5 ms·

I still don't understand what these freaks are doing running these agents 24/7 on machines. What are they doing? Managing a todo list? You mean crossing items o

I still don't understand what these freaks are doing running these agents 24/7 on machines. What are they doing? Managing a todo list? You mean crossing items off as you complete them? Research tasks? To do what? Never really get good answers. There is no killer app. Just bikeshedding.

leokennis 3mo ago
Exact same question as you. When the new ChatGPT app dropped it suggested to me to set up a task something like (paraphrased) “every Monday read my Gmail and Slack an make a summary and task list for the week”. Why would I need an LLM to do this for me? That’s 5 minutes of work max, and doing it gets me in the flow of work again, to see what’s going on and needs to be done.
- phil21 3mo ago
  For a lot of folks summarizing a few days of work email and especially slack chats is way more than 5 minutes. Some work environments do not have great communication hygiene so it can be overwhelming to try to keep up with 500 emails a day and 38 Slack channels. For the folks I talk to who use a LLM for this that seems to be the case. Takes a huge cognitive load off every morning and saves them an hour or two. More or less a very expensive band aid over a bad work environment. I kinda use it the same way in a sense. I have a little skill I run against our (horrible) task management system to summarize things and give me a punchlist to work through sorted by priority. This saves me thousands of clicks to do the same thing in the horrible web UI. A proper system in the first place would be a lot better! At some point I’ll probably just take that to the next logical step and have the LLM write my own web interface to abstract and replace the horrible one entirely for me.
  - croes 3mo ago
    And how can they be sure the summary correct and doesn’t miss anything important?
    - lionkor 3mo ago
      This is very much just laundering not giving a shit through an LLM so you can blame it after the fact.
    - phil21 3mo ago
      In such environments everyone is constantly missing things and not replying until they get followed up with. So that sort of thing is already normalized. An LLM is unlikely to be worse than a human. There is no accountability either way since everyone is failing at the task, it really doesn’t matter much if your or your bot misses a few percentage points of high priority items. You will probably be vastly outperforming your peers who are doing it manually.
- moron4hire 3mo ago
  Because then OpenAI can read your emails and project communications and eventually build a model they will sell as an automated consultant. The CEOs will uncritically eat it up just long enough to cut the footing out from the industry. Once everyone is used to the sorry state of software, nobody will be able to imagine putting people to the task anymore and we'll have the new world order that Altman and Theil have been talking about creating.
greggsy 3mo ago
I set it up out of curiosity a few months ago and realised I had no requirement for it whatsoever. I’m actually very time-poor, so figured it could help be clawed back time doing… what exactly?
fooster 3mo ago
I think you need to open your mind to the possibilities? For example: - scanning logs for errors and - opening issues which are then auto-triaged and - PRs are opened for them and auto-reviewed and - merged (and deployed). This workflow alone is immensely powerful, and takes alot of burden off the team.
- airstrike 3mo ago
  > This workflow alone is immensely powerful, and takes alot of burden off the team. ITSM those unsupervised workflows are essentially an attempt at purported productivity in the near term at the expense of meaningful incremental long term burden for teams. The only ostensible benefit is in the eyes of the AI-psychotic tinkerer, who knows no better, or in those of the clout-chasing developer farming likes on their LinkedIn posts.
  - fooster 3mo ago
    Really they're not. But it seems you have decided that you, above all, know best.
    - airstrike 3mo ago
      I started my post with "it seems to me" precisely because I haven't decided that I know best.
      - hjkl0 3mo ago
        > The only ostensible benefit is in the eyes of the AI-psychotic tinkerer, who knows no better, or in those of the clout-chasing developer farming likes on their LinkedIn posts. Truly open minded
        airstrike 3mo ago
        I'm open minded, I just haven't seen evidence to the contrary. Speaking as someone who's spent an ungodly amount of time in claude code
kdheiwns 3mo ago
It seems the main use case is having Claude automatically write blogposts about how great using Claude is, then submit them wherever necessary. There's lots of news about the billions AI companies spend on data center construction, but it feels like it's not even a fraction of the money they're spending on endless nonstop blogs about how great their app is at doing... things. Things that will never be defined.
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  It really feels to me like this OpenClaw type stuff is the new "I built a static site generator!" type blogs that just post a few articles about how they built their generator.
artisinal 3mo ago
Swiping Tinder. It takes about 5000 matches to get a date. It’s easier to just automate it. It automatically adds dates to my calendar, all I have to do is show up. I get a summary of our chat history (well, what the agent wrote to her) in the notes section of the calendar entry and some pointers and talking points for the date. Maybe I should have the agent also do a background check. PS: This is a joke, but feel free to steal this idea.
- mystifyingpoi 3mo ago
  Crap, I totally believed this. We live in a dystopia already.
  - artisinal 3mo ago
    Someone apparently made this https://github.com/Grigorij-Dudnik/TinderGPT https://github.com/Grigorij-Dudnik/TinderGPT > TinderGPT automates the process of writing and arranging dates with girls on Tinder, enabling you to generate romantic meetings with almost zero effort. Your only role is to like the profiles that catch your eye. After that, TinderGPT comes into the play. It initiates a conversation with the girl, using details from her profile, continues by building an emotional bond and highlighting your attractive traits, and finishes by arranging a meeting and giving you a push-up on your phone with her number.
    - lionkor 3mo ago
      This is a sure way to get girls! Girls love being entirely commoditized and objectified, famously that's a great way to date! /s
      - artisinal 3mo ago
        I’m surprised that the author didn’t even refer to them as females.
    - hjkl0 3mo ago
      This is not really the same at all. You still have to swipe, the value add here is apparently “building an emotional bond”. Together with the explicit goal of “dates with girls”, this actually feels incredibly nefarious.
ronbenton 3mo ago
Have it work down my jira tickets while I’m sitting on the porcelain throne
theptip 3mo ago
If you can’t think up enough coding projects to keep an agent busy in the background that’s a skill issue on your side.
- lionkor 3mo ago
  I am aware this is likely sarcasm, but in case it isn't, what do you gain from doing side projects this way?
  - theptip 3mo ago
    No sarcasm, I am completely serious. I don’t have time for much leisure coding these days. I do have time to kick off a few tasks in the morning to progress my many side projects. Nothing public / oss, just code that I find useful/interesting like home automation, content pipelines, games, etc. There are a bunch of cases where remote control from iOS onto a Mac Mini is simply nicer than using iOS Claude Code sandboxes. It’s the same pattern as you (hopefully) apply at $dayjob. If you are not defining a /goal and letting your agent crank you are not making full use of the models’ capabilities.
    - lionkor 3mo ago
      Well I am fully of the opinion that LLMs can help in software programming, it's not something that I feel provides any value unless it has a human in the loop. The overhead of having to figure out if the agent did a good job, if the agent is actually done or not, and if the thing it built is shit or not, is worth simply avoiding by having a human in the loop. So I wouldn't agree that the agent should be cranking out code all the time, in fact that seems more like a waste of resources compared to the work it creates. But I do understand home automation software can be very one-off and simple. But then again, a properly programmed home automation suite doesn't need a SOTA model to modify it, I think.
    - troupo 3mo ago
      On all projects I've run any of the models they: - infinitely duplicate any and all code, helpers and components - infinitely duplicate CSS (because they duplicate components) - continuously write code like "read the entire db into memory and run a filter function on retrieved data" - continuously write code like "call db with multiple queries for each element in a list" - etc. etc. Why the hell would I ever want to run them unsupervised?
vessenes 3mo ago
Let me guess -- in your day job you don't manage people. I have agents parsing messages, building out document sets, evaluating existing document sets, one is currently fixing a giant backlog of bugs and feature requests for a multi year personal coding project, one is exploring some ideas on speeding up inference at the edge.. If you put yourself in a position where you need more leverage (technical or operating) I think you might find you get some value.
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  Given all the automation you do, it sounds like you don't really manage people either.

leokennis 3mo ago

Exact same question as you. When the new ChatGPT app dropped it suggested to me to set up a task something like (paraphrased) “every Monday read my Gmail and Slack an make a summary and task list for the week”. Why would I need an LLM to do this for me? That’s 5 minutes of work max, and doing it gets me in the flow of work again, to see what’s going on and needs to be done.

phil21 3mo ago
For a lot of folks summarizing a few days of work email and especially slack chats is way more than 5 minutes. Some work environments do not have great communication hygiene so it can be overwhelming to try to keep up with 500 emails a day and 38 Slack channels. For the folks I talk to who use a LLM for this that seems to be the case. Takes a huge cognitive load off every morning and saves them an hour or two. More or less a very expensive band aid over a bad work environment. I kinda use it the same way in a sense. I have a little skill I run against our (horrible) task management system to summarize things and give me a punchlist to work through sorted by priority. This saves me thousands of clicks to do the same thing in the horrible web UI. A proper system in the first place would be a lot better! At some point I’ll probably just take that to the next logical step and have the LLM write my own web interface to abstract and replace the horrible one entirely for me.
- croes 3mo ago
  And how can they be sure the summary correct and doesn’t miss anything important?
  - lionkor 3mo ago
    This is very much just laundering not giving a shit through an LLM so you can blame it after the fact.
  - phil21 3mo ago
    In such environments everyone is constantly missing things and not replying until they get followed up with. So that sort of thing is already normalized. An LLM is unlikely to be worse than a human. There is no accountability either way since everyone is failing at the task, it really doesn’t matter much if your or your bot misses a few percentage points of high priority items. You will probably be vastly outperforming your peers who are doing it manually.
moron4hire 3mo ago
Because then OpenAI can read your emails and project communications and eventually build a model they will sell as an automated consultant. The CEOs will uncritically eat it up just long enough to cut the footing out from the industry. Once everyone is used to the sorry state of software, nobody will be able to imagine putting people to the task anymore and we'll have the new world order that Altman and Theil have been talking about creating.

greggsy 3mo ago

I set it up out of curiosity a few months ago and realised I had no requirement for it whatsoever. I’m actually very time-poor, so figured it could help be clawed back time doing… what exactly?

fooster 3mo ago

I think you need to open your mind to the possibilities? For example: - scanning logs for errors and - opening issues which are then auto-triaged and - PRs are opened for them and auto-reviewed and - merged (and deployed). This workflow alone is immensely powerful, and takes alot of burden off the team.

airstrike 3mo ago
> This workflow alone is immensely powerful, and takes alot of burden off the team. ITSM those unsupervised workflows are essentially an attempt at purported productivity in the near term at the expense of meaningful incremental long term burden for teams. The only ostensible benefit is in the eyes of the AI-psychotic tinkerer, who knows no better, or in those of the clout-chasing developer farming likes on their LinkedIn posts.
- fooster 3mo ago
  Really they're not. But it seems you have decided that you, above all, know best.
  - airstrike 3mo ago
    I started my post with "it seems to me" precisely because I haven't decided that I know best.
    - hjkl0 3mo ago
      > The only ostensible benefit is in the eyes of the AI-psychotic tinkerer, who knows no better, or in those of the clout-chasing developer farming likes on their LinkedIn posts. Truly open minded
      - airstrike 3mo ago
        I'm open minded, I just haven't seen evidence to the contrary. Speaking as someone who's spent an ungodly amount of time in claude code

kdheiwns 3mo ago

It seems the main use case is having Claude automatically write blogposts about how great using Claude is, then submit them wherever necessary. There's lots of news about the billions AI companies spend on data center construction, but it feels like it's not even a fraction of the money they're spending on endless nonstop blogs about how great their app is at doing... things. Things that will never be defined.

deadbabe 3mo ago
It really feels to me like this OpenClaw type stuff is the new "I built a static site generator!" type blogs that just post a few articles about how they built their generator.

artisinal 3mo ago

Swiping Tinder. It takes about 5000 matches to get a date. It’s easier to just automate it. It automatically adds dates to my calendar, all I have to do is show up. I get a summary of our chat history (well, what the agent wrote to her) in the notes section of the calendar entry and some pointers and talking points for the date. Maybe I should have the agent also do a background check. PS: This is a joke, but feel free to steal this idea.

mystifyingpoi 3mo ago
Crap, I totally believed this. We live in a dystopia already.
- artisinal 3mo ago
  Someone apparently made this https://github.com/Grigorij-Dudnik/TinderGPT https://github.com/Grigorij-Dudnik/TinderGPT > TinderGPT automates the process of writing and arranging dates with girls on Tinder, enabling you to generate romantic meetings with almost zero effort. Your only role is to like the profiles that catch your eye. After that, TinderGPT comes into the play. It initiates a conversation with the girl, using details from her profile, continues by building an emotional bond and highlighting your attractive traits, and finishes by arranging a meeting and giving you a push-up on your phone with her number.
  - lionkor 3mo ago
    This is a sure way to get girls! Girls love being entirely commoditized and objectified, famously that's a great way to date! /s
    - artisinal 3mo ago
      I’m surprised that the author didn’t even refer to them as females.
  - hjkl0 3mo ago
    This is not really the same at all. You still have to swipe, the value add here is apparently “building an emotional bond”. Together with the explicit goal of “dates with girls”, this actually feels incredibly nefarious.

ronbenton 3mo ago

Have it work down my jira tickets while I’m sitting on the porcelain throne

theptip 3mo ago

If you can’t think up enough coding projects to keep an agent busy in the background that’s a skill issue on your side.

lionkor 3mo ago
I am aware this is likely sarcasm, but in case it isn't, what do you gain from doing side projects this way?
- theptip 3mo ago
  No sarcasm, I am completely serious. I don’t have time for much leisure coding these days. I do have time to kick off a few tasks in the morning to progress my many side projects. Nothing public / oss, just code that I find useful/interesting like home automation, content pipelines, games, etc. There are a bunch of cases where remote control from iOS onto a Mac Mini is simply nicer than using iOS Claude Code sandboxes. It’s the same pattern as you (hopefully) apply at $dayjob. If you are not defining a /goal and letting your agent crank you are not making full use of the models’ capabilities.
  - lionkor 3mo ago
    Well I am fully of the opinion that LLMs can help in software programming, it's not something that I feel provides any value unless it has a human in the loop. The overhead of having to figure out if the agent did a good job, if the agent is actually done or not, and if the thing it built is shit or not, is worth simply avoiding by having a human in the loop. So I wouldn't agree that the agent should be cranking out code all the time, in fact that seems more like a waste of resources compared to the work it creates. But I do understand home automation software can be very one-off and simple. But then again, a properly programmed home automation suite doesn't need a SOTA model to modify it, I think.
  - troupo 3mo ago
    On all projects I've run any of the models they: - infinitely duplicate any and all code, helpers and components - infinitely duplicate CSS (because they duplicate components) - continuously write code like "read the entire db into memory and run a filter function on retrieved data" - continuously write code like "call db with multiple queries for each element in a list" - etc. etc. Why the hell would I ever want to run them unsupervised?

vessenes 3mo ago

Let me guess -- in your day job you don't manage people. I have agents parsing messages, building out document sets, evaluating existing document sets, one is currently fixing a giant backlog of bugs and feature requests for a multi year personal coding project, one is exploring some ideas on speeding up inference at the edge.. If you put yourself in a position where you need more leverage (technical or operating) I think you might find you get some value.

deadbabe 3mo ago
Given all the automation you do, it sounds like you don't really manage people either.