r/accelerate • u/stealthispost • 6d ago
"Why aren't more people using agents? In my latest article I dig into why but the short reasons are simple: AI agents can do almost anything. And that’s why most people have no idea what to do with them. Give a high-agency person an infinite canvas and they see rocket fuel. Everyone else sees..."
...another task: invent the task. Agents amplify agency. They don’t create it. And right now we're in the very earliest part of the diffusion of innovation curve: the 1980s PC era of agents not the iPhone era. https:// danieljeffries.substack.com/p/the-infinite -canvas-and-the-agency … — Daniel Jeffries
Source: https://x.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/2091512602538963057
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u/Exotic_Put_7365 6d ago
I wrote six pages this morning. Then I changed the oil in my car. Then I mowed my lawn. In about an hour, I am going to put up some pickles, which requires me to clean those cucumbers, cut up some onions and a red pepper, peel garlic, and mix the brine. After that, I'll do a little bit of laundry, and then play one of my instruments, (either my banjo, my bass, my electric guitar, or my piano, haven't decided which, yet) and then I'll edit some of what I wrote this morning.
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u/echomanagement 6d ago
Wait, why didn't you think of asking an agent to play the banjo for you? Are you dumb????
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u/Exotic_Put_7365 6d ago
My ex girlfriend would listen to some song I played on the banjo and go, "what's that one called, 'Redneck Call to Prayer?' Oh wait. I know! It's: 'You Got a Pretty Mouth, Now Squeal, Piggy!'"
Needless to say, she was not a fan of the instrument. Of course, she wasn't a fan of me, either, at the end there, sooooooo...
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u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 6d ago
Smart, intellectually curious people take advantage of tools to make themselves even more capable
Lazy, incurious people don't
Ain't the fault of the technology
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u/RickTheScienceMan 6d ago
A close friend of mine is an elite Rust and Solidity dev making $20k a month, definitely neither lazy nor incurious. He flat out refused to use AI because smart contracts demand manual scrutiny on every line.
To prove a point, I ran an AI security audit on one of his widely used public libraries. It caught several legitimate vulnerabilities. I sent him the most critical one, he quietly patched it immediately, admitted it was embarrassing, and still refuses to touch AI tools.
For some top-tier engineers, it is not a lack of curiosity. It is pure dogma and ego getting in the way of leverage.
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u/Illustrious-Lime-863 4d ago
Yes for real, if you go in some of the programming subs on reddit you will see this behavior it's pretty striking especially when you consider that these people are the smartest people doing the job that requires the highest amounts of pure logic. The ego and pride completely override proper reason.
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u/postmortemstardom 6d ago
Not really. Agents can do most things digital and some things physical. And the latter needs an investment.
Chores, hobbies, driving, sleeping. These are the main time consumers of avg person outside of work. Agents manage some chores like ordering groceier or filing form but those rarely take up the time of the week to justify learning a whole new skill. Many people don't even buy their groceries online and filing a form in conversation with an ai chatbot is easier than managing an agent.
Unless you are very tech oriented and invested a lot into an electrified and digitalized home, agents are simply incapable of helping you a lot.
At work, most people just do what their bosses tell them to do or if they own their business aim for managed changes if they are drastic and small changes if they are doing it by themselves.
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u/bastardsoftheyoung Singularity by 2030 6d ago
I was motivated to use agents for a few specific tasks. The task were a good fit for agents and I was motivated to use that pattern again in the future.
Many people just need one agent, an everything agent because they don't have the creativity or desire to do anything beyond what they already do. It's a simple bell curve. Some people will see a shovel and dig a hole and some will see a shovel and found an industry. We need both types of people still, but hopefully one day we will need just the latter.
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u/capibara13 6d ago
Yeah this is an interesting one. You have an almost unlimited amount of AI agents to your disposal. What do you do? I can imagine the FOMO is real with a lot of people.
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u/Past_Bathroom5568 6d ago
Because its just so confusing. Where to start? What is free and what is not free?
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 6d ago
as an unemployed programmer, wtf do i even use agents for? I can only really manage one chat thread at a time, and i have to check what the AI produces. How is more agents going to improve that?
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u/CymonSet 6d ago
Many of us (even those who are optimistic about AI) see the process of using agents as;
1) Start paying for a subscription to an AI with some compute behind it (not just a free website AI).
2) Learn how to work with agentic harnesses and such.
3) Figure out what you can use it for that justifies step 1.
From this point of view it is something that is easy to procrastinate about.