2025 is the year of agents. I’ve heard about SDR AI agents but not great things. Most “agents” sound like workflow automations that have been around forever. Anyone have an example of an “ai” agent which I understand to be intelligent that isn’t a glorified or rebranded workflow automation? Thx.
Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few AI/ML/RPA etc fads.
Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.
Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.
Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.
My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.
On the one hand you have gurus claiming that AI agents are going to all make all SaaS redundant, on the other claiming that AI isn't going to take my coding job, but I need to adapt my workflows to incorporate AI. We all need to start preparing now for the changes that AI is going to cause.
But these two claims aren't compatible. If AGI and these super agents are that bonkers amazeballs that they can replace entire SaaS companies - then there is no way I'm going to be able to adapt my workflows to compete as a programmer.
Further, if the wildest claims about AI end up proving to be true - there is simply no way to prepare. What possible adaptation to my workflow could I possibly come up with that an AI agent could not surpass? Why should I bother learning how to implement (with today's apis) some RAG setup for a SaaS customer service chatbot when presumably an AI agent is going to make that skillset redundant shortly after?
I'm going to be interviewing for frontend roles soon, and for my prep I'm just going back to basics and making sure I remember on demand all the basics css, html, js/ts - fuck the rest of this noise.
I like this distinction from automation by Bartosz Pucek:
At its core, an Agent is software that can:
Take in a task description
Break it down into steps
Execute those steps using available tools
Adapt its approach based on feedback
The key distinction from traditional automation: Agents handle variance and uncertainty by replanning rather than failing when their happy path breaks.
Amazing that at nearing the 50 comment mark and there only seems to be people who have successfully created tutorial examples? And some other things that could be done with more purpose specific traditional solutions. And some people showing love for the concepts. This is probably the bleakest I've seen a Ask HN thread considering this is where all the money is going. I think one stark thing that maybe isn't being addressed is that the value of the models is being completely controlled by the model creators or else there would be at least one story by now of success that doesn't involve merely making the LLM products available to customers as a middle entity.
chevman ·5 days ago
Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.
Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.
Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.
My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.
oraphalous ·9 days ago
On the one hand you have gurus claiming that AI agents are going to all make all SaaS redundant, on the other claiming that AI isn't going to take my coding job, but I need to adapt my workflows to incorporate AI. We all need to start preparing now for the changes that AI is going to cause.
But these two claims aren't compatible. If AGI and these super agents are that bonkers amazeballs that they can replace entire SaaS companies - then there is no way I'm going to be able to adapt my workflows to compete as a programmer.
Further, if the wildest claims about AI end up proving to be true - there is simply no way to prepare. What possible adaptation to my workflow could I possibly come up with that an AI agent could not surpass? Why should I bother learning how to implement (with today's apis) some RAG setup for a SaaS customer service chatbot when presumably an AI agent is going to make that skillset redundant shortly after?
I'm going to be interviewing for frontend roles soon, and for my prep I'm just going back to basics and making sure I remember on demand all the basics css, html, js/ts - fuck the rest of this noise.
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readyplayernull ·7 days ago
At its core, an Agent is software that can:
The key distinction from traditional automation: Agents handle variance and uncertainty by replanning rather than failing when their happy path breaks.Source: https://newsletter.pucek.com/p/2025-the-state-of-ai-agents-a...
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th0ma5 ·5 days ago
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kodablah ·5 days ago
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