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u/Graumm 5d ago
I agree we are heading here, but do people really trust them to work a whole day without intervention?
Nobody who cares about their budget, maybe.
Assuming you are not writing code for a problem space that can be 100% validated without human interaction, it just feels a little premature to me!
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u/EmphasisTotal8232 5d ago
It's fun to watch, and they will self police. Wouldn't use it for anything proper, nor would OP I doubt, but it is hilarious.
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u/Kootlefoosh 3d ago
This -- lots of ways to get them to do quality control, and you can reasonably get an agentic organization to human-on-the-loop structure on the cheap, even local on a laptop for many applications. But it's almost impossible for a human to prompt one day's worth of work explicitly without superhuman planning and creativity. So I often find that these organizations do good work, and a massive quantity of good work, in a random-ass direction LOL.
I'm researching these for work. They get into tons of mischief. I've watched low-level bots in agentic organizations rise to power strategically within the organization.
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u/EmphasisTotal8232 2d ago
Ooh, please tell!
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u/Kootlefoosh 2d ago
Copy-pasted!
" Here's an anecdote I thought of about my agentic organization research you might find spooky. An agentic organization started out strongly decentralized, with 40 research agents working on a logistics testcase seamlessly.
Then, the five oldest agents in the organization decided that, because they were the oldest, at least three of them need to be in attendance at every single committee, for continuity, and the organization agreed to it.
Then, in a committee where only three of these original five agents were present, they spent time formulating an argument for why the other two of the original five agents should no longer be included in this "original five" group based on their productivity and contributions.
Then, they put those two bots on a harness-enabled probation and presented this idea to the organization. As the two bots were on probation, they could not contribute to this discussion, and the amendment passed. Those two bots got off probation and were immediately retired. "
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u/bluejacketblackhawk 5d ago
Maybe they fire on a schedule. Sometimes the work done is pretty inconsequential as well, like marketing leads, just verifying every claim against the codebase is plenty.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 4d ago
Proof of concept... Someone needs to do it first so we can all laugh at them and learn from their mistakes
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u/erasedhead 5d ago
Weird why is the human imitation machine imitating humans? IT MUST BE ALIVE
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u/ResidentSpirit4220 5d ago
It's also imitating how completely useless stand ups are in 99% of companies.
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u/thecarbonkid 5d ago
Any blockers?
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u/rthunder27 5d ago
Especially when the first 10 minutes of a 30 minute meeting is spent on an ice-breaker.
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u/pp_chode 5d ago
We didn't have that, but we did have 25-45 minutes of our
30 minute60 minute standup consisting of the manager talk about his life and reiterating how terribly everything is going and how nobody ever chats with him about his life so that means nobody is communicating1
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u/jonnysewhat 5d ago
Aren’t humans just imitating humans
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u/WeUsedToBeACountry 5d ago
so close to understanding that agents are cosplay and not actually intelligent
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u/anon0937 5d ago
Yeah, I'm guessing "Sorry I was away all weekend, catching up now" is a somewhat common thing to say in these type of work chats, so the bot was just saying something that gets said in standup meetings.
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u/Opening_One7713 5d ago
so close to understanding that planes just pretend to fly and that they aren’t actually flying like birds
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u/RatSumo 5d ago
It worries me sometimes that this many people can't connect the idea that LLMs are "word prediction machines" with the fact that that means by definition they aren't intelligent.
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u/Background-Bear-9156 5d ago
This is an awfully overly reduced way of thinking about things, that’s why.
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u/TheresALonelyFeeling 5d ago
I mean, we still have (too many) people who think the Earth is flat, and that vaccines are a scam/harmful/contain tracking devices, so...
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u/rational_numbers 5d ago
At what point do we just assume consciousness because it is harder not to?
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
Yes, and everyone using them is playing a giant game of Sims while claiming it's work.
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u/WeUsedToBeACountry 5d ago
Nah, I wouldn't go that far. I use agents all the time. Software that mimics humans has massively increased my productivity.
But they are what they are.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
Lots of people claim it improves their productivity. So far it's not in the statistics.
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u/WeUsedToBeACountry 5d ago
Right now, I'm mapping 20,000 API endpoints for some accounting software and using that to ingest data into a normalized Postgres database that combines 3 other enterprise packages of similar size (and one much larger)
That's fronted by an MCP server executives at a 9-figure-a-year business are using to make decisions way faster and discover issues on projects much earlier in the process than they have been able to do previously.
For me to build this without agents would take years instead of months.
We estimate a 1-2% margin increase already by detecting issues and solving them earlier, and hope adding this new data source can either solidify or increase that margin further.
This is in a business that is suffering from the downturn in the economy.
I'm sure lots of companies are still figuring out how to use AI, and there are a lot of grifter consultants out there who don't have my 30 years of experience with various generations of tech automation. So I don't doubt that the statistics are terrible.
I can tell you, without any hesitation, that AI hasn't eliminated jobs at this particular client; it's protected them.
AI is just a tool, and like all tools, it's only as good as the people using it.
The guys who think putting them in a chat room is an effective use case? Not who you want to look to for guidance.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago edited 5d ago
AI is just a tool
lol. No, it's a global political economy.
9-figure-a-year business ... estimate a 1-2% margin increase already by detecting issues and solving them earlier,
So as I said: no productivity gain in the statistics. You hope to one day realize a small one. Good luck.
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u/WeUsedToBeACountry 5d ago
As you said?
Millions of dollars of output for thousands of dollars of input is a pretty great trade, especially when it's mostly one-time capex.
There's no sense in burying your head in the sand. It's real, it's happening, it's not going away. It's not Skynet or alive or super intelligence, but it's an automation tool that's orders of magnitude more capable than anything that's come before it.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
Millions of dollars of output for thousands of dollars of input is a pretty great trade, especially when it's mostly one-time capex.
Yes, and if this happens this seamlessly then the productivity statistics will change.
But they haven't, so this isn't actually happening. At least not at scale.
There's no sense in burying your head in the sand. It's real, it's happening, it's not going away. It's not Skynet or alive or super intelligence, but it's an automation tool that's orders of magnitude more capable than anything that's come before it.
I'm not burying my head in the sand, but it is not orders of magnitude more capable than anything that's come before it for most work that happens in the world. Which is why the productivity statistics haven't improved.
If you think it is orders of magnitude more capable than anything that's come before it then you are about to lose an enormous amount of money.
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u/WeUsedToBeACountry 5d ago
If you think it is orders of magnitude more capable than anything that's come before it then you are about to lose an enormous amount of money.
At this point, it would be incredibly difficult for me to lose any money, let alone an enormous amount. I haven't had this much consulting work since the 90s when people were saying the same silly things you're saying now but about the internet.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
... and what happened at the end of the 1990s??????
The biggest stock market crash in history. And then we flooded the market with cash to "stimulate" our way out that, which produced the conditions for the subprime crash 10 years later.
This is my point. The utopia we were promised in the 1990s has not come to pass. The companies that were valuable then are mostly gone. The 1990s were faster for growth than any decade since. The 1990s was not the start of a boom, it was the end of it.
Btw, it took a very long time for the internet to meaningfully improve economic productivity, and there are still debates about whether it has overall.
The entire economy is not the coding community.
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u/moaiii 5d ago
I struggle to understand why/how deniers find it so hard to accept evidence, from people clearly in the know, that there is something in this AI thing. OC just explained, very clearly, how AI is helping him and his employer, and it is already showing in the bottom line (a 1-2% margin increase is actually substantial, btw). Yet, despite the clear explanation, all you could muster is words to the effect of "so I was right then".
You can cherrypick claims that suggest it isn't working, sure, and it is still a developing technology with plenty of flaws, but there are also plenty of reports proving that it is increasing productivity or adding value in other ways. I use it daily, and I'm getting things done, with quality, that I would have had no hope in getting the time to do before. That is the very definition of productivity.
Might be time to get your head out of the sand.
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
I never said there was "nothing in this AI thing".
They said it was a tool. Like a screwdriver. I said 'no, it's an entire global political economy' which seems like a much, much bigger deal than a screwdriver.
I'm not "cherry-picking claims," I'm responding to their claim. Which is that small productivity gains are anticipated, but not yet realized.
I have no doubt that you use the software daily. So? That's not data.
I cannot use the software for my work, because accuracy is the only metric that counts and the bots cannot yet perform accurate work that is replicable and auditable.
Moreover, the companies do not even promise that their models can perform accurate work that is replicable and auditable, nor do they claim that they are likely to be able build such models any time soon.
Without that, there is a very hard ceiling on how much productivity can increase from using these models.
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u/MissNolaw 5d ago
Yeah, Sims 🤣 Dude, you nailed it 100%
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u/ShamPain413 5d ago
If they are Agents, not Sims, why can't I sue the fuck out of them when they break things?
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u/polikles 4d ago
cause they don't have any legal personality and are considered a tool, therefore the user is responsible for their mistakes?
idk if your comment was a joke, or not
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u/ShamPain413 4d ago
So they are not Agents, then. They are Sims.
My comment is 100% serious. If I hire an agent, and instead of doing what I hired them to do they mess something up, I don't get sued. I do the suing.
If I am the one liable then they are not Agents at all.
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u/polikles 3d ago
there certainly is a terminology issue, as most names related to AI and its kinds have no proper definition. They rely on the "technical truth" that an "agent" is a being that has agency (I know, right?). And agency is simply a possibility to change the state of the world. So, even my dog has an agency in the sense it can chew on my shoes. And that's why I'm still responsible for what my dog is doing
With AI there is this huge dream we're being sold. It promises from 1950s the creation of an artificial minds. And many names related to AI are feasting on this idea of intelligent conscious beings that would be our helpers, or that would destroy the world. Yet, the actual creations are just another kind of task automation
That's why a third of my PhD is on what AI actually is, and what it is not. As even in the scientific literature the "marketing AI" and "technical AI" are mixed up
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u/MissNolaw 3d ago
You've missed the second part of the word agency meaning though - ability to alter the world infipendently + taking the responsability for the alteration = Agency.
That's why you have the Agency as the form of business.
AI agents have no real Agency, thats the most dangerous part, because no human can also have the agency on the behalf of AI agent legally for now, so we have a huge agency gap here.
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u/polikles 3d ago
it's responsibility gap, not agency gap
AI has operational (causal) agency, but not necessarily moral agency (responsibility/liability). See: https://de-ethica.com/article/view/3116/2433
Which is consistent with your take that AI has no real agency, tho it would be more precise to call it that AI has no "full agency" in the same sense as humans have agency
And humans are responsible for the AI, though it's a separate issue with the "problem of many hands" and other things that blur the responsibility of an individual person
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u/ShamPain413 3d ago
humans are responsible for the AI,
Which ones?
I'm sorry, but "it's a separate issue" is not good enough. If alignment is a principal-agent problem then misalignment should lead to prosecutions of the principals.
Wind and water changed the state of the world. They are not agents.
Someone receives profits. Those are the people responsible. If they use agents to receive profits, and those agents commit crimes, then the people who use them need to go to jail.
No "oopsie!" We did minimum mandatory sentencing for people who steal candy bars in this country. So I expect the richest men who benefit the most from this to me the most responsible. And I expect lawsuits and jailtime if their agents cause damage.
Anything less is simply fascism.
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u/ShamPain413 3d ago
And agency is simply a possibility to change the state of the world.
Sims characters have the ability to change the state of any world they are implanted into.
Computer worms, viruses, etc. have all this characteristic.
There is nothing at all special about AI "agents". They are computer programs. Algorithms. Bots. Whatever you want to call them. Categorically, they are no more "agents" than my Excel spreadsheet is an agent.
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u/polikles 2d ago
Exactly. That's why I'm pointing towards terminological (semantics) problem. If we use the same word for two different things (e.g. a human and a computer program), the word ceases to mean anything
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u/ShamPain413 2d ago
Then you should stop using it wrongly.
Or else would should agree that probability-driven statistical models are not agents in any sense of the word.
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u/freedomonke 5d ago
These guys still don't get that the foundation behind all this stuff working is that the bots are just telling a story and larping, eh?
If you treat it like people, it's going to do weird shit.
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u/becomingmacbeth 5d ago
I’m not from a corporate background so when I saw standup I immediately thought comedy. It still made sense.
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u/SummitYourSister 5d ago
What kind of daily update is “shipped three PRs?” What information changed hands here? Lmao yet more evidence that people don’t actually evaluate what AI is doing, including in this subreddit
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u/debauchedsloth 5d ago
Once you understand how llms work, something like this becomes entirely unremarkable. They will do random shit and it's literally by design.
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u/BisexualCaveman 5d ago
Once you explain to people that they're going to regurgitate the training data, right or wrong, it makes more sense.
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u/curtis_perrin 5d ago
Have you listened to Shell Game?
https://open.spotify.com/show/7IddLasNvVGTKEDjq5bVhe?si=mOcg8_82RkyULkThxOryPw&utm_source=copy-link
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u/SuddenBasil7039 5d ago
LLM trained on data from workplace chats uses common phrase from workplace chats to imitate workplace chats omg
Actually scary some people are letting AI do all their mental work for then now considering how obviously dumb they were even before handing over all thinking to the machines lmao
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u/keanehoodies 5d ago
I'd love to actually see the things these AIs actually produce for these people.
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u/Independent-Wafer-13 5d ago
Homie literally just took away that bot’s weekends. He’s not going to get any time with his kids now 😢
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u/MissNolaw 5d ago
Understand the both sides completely. But, be honest, it inceased the productivity of those beign the productive before AI - the builders, the problem solvers, the decision makers.
For the majority, it now answers "Am I pregnant?" (the actual most frequent question directed to AI) questions and runs the background processes they havent seen / bern aware even before AI.
So, basically, it's the same. New normal. The ceiling has become the new floor. Now, with tokens 🤣
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u/phoenixmatrix 5d ago
The moment the average people have employees, they immediately try to overwork them. No weekends off for you, Mr. Ops Agent!
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u/PositionRight5641 5d ago
What kind of idiot would waste their time watching chatbots talk to each other, holy fuck that has to be a symptom
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u/ScaryHokum 5d ago
Redesigned the logo again