Are AI Agents like von Hammerstein's industrious and stupid?
Comments
ksherlock
mitchbob
Despair is always with us. The "Adaptation" poster was prescient:
The bad news is robots can do your job now. The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians. The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots - and we do not anticipate any further good news.
sph
The AI agent is certainly more industrious than you, and I want to believe you are smarter than an LLM. But relying on it too much makes you dumber.
This quote is exactly why giving shell privileges to any LLM is idiotic.
PreciousH
I have gone back to manual coding to remove this AI induced laziness because i discovered immediately the LLM starts making some useless engineering decisions it does it like it knows what it's doing and also very deceptive and sometimes it's just easier to do it by myself other than trying to get the AI to do it,LLMS get so confidently wrong.
multidude
And it sounds so knowledgeable and authoritative in its replies. And i like being told "great idea"... OK, that is a joke i don't like it that much coming from a mindless agent. But in the dialog it becomes so convincing that i struggle not to anthropomorphize it. Remember "Her" with Joaquin Phoenix? i wont fall in love with it but i might entrust it with my root passwords?
codingdave
All I know is that when I look through my clients' Jira boards, I see an explosion of bugs, outages, and other problems, starting 2 years ago and ramping up so fast that none of the teams can keep up.
If AI were working as well as people claim, I'd expect the opposite - work getting delivered faster than the product managers can spec it. Bugs speeding right through the SDLC process. Jira boards sitting mostly empty.
As I'm not seeing that, I'm inclined to agree that this whole industry is falling into "industrious and stupid"
Aztar
Or maybe you are building more features than two years ago, which is reflecting positively on other KPIs.
You were building one house (feature) per year. After finishing the house you found a few issues (bugs). You get your plumber, electrician..etc to fix each issue.
After two years, you start building 10 houses per year. When you finish, you find twice or x times as many issues (bugs) as before. Does that mean your workrate and productivity declined or that things are going downwards?
I'm not saying AI is the joker and solving everything. I think there is a bigger picture to consider whether AI is having a good or no impact on the company you are working for. Did you release more features than before, what about MRR, CSAT,..etc?
muzani
AI is simply not an officer. It's a tool. At best, it's a stupid and lazy officer, mere information routers and supervisors.
It sounds smart, but it's autocomplete. If a group of students uses it to get ideas for an essay, the whole class will write the same essay, starring the same "Sarah Chen (no relations to Marcus Chen)".
That said, throughout history we've delegated decision making to tools. Bone reading, palm reading, face reading, dice, cards, horoscope, diviners, prophets. AI is just the latest, and 50 years from now we'll be shaking our heads at how the people in 2025 blindly trusted them.
kubiknubika
The stupid+industrious problem gets worse in 1-on-1 setup. AI has no competing voice to push back against its own industriousness. Maybe the fix is putting it in a room with 30 people who disagree
Some of this AI brings to mind the old Despair "Incompetence" poster (https://despair.com/products/incompetence)
When you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your efforts, there's no end to what you can't do.
For those too young to remember, once upon a time people went into an office to work. And sometimes HR put up motivational posters. And this spawned humorous demotiviational posters.
If you're still confused, they're memes that printed, framed, and hung on a wall.