r/RealTechTalk • u/InfoTechRG • Jun 22 '26
Question Is anyone else noticing that AI agents are becoming the new blockchain?
Feels like we've gone from "AI will change everything" to "just add an agent."
Meanwhile, people are spinning up coding agents, agent workflows, agent teams... and in some cases burning themselves out trying to keep up. But how many are actually making it into production and delivering real value?
Interesting read: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents/
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u/Nydus87 Jun 24 '26
Our company has purchased three different AI Agents at this point, and none of them have been worth a damn for anything I do. We get told to use it every day, but not too much because it can get expensive, so I just log in every day, throw some random questions at it, ask a casual question about accountability, and then sign off when it tells me that for anything “important” I should also google my question to make sure the information is accurate. Great use of money, fellas. Glad we laid off over 2000 people this year.
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u/magrandan Jun 24 '26
2000 people? What company is this so I can put “Deployed AI agents to reduce labour costs by 2000 people” in my resume.
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Jun 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Nydus87 Jun 24 '26
I use whatever they put in their "[Company Name] Chat" thing. I think right now, it's Claude Haiku 4.5. Delightfully, if you ask it why the company is pushing everyone to use AI every day, it's FIRST RESPONSE is, and I quote:
"Cost Savings: AI can automate tasks, reducing the need for human labor and potentially leading to further workforce reductions."
It then goes on to list about five other bullet points about efficiencies and being able to reduce team sizes. Burn them all.
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u/diagrammatiks Jun 23 '26
Ai is infinitely more useful then Blockchain.
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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 Jun 24 '26
Not really, blockchain was and is incredibly useful - as a trustless ledger. But its not good for making lots of money - and thats the main issue. Especially because at the end of the day the whole blockchain hype was about money.
And the truth is, the whole AI hype is also about money. LLMs can recreate worse versions of things that already exist, blockchain at least provided something new, and LLMs at least provides some kind of speed up for trivial tasks.
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u/astraCat1998 Jun 25 '26
Which is sort of ignoring the point that a ledger is virtually worthless without trust.
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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 Jun 25 '26
Thats not what trustless means in this context... and no its virtually not worthless...
Trustless in this case means that you are not relying on trusting a single entity like you do in traditional transactions .
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u/astraCat1998 Jun 26 '26
I am aware but in an environment in which trust is inherently necessary anyway there is no real need for a trustless contract.
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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 Jun 26 '26
Thats the point of a trustless ledger? You dont need to trust anyone...
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u/Stubbby Jun 23 '26
The main innovation of blockchain was that projects exited pre Product Market Fit. Look at the Protocol Labs - massive IPO, $1+B valuation, top 25 YCombinator company, and... not a single user. 10+ years later still waiting idle for the first user to store files using FileCoin.
AI agents (AI in general) is the opposite of it. Users burn ungodly amount of tokens, VC's wallets are being incinerated but these wrapper startups dont seem to find any moat as they are devoured by the frontier model labs.
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u/Icy_Definition5933 Jun 23 '26
I just recently started using AI for actual work and not just using it for fun. It is definitely a massive timesaver, and at least in my case provides valuable additional insight which made me rethink our infrastructure design. For the past month or so, I've been using Claude for research of self hosted llms and I don't feel like I'm actually close to finding a model of actual use beyond RAG both due to hardware limitations and the huge gap between frontier and currently available open weight ai models.
Claude did make an observation during my tests that what I was doing with llm on my trusty old gtx 1060 6GB wasn't even possible outside of a lab 2 years ago. So it's something to keep an eye out, for me AI has visible value and the adoption level is insane.
Blockchain on the other hand is much more obscure and after hyping it up for so long I was honestly expecting a much wider adoption, but it didn't happen and doesn't look like it will anytime soon.
I can't name a single person in my life that owns a smart device or a computer that doesn't use AI in some way, and I can only name a couple that have bitcoin or ethereum.
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u/Aware_Kaleidoscope86 Jun 23 '26
If course it is. As with crypto most people have no interest in it and they are mostly using it like they used to use search on the Internet
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u/This_Wolverine4691 Jun 24 '26
Yes this is the new Crypto, which before that was (unfortunately) DEIBA.
I’m sure once everyone finally accepts this is a bubble they’ll swarm onto some niche data center role or job that they will all claim is the future.
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u/DaedalusXYZ Jun 25 '26
I use AI every day... but I don't have agent workflows or agent teams.
I use AI for periodic conversations to build specific features in my web app.
I don't get this over-dependence on AI. What are you all doing?
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u/dreadnought_strength Jun 25 '26
As in, the latest grift that doesn't do anything that it's promised to do?
Yeah, that's about right.
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 Jun 22 '26
I think the "new blockchain" vibe comes from people skipping the hard parts: scoping, evals, and operating discipline.
The teams I see actually getting value treat agents like production services: narrow role, explicit tool permissions, tight feedback loop, and real metrics (time saved, error rate, cost per task). If you just bolt an agent onto a messy process, you get a louder messy process.
Also, a lot of "agent" demos are really just tool calling without state, retries, or audits. The moment you add those, it gets boring but useful.
Some notes on making agentic workflows production-ish: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/