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Ask HN: Are most AI agents worthless?

3 points by galfarragem ↗ HN
I would like to know the HN opinion on AI agents. I'm learning about the subject but so far it seems that most AI agents that are posted on HN, if not useless, hardly worth to pay and are just a sloppy wrapper of a LLM du jour. What's your take on this?

4 comments

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beernet
Agents are a tool and must be treated as such. Is the tool worthless? Depends on its application. There seems to be lots of confusion around this topic by people not experienced with data and analytics.
wryoak
So please, enlighten us
ericalexander0
I haven't seen anything useful in the agent space. I definitely haven't seen anything I would trust in a business process.

At the same time, I'm constantly amazed at how accessible LLMs have made automating things with Python. I'm seeing more non-SDEs describe what they want to do and then iterate on a solution with the LLM.

So I see more happening in this space, but it's a little more deterministic and a little less abstracted than the current products are headed.

I also see Gitlab or GitHub dabbling in this area. At some point you need to deploy the code. GitHub actions, workspaces, and pages are not that far off from a product that could cater to this need.

dtagames
Since no new fundamental AI breakthrough has happened since transformers were invented, it stands to reason that all current applications of AI are just LLMs underneath.

RAG is just an LLM plus regular procedural code acting on the LLM output. So are "reasoning" agents, because the reasoning is done via LLM predictions. "Agents" are just RAG applications that have access to your screen, keyboard, and mouse. It's LLMs all the way down.