Ask HN: Are Agents Just Hype?

3•spacemnstr42069•1h ago

I have spent the last few days trying (and failing) to find real cases where AI agents actually scale in production. Outside of coding agents and dev-productivity tools, I am struggling to see anything that looks like a genuinely scalable agent system.

Most of what people are calling “agents” today are basically deterministic workflows with one or two LLM calls glued together. That is not an agent. That is a at best API pipeline.

So I am genuinely curious: are there any real examples of agents handling large, messy, multi-step workflows at scale? Not demos, not toy projects, not VC decks.

Comments

AIinyourAI•1h ago

There probably are examples out there but paywalled heavily as they probably still make more money from selling the guides than actually using the agents.

scosman•54m ago

No they work fine. Not a panacea, but when the use case permits.

Usually layers of tools clustered under sub-agents, and fairly detailed orchestration prompts at higher levels. Orchestration via agent-prompts can be better than hard-coded workflows when they require qualitative assessments.

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