that we use to build services quickly until we have cheaper hard coded functions developed once the AI agent gives us sufficient experience with the scope of the problem domain.
- Onewildgamer 1y ago
  An interesting take, only if the stakes are low when the decisions are wrong. I'm not confident to have an LLM taking decisions for a customer or me. I'd rather have it suggest things to customers, sugesstive actions and some useful insights that user may have overlooked.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Can you imagine a bank taking this approach? Sorry, we didn't have enough time to build a true ledger, and now the AI says you have no money.
    - collingreen 1y ago
      This is happening across lots of industries right now. Some are ok like the car company that had to sell the car at the insanely low price their agent promised but some are terrible like the United healthcare "90% wrong when denying coverage" one or the "who should be fired" prompt from doge.
joeblubaugh 1y ago
Why do so many examples break down to “send better spam faster”?
- malfist 1y ago
  lol, that was literally their example wasn't it? Troll linkedin looking for people and spam them with "personalized" emails.
  - Animats 1y ago
    That's what's so funny about this. Spamming is not only obnoxious, but a very weak example. Spamming is so error tolerant that if 30% of the output is totally wrong, the sender won't notice. Response rates are usually very low. This is a singularly un-demanding problem. You don't even need "AI" for this. Just score LinkedIn profiles based on keywords, and if the score is high enough, send a spam. Draft a few form letters, and send the one most appropriate for the keywords. Probably would have about the same reply rate.
- rglover 1y ago
  What is a wheel without its grease?
itomato 1y ago
MCP Server for Disco/Prom or Celonis?
jlaneve 1y ago
We’re seeing this all the time - taking traditional workflow orchestration tools and instrumenting LLMs as part of it. It becomes a lot easier to build these because the complexity comes from a) the model, which frontier labs are making easy and b) productionizing a workflow, which workflow orchestration tools make easy. It’s also easy to recognize value because these workflows are often grounded in existing work and thus easy to measure. We see these patterns do much so that we packaged it up for Airflow (one of the most popular workflow tools)! https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk
JSR_FDED 1y ago
After spending the last 3 weeks to get agents to work reliably I went for a much simpler pattern. Agents feel like they’re in the six fingers on a hand stage.
abelanger 1y ago
Agents depend heavily on the quality of their individual components, so it's pretty obvious that demo agents are going to be incredibly unstable. You need a success rate for each individual component to be near 100% or build in a mechanism for corrective action (one of the things that Claude Code does particularly well).
rm999 1y ago
A really short version of it is that you don't need an agent if you have a well-defined solution that can be implemented in advance (e.g. the 'patterns' in this article). Programmers often work on problems that have programmatic solutions and then the advice is totally correct: reach for simpler more reliable solutions. In the future AIs will probably be smart enough to just brute force any problem, but for now this is adding unneeded complexity. I suspect a reason so many people are excited about agents is they are used to "chat assistants" as the primary purpose of LLMs, which is also the ideal use case for agents. The solution space in chat assistants is not defined in advance, and more complex interactions do get value from agents. For example, "find my next free Friday night and send a text to Bob asking if he's free to hang out" could theoretically be programmatically solved, but then you'd need to solve for every possible interaction with the assistant; there are a nearly unlimited number of ways of interfacing with an assistant, so agents are a great solution.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  Works great when you can verify the response quicker than it would take to just do yourself. Personally I have a hard ass time trusting it without verifying.
bravesoul2 1y ago
Oh I wad hoping this would go back another step in the 5 whys and why use an LLM conversationally at all. By the time you got a nice well established context with the right info... just give it to the user. I like the idea of hallucination-free systems where the LLM merely classifies things at most. Question -> classifier -> check with user action to take -> act using no AI
btown 1y ago
When I see things like "The coordinator threw up its hands when tasks weren't clearly defined" but the conclusion is to not use a coordinator at all in favor of imperative logic... it's really hard to know how much of this could be solved by using much more specific prompts/tool descriptions, and using interim summarization/truncation LLM passes to ensure that the amount of context from prior tool outputs doesn't overwhelm the part of context that describes the tools themselves and their recommended use cases. And when the article doesn't even provide a single example of a long-form tool description or prompt that would actually be used in practice... I think there's some truth to using the right orchestration for the job, but I think that there's a lot more jobs that could benefit from agentic orchestration than the article would have you believe.
ramoz 1y ago
Sorry, but you had a misleading experience with trash software (crew). Research Agent of all cases - the productionized high-value agent shipped to the masses by all providers. Hard disagree with most of the narrative. Dont start with models, start with Claude Code. For any use case. Go from there depending on costs. > When NOT to use agents > Enterprise Automation Archive this blog. The real lesson is don't let any company other than the providers dictate what an agent is vs isnt. Computer use agents are here, they are coming for the desktop of non-technical users, they will provide legitimate RPA capability and beyond, anyone productizing agents will build on top of provider sdks.
ilaksh 1y ago
I think this was true late 2023 or early 2024, but not necessarily in mid 2025 for most tasks (as long as they require some AI and aren't purely automation) and you use SOTA LLMs. I used to build the way most of his examples are just functions calling LLMs. I found it almost necessary due to poor tool selection etc. But I think the leading edge LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 are smart enough and good enough at instruction following and tool selection that it's not necessarily better to create workflows. I do have a checklist tool and delegate command and may break tasks down into separate agents though. But the advantage of creating instructions and assigning tool commands, especially if you have an environment with a UI where it is easy to assign tool commands to agents and otherwise define them, is that it is more flexible and a level of abstraction above something like a workflow. Even for visual workflows it's still programming which is more brittle and more difficult to dial in. This was not the case 6-12 months ago and doesn't apply if you insist on using inferior language models (which most of them are). It's really only a handful that are really good at instruction following and tool use. But I think it's worth it to use those and go with agents for most use cases. The next thing that will happen over the following year or two is going to be a massive trend of browser and computer use agents being deployed. That is again another level of abstraction. They might even incorporate really good memory systems and surely will have demonstration or observation modes that can extract procedures from humans using UIs. They will also learn (record) procedural details for optimization during exploration from verbal or written instructions.
- bonzini 1y ago
  The techniques he has in the post are mostly "model your problem as a data flow graph and follow it". If you skip the modeling part and rely on something that you don't control being good enough, that's faith not engineering.
  - ilaksh 1y ago
    I didn't say to skip any kind of problem modeling. I just didn't emphasize it. The goal _should_ be to avoid doing traditional software engineering or create a system that requires typical engineering to maintain. Agents with leading edge LLMs allow smart users to have flexible systems that they can evolve by modifying instructions and tools. This requires less technical skill than visual programming. If you are only taking advantage of the LLM to handle a few wrinkles or a little bit of natural language mapping then you aren't really taking advantage of what they can do. Of course you can build systems with rigid workflows and sprinkling of LLM integration, but for most use cases it's probably not the right default mindset for mid-2025. Like I said, I was originally following that approach a little ways back. But things change. Your viewpoint is about a year out of date.
aryehof 1y ago
I have long felt that deterministic business processes are not suited to LLM orchestration. Isn’t the author in this article expressing this discovery?
appleaday1 1y ago
Peddling course ROFL
lmeyerov 1y ago
I like the decision diagram :) The callout on enterprise automation is interesting b/c it's one of the $T sized opportunities that matters most here, and while I think the article is right in the small, I now think quite differently in the large for what ultimately matters here. Basically, we're crossing the point where one agent written in natural language can easily be worth ~100 python scripts and be much shorter at the same time. For context, I work with teams in operational enterprise/gov/tech co teams like tier 1+2 security incident response, where most 'alerts' don't get seriously investigated as underresourced & underautomated teams have to just define them away. Basically every since gpt4, it's been pretty insane figuring this stuff out with our partners here. As soon as you get good at prompt templates / plans with Claude Code and the like to make them spin for 10min+ productively, this gets very obvious. Before agents: Python workflows and their equivalent. They do not handle variety & evolution because they're hard-coded. Likewise, they only go so far on a task because they're brain dead. Teams can only crank out + maintain so many. After agents: You can easily sketch out 1 investigation template in natural language that literally goes 10X wider + 10X deeper than the equiv of Python code, including Python AI workflows. You are now handling much more of the problem.
evertedsphere 1y ago
Another day, another blog post chock full of LLM tells on the front page.
leCaptain 1y ago
there is no mention of which model was used to build the agent. for all we know the author could have used qwen3 0.6 q4. it would be helpful to know which models where used in each scenario, otherwise this can largely be ignored
intellectronica 1y ago
100% agree - agents are exciting and fun to play with, but to get real work done and get real productivity improvements, orchestrating specific workflows and processes and using AI to do things only AI can do, is the right approach. See also https://ai.intellectronica.net/the-case-for-ai-workflows https://ai.intellectronica.net/the-case-for-ai-workflows
pancsta 1y ago
I can barely agree with anything in this article. > most agent systems break down from too much complexity, not too little ...when the platform wasn't made to handle complexity. The main problem is that the "frameworks" are not good enough for agentic workloads, which naturally will scale into complex stateful chaos. This requires another approach, but all that is done is delegating this to LLMs. As the author says "A coordinator agent that managed task delegation", which is the wrong way, an easy exit, like "maybe it will vibe-state itself?". Agentic systems existed before LLMs (check ABM), and nowadays most ppl confuse what LLMs give us (all-knowing subconscious DBs) with agency, which is a purpose of completing a process. Eg a bus driver is an agent, but you dont ask a bus driver to play the piano. It has predefined behavior, within a certain process. Another common mistake is considering a prompt (with or without history) an agent. It's just a DB model which you query. A deep research agent has 3 prompts: Check if an answer is possible, scrape, and answer. These are NOT 3 agents - these are DB queries. Delegating logical decisions to LLMs without verification is like having a drunk bus driver. A new layer is needed, which is where all the python frameworks offer it on top of their prompts. That's a mistake, because it splits the control flow, and managing complex state with FSMs or imperative code will soon hit a wall. Declarative programming to the rescue - this is the only (and also natural) way of handling live and complex systems. It has to be done from the bottom up and it will change the paradigm of the whole agent. I've worked on this exact approach for a while now, and besides handling complexity, the 2nd challenge is navigating through it easily, to find answers to your questions (what and when, exactly, went wrong). I let LLMs "build" the dynamic parts of the agent (like planning), but keeping them in IoC - only the agent layer makes decisions. Another important thing - small prompts, with a single task; 100 focused prompts is better then 1 pasta-prompt. Again, without a proper control flow, synchronizing 100 co-dependent prompts can be tricky (when approached imperatively, with eg a simple loop). Theres more to it, and I recommend checking out my agents (research and cook), either as a download, source code, or a video walk-through [0]. PS. Embrace chaos, and the chaos will embrace you. TLDR; toy-frameworks in python, ppl avoiding coding, drunk LLMs [0] https://github.com/pancsta/secai https://github.com/pancsta/secai
pierrebrunelle 1y ago
I fully agree and this is why context engineering matters and unifying storage and orchestration and treating agents as just another function call is significant and getting full visibility into the pipeline to easily iterate and with with the I/O. This is a good sample implementation of that: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixelbot https://github.com/pixeltable/pixelbot
Shypangz 1y ago
If building AI agents feels tricky, try focusing on tools that help manage tasks or data better. For example, using LeadsApp can simplify capturing and organizing leads without complex AI setups. It made handling prospects a lot easier for me.

This is all going to be solved by better models. Building agents is building for a world that doesn't quite exist yet, but probably will in a year or two. Building some big heuristic engine that strings together LLM calls (which is what this blog advocates for) is essentially a bet against progress in ai. I'm not taking that bet, and neither are any of the major players.

candiddevmike 1y ago
There are perverse incentives against admitting that the AI boom music is probably stopping and grabbing a chair, better to keep stringing along investors with more AGI thought leadership.
- tptacek 1y ago
  This comment has nothing to do with either the comment it replies to or the original post, neither of which have anything whatsoever to do with "AGI thought leadership".
  - bGl2YW5j 1y ago
    There's an implication in the messaging of most of these blogs that LLMs and the approach the blog describes, is verging on AGI.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      No, there isn't. People talk about AGI, including the CEOs of frontier model companies, but this isn't a post about that; it's very specifically a post about the workaday applications of LLMs as they exist today. (I don't think AGI will ever exist and don't care about it either way.)
tptacek 1y ago
Maybe! But it seems like it's points well taken today. The important thing I think to keep in mind is that LLM calls themselves, anything that's happening inside the LLM, is stochastic. Even with drastically better models, I still can't tell myself a story that I can rely on specific outputs from an LLM call. Their outputs today are strong enough for a variety of tasks, when LLMs are part of the fabric of a program's logic --- in agent systems --- you need an expert human involved to notice when things go off the rails.
snek_case 1y ago
I've been reviewing papers for NeurIPS and I can tell you that many of the submissions are using various strategies to string together LLM calls for various purposes. It tends to work better when you give the LLMs some specific narrow subtask to do rather than expecting them to be in the driver's seat.
mccoyb 1y ago
What do "better models" and "progress in ai" mean to you? Without more information, it's impossible to respond sincerely or precisely.
m82labs 1y ago
So for people building real things today are you saying instead of stringing prompts together with logic we should just sit on our hands for a year and wait for the models to catch up to the agent paradigm?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y ago
  if you are in a competitive market you will lose with this approach
malfist 1y ago
People have been saying "solved by better models" for 5 years now. Still waiting on it.
imhoguy 1y ago
I think that world will be abandoned by most of the sane people. Who personaly loves AI output? It it next level enshitification engine, see example in the article - spam...cough...salesbot.

transcriptase 1y ago

I love that there are somehow authorities on tech that realistically they could have 1-2 years experience with tops. It’s the reverse of the “seeking coder with 10 years of experience in a 2 year old language” meme.

noosphr 1y ago
I've been building what's called ai agents since gpt3 came out. There are plenty of other people who did the same thing. That's five years now. If you can't be an expert after 5 years then there is no such thing as experts. Of course agents is now a buzzword that means nothing so there is that.
- GPerson 1y ago
  5 years is barely a beginner in lots of fields.
  - hinterlands 1y ago
    More to the point, it's a field where we're constantly told that our experiences from a month ago are in no way relevant and that the latest thing is fundamentally different to what we know. Should expertise degrade just as quickly?
    - lmm 1y ago
      Yes. The worst company I worked for was the one that allowed the guy who was a programming expert from like 30 years ago to make all important decisions.
  - tokioyoyo 1y ago
    Don't take it wrong way, but it's software. It's not that deep for 99% of cases.
- apwell23 1y ago
  curious what did you build? experience only counts if you are shipping right?

dmezzetti 1y ago

This article is missing an even more important point: you don't always need to start with an LLM, plain old coding still solves a lot of problems.

riku_iki 1y ago
but you can't build 5B startup in 10 months with plain old coding..
- nine_k 1y ago
  Is coding the bottleneck there?
  - thimabi 1y ago
    Without it being attached to the AI hype, it surely is. In the current tech landscape, there’s a tendency to stuff AI into everything, so anything that doesn’t include it ends up being left behind.
- dmezzetti 1y ago
  There are plenty of AI companies solving interesting problems and possibly worth it. But most problems are more simple than that and that hasn't changed.
- imhoguy 1y ago
  you can build AI unicorn without AI even: builder.ai /s
  - gsky 1y ago
    Some media outlets pushed that for clicks. According to an employee who worked there that they built some ai models and used AI.
skeeter2020 1y ago
It's funny how when I talk to ML practitioners who have experience & work in the field they're the most pragmatic voices, like our staff developer on the ML team: "if you can solve the problem algorithmically you should definitely do that!"

rvz 1y ago

Imagine playing the AI agent and scraper cat-and-mouse game all for Cloudflare to block them all by default all to navigate web pages and waste millions worth of tokens just to operate a computer. The move by Cloudflare will totally ruin the AI scraper and the AI agent hype.

oceanplexian 1y ago
I don’t see how CloudFlare is going to realistically block someone who is trying hard enough. They’ll just get the agent to operate a browser with vision and it’s over. CAPTCHAs were already obsolete like 2-3 years ago.
- rsanek 1y ago
  they don't have to make it impossible, just expensive enough for it to not be worth it. using vision is a perfect example.
iphone_elegance 1y ago
Eh, if you control the browser or provide a good plugin you can just have users scrape for you
OccamsMirror 1y ago
The funny thing is that a lot of people want the AI to scrape their public website. The same people that likely wrote all of their marketing content with ChatGPT.

mccoyb 1y ago

Building agents has been fun for me, but it's clear that there are serious problems with "context engineering" that must be overcome with new ideas. In particular, no matter how big the context window size is increased - one must curate what the agent sees: agents don't have very effective filters on what is relevant to supercharge them on tasks, and so (a) you must leave *.md files strewn about to help guide them and (b) you must put them into roles. The *.md system is essentially a rudimentary memory system, but it could get be made significantly more robust, and could involve e.g. constructing programs and models (in natural language) on the fly, guided by interactions with the user. What Claude Code has taught me is that steering an agent via a test suite is an extremely powerful reinforcement mechanism (the feedback loop leads to success, most of the time) -- and I'm hopeful that new thinking will extend this into the other "soft skills" that an agent needs to become an increasingly effective collaborator.

zmgsabst 1y ago
I’ve found managing the context is most of the challenge: - creating the right context for parallel and recursive tasks; - removing some steps (eg, editing its previous response) to show only the corrected output; - showing it its own output as my comment, when I want a response; Etc.
- mccoyb 1y ago
  I've also found that relying on agents to build their own context _poisons_ it ... that it's necessary to curate it constantly. There's kind of a <1 multiplicative thing going on, where I can ask the agent to e.g. update CLAUDE.mds or TODO.mds in a somewhat precise way, and the agent will multiply my request in a lot of changes which (on the surface) appear well and good ... but if I repeat this process a number of times _without manual curation of the text_, I end up with "lower quality" than I started with (assuming I wrote the initial CLAUDE.md). Obvious: while the agent can multiply the amount of work I can do, there's a multiplicative reduction in quality, which means I need to account for that (I have to add "time doing curation")
  - prmph 1y ago

mindwok 1y ago

I'm not yet convinced (though I remain open to the idea) that AI agents are going to be a widely adopted pattern in the way people on LinkedIn suggest. The way I use AI today is by keeping a pretty tight leash on it, a la Claude Code and Cursor. Not because the models aren't good enough, but because I like to weigh in frequently to provide taste and direction. Giving the AI more agency isn't necessarily desirable, because I want to provide that taste. Maybe that'll change as I do more and new ergonomics reveal themselves, but right now I don't really want AI that's too agentic. Otherwise, I kind of lose connection to it.

thimabi 1y ago
Do you think that, over time, knowing how the models behave, simply providing more/better context and instructions can fill this gap of wanting to provide taste and direction to the models’ outputs and actions? My experience is that, for many workflows, well-done “prompt engineering” is more than enough to make AI models behave more like we’d like without constantly needing us to weight in.
- apwell23 1y ago
  taste cannot be reduced to a bunch of instructions.
- mindwok 1y ago
  I suppose it's possible, although the models would have to have a really nuanced understanding about my tastes and even then it seems doubtful. If we use a real world analogy, think of someone like an architect designing your house. I'm still going to be heavily involved in the design of my house, regardless of how skilled and tasteful the architect is. It's fundamentally an expression of myself - delegating that basically destroys the point of the exercise. I feel the same for a lot of the stuff I'm building with AI now.
  - thimabi 1y ago
    Can you share some examples of things you’ve been building with AI? From your comments, I’d venture a guess that you see your AI-assisted work as a creative endeavor — an expression of your creativity. I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up for AI to make innovative jokes, poems and the like. Yet for things that can converge on specific guidelines for matters of taste and preferences, like coding, I’ve been increasingly impressed by how well AI models adapt to our human wishes, even when expressed in ever longer prompts.

deadbabe 1y ago

A key thing we may be forced to admit someday is that AI agents are really just expensive temporary glue that we use to build services quickly until we have cheaper hard coded functions developed once the AI agent gives us sufficient experience with the scope of the problem domain.

Onewildgamer 1y ago
An interesting take, only if the stakes are low when the decisions are wrong. I'm not confident to have an LLM taking decisions for a customer or me. I'd rather have it suggest things to customers, sugesstive actions and some useful insights that user may have overlooked.
- malfist 1y ago
  Can you imagine a bank taking this approach? Sorry, we didn't have enough time to build a true ledger, and now the AI says you have no money.
  - collingreen 1y ago
    This is happening across lots of industries right now. Some are ok like the car company that had to sell the car at the insanely low price their agent promised but some are terrible like the United healthcare "90% wrong when denying coverage" one or the "who should be fired" prompt from doge.

joeblubaugh 1y ago

Why do so many examples break down to “send better spam faster”?

malfist 1y ago
lol, that was literally their example wasn't it? Troll linkedin looking for people and spam them with "personalized" emails.
- Animats 1y ago
  That's what's so funny about this. Spamming is not only obnoxious, but a very weak example. Spamming is so error tolerant that if 30% of the output is totally wrong, the sender won't notice. Response rates are usually very low. This is a singularly un-demanding problem. You don't even need "AI" for this. Just score LinkedIn profiles based on keywords, and if the score is high enough, send a spam. Draft a few form letters, and send the one most appropriate for the keywords. Probably would have about the same reply rate.
rglover 1y ago
What is a wheel without its grease?

itomato 1y ago

MCP Server for Disco/Prom or Celonis?

jlaneve 1y ago

We’re seeing this all the time - taking traditional workflow orchestration tools and instrumenting LLMs as part of it. It becomes a lot easier to build these because the complexity comes from a) the model, which frontier labs are making easy and b) productionizing a workflow, which workflow orchestration tools make easy. It’s also easy to recognize value because these workflows are often grounded in existing work and thus easy to measure. We see these patterns do much so that we packaged it up for Airflow (one of the most popular workflow tools)! https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk https://github.com/astronomer/airflow-ai-sdk

JSR_FDED 1y ago

After spending the last 3 weeks to get agents to work reliably I went for a much simpler pattern. Agents feel like they’re in the six fingers on a hand stage.

abelanger 1y ago

Agents depend heavily on the quality of their individual components, so it's pretty obvious that demo agents are going to be incredibly unstable. You need a success rate for each individual component to be near 100% or build in a mechanism for corrective action (one of the things that Claude Code does particularly well).

rm999 1y ago

A really short version of it is that you don't need an agent if you have a well-defined solution that can be implemented in advance (e.g. the 'patterns' in this article). Programmers often work on problems that have programmatic solutions and then the advice is totally correct: reach for simpler more reliable solutions. In the future AIs will probably be smart enough to just brute force any problem, but for now this is adding unneeded complexity. I suspect a reason so many people are excited about agents is they are used to "chat assistants" as the primary purpose of LLMs, which is also the ideal use case for agents. The solution space in chat assistants is not defined in advance, and more complex interactions do get value from agents. For example, "find my next free Friday night and send a text to Bob asking if he's free to hang out" could theoretically be programmatically solved, but then you'd need to solve for every possible interaction with the assistant; there are a nearly unlimited number of ways of interfacing with an assistant, so agents are a great solution.

franktankbank 1y ago
Works great when you can verify the response quicker than it would take to just do yourself. Personally I have a hard ass time trusting it without verifying.

bravesoul2 1y ago

Oh I wad hoping this would go back another step in the 5 whys and why use an LLM conversationally at all. By the time you got a nice well established context with the right info... just give it to the user. I like the idea of hallucination-free systems where the LLM merely classifies things at most. Question -> classifier -> check with user action to take -> act using no AI

btown 1y ago

When I see things like "The coordinator threw up its hands when tasks weren't clearly defined" but the conclusion is to not use a coordinator at all in favor of imperative logic... it's really hard to know how much of this could be solved by using much more specific prompts/tool descriptions, and using interim summarization/truncation LLM passes to ensure that the amount of context from prior tool outputs doesn't overwhelm the part of context that describes the tools themselves and their recommended use cases. And when the article doesn't even provide a single example of a long-form tool description or prompt that would actually be used in practice... I think there's some truth to using the right orchestration for the job, but I think that there's a lot more jobs that could benefit from agentic orchestration than the article would have you believe.

ramoz 1y ago

Sorry, but you had a misleading experience with trash software (crew). Research Agent of all cases - the productionized high-value agent shipped to the masses by all providers. Hard disagree with most of the narrative. Dont start with models, start with Claude Code. For any use case. Go from there depending on costs. > When NOT to use agents > Enterprise Automation Archive this blog. The real lesson is don't let any company other than the providers dictate what an agent is vs isnt. Computer use agents are here, they are coming for the desktop of non-technical users, they will provide legitimate RPA capability and beyond, anyone productizing agents will build on top of provider sdks.

ilaksh 1y ago

I think this was true late 2023 or early 2024, but not necessarily in mid 2025 for most tasks (as long as they require some AI and aren't purely automation) and you use SOTA LLMs. I used to build the way most of his examples are just functions calling LLMs. I found it almost necessary due to poor tool selection etc. But I think the leading edge LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 are smart enough and good enough at instruction following and tool selection that it's not necessarily better to create workflows. I do have a checklist tool and delegate command and may break tasks down into separate agents though. But the advantage of creating instructions and assigning tool commands, especially if you have an environment with a UI where it is easy to assign tool commands to agents and otherwise define them, is that it is more flexible and a level of abstraction above something like a workflow. Even for visual workflows it's still programming which is more brittle and more difficult to dial in. This was not the case 6-12 months ago and doesn't apply if you insist on using inferior language models (which most of them are). It's really only a handful that are really good at instruction following and tool use. But I think it's worth it to use those and go with agents for most use cases. The next thing that will happen over the following year or two is going to be a massive trend of browser and computer use agents being deployed. That is again another level of abstraction. They might even incorporate really good memory systems and surely will have demonstration or observation modes that can extract procedures from humans using UIs. They will also learn (record) procedural details for optimization during exploration from verbal or written instructions.

bonzini 1y ago
The techniques he has in the post are mostly "model your problem as a data flow graph and follow it". If you skip the modeling part and rely on something that you don't control being good enough, that's faith not engineering.
- ilaksh 1y ago
  I didn't say to skip any kind of problem modeling. I just didn't emphasize it. The goal _should_ be to avoid doing traditional software engineering or create a system that requires typical engineering to maintain. Agents with leading edge LLMs allow smart users to have flexible systems that they can evolve by modifying instructions and tools. This requires less technical skill than visual programming. If you are only taking advantage of the LLM to handle a few wrinkles or a little bit of natural language mapping then you aren't really taking advantage of what they can do. Of course you can build systems with rigid workflows and sprinkling of LLM integration, but for most use cases it's probably not the right default mindset for mid-2025. Like I said, I was originally following that approach a little ways back. But things change. Your viewpoint is about a year out of date.

aryehof 1y ago

I have long felt that deterministic business processes are not suited to LLM orchestration. Isn’t the author in this article expressing this discovery?

appleaday1 1y ago

Peddling course ROFL

lmeyerov 1y ago

I like the decision diagram :) The callout on enterprise automation is interesting b/c it's one of the $T sized opportunities that matters most here, and while I think the article is right in the small, I now think quite differently in the large for what ultimately matters here. Basically, we're crossing the point where one agent written in natural language can easily be worth ~100 python scripts and be much shorter at the same time. For context, I work with teams in operational enterprise/gov/tech co teams like tier 1+2 security incident response, where most 'alerts' don't get seriously investigated as underresourced & underautomated teams have to just define them away. Basically every since gpt4, it's been pretty insane figuring this stuff out with our partners here. As soon as you get good at prompt templates / plans with Claude Code and the like to make them spin for 10min+ productively, this gets very obvious. Before agents: Python workflows and their equivalent. They do not handle variety & evolution because they're hard-coded. Likewise, they only go so far on a task because they're brain dead. Teams can only crank out + maintain so many. After agents: You can easily sketch out 1 investigation template in natural language that literally goes 10X wider + 10X deeper than the equiv of Python code, including Python AI workflows. You are now handling much more of the problem.

evertedsphere 1y ago

Another day, another blog post chock full of LLM tells on the front page.

leCaptain 1y ago

there is no mention of which model was used to build the agent. for all we know the author could have used qwen3 0.6 q4. it would be helpful to know which models where used in each scenario, otherwise this can largely be ignored

intellectronica 1y ago

100% agree - agents are exciting and fun to play with, but to get real work done and get real productivity improvements, orchestrating specific workflows and processes and using AI to do things only AI can do, is the right approach. See also https://ai.intellectronica.net/the-case-for-ai-workflows https://ai.intellectronica.net/the-case-for-ai-workflows

pancsta 1y ago

I can barely agree with anything in this article. > most agent systems break down from too much complexity, not too little ...when the platform wasn't made to handle complexity. The main problem is that the "frameworks" are not good enough for agentic workloads, which naturally will scale into complex stateful chaos. This requires another approach, but all that is done is delegating this to LLMs. As the author says "A coordinator agent that managed task delegation", which is the wrong way, an easy exit, like "maybe it will vibe-state itself?". Agentic systems existed before LLMs (check ABM), and nowadays most ppl confuse what LLMs give us (all-knowing subconscious DBs) with agency, which is a purpose of completing a process. Eg a bus driver is an agent, but you dont ask a bus driver to play the piano. It has predefined behavior, within a certain process. Another common mistake is considering a prompt (with or without history) an agent. It's just a DB model which you query. A deep research agent has 3 prompts: Check if an answer is possible, scrape, and answer. These are NOT 3 agents - these are DB queries. Delegating logical decisions to LLMs without verification is like having a drunk bus driver. A new layer is needed, which is where all the python frameworks offer it on top of their prompts. That's a mistake, because it splits the control flow, and managing complex state with FSMs or imperative code will soon hit a wall. Declarative programming to the rescue - this is the only (and also natural) way of handling live and complex systems. It has to be done from the bottom up and it will change the paradigm of the whole agent. I've worked on this exact approach for a while now, and besides handling complexity, the 2nd challenge is navigating through it easily, to find answers to your questions (what and when, exactly, went wrong). I let LLMs "build" the dynamic parts of the agent (like planning), but keeping them in IoC - only the agent layer makes decisions. Another important thing - small prompts, with a single task; 100 focused prompts is better then 1 pasta-prompt. Again, without a proper control flow, synchronizing 100 co-dependent prompts can be tricky (when approached imperatively, with eg a simple loop). Theres more to it, and I recommend checking out my agents (research and cook), either as a download, source code, or a video walk-through [0]. PS. Embrace chaos, and the chaos will embrace you. TLDR; toy-frameworks in python, ppl avoiding coding, drunk LLMs [0] https://github.com/pancsta/secai https://github.com/pancsta/secai

pierrebrunelle 1y ago

I fully agree and this is why context engineering matters and unifying storage and orchestration and treating agents as just another function call is significant and getting full visibility into the pipeline to easily iterate and with with the I/O. This is a good sample implementation of that: https://github.com/pixeltable/pixelbot https://github.com/pixeltable/pixelbot

Shypangz 1y ago

If building AI agents feels tricky, try focusing on tools that help manage tasks or data better. For example, using LeadsApp can simplify capturing and organizing leads without complex AI setups. It made handling prospects a lot easier for me.