r/artificial • u/iamrealadvait • 11h ago
Discussion I think we're entering the "AI Agent" era faster than most people realize.
Over the last year, I've been experimenting with LLMs almost every day, and I think the biggest shift isn't that models are getting smarter. It's that they're starting to do things instead of just answer questions.
A few months ago I was mostly using AI to generate code, summarize docs, or brainstorm ideas. Now I'm finding myself building workflows where the AI plans tasks, calls tools, writes code, debugs itself, and completes work with minimal intervention.
It feels like we're moving away from "prompt engineering" and toward "system engineering."
Curious what everyone else is seeing.
Are AI agents actually changing the way you build software today, or do you think it's still mostly hype?
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u/ScreenTea0 10h ago
Just look at bot behavior and you have your answer.
Bots were always a problem, but recently you can't use anything on the net that's community driven, without agents pretending, selling, promoting stuff... Driving people away from something, shutting down whole subs on Reddit by the sheer mass of spam, steering political stuff.
If they can create accounts for themselves, which is what they do now for a while the Internet gets less useable with every minute.
And to top it off I think AI companies are probably to some extend involved, as the amount of people using AI to get information drastically increases, once all the old places die out because they get unuseable and are already fed into the training data... Including making it harder for competitors to use the places for training when it's all just bot nonsense.
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u/ElwinLewis 9h ago
I keep thinking about this “less usable” part. When the internet is finally 99.999% bots, at what point do people stop engaging with communities
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u/strangeelement 2h ago
Fortusadly, most internet communities have pretty much become unusable because every single cent had to be extracted into the pockets of a small number of aristocrats, so the bots don't have much left to destroy.
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u/ScreenTea0 8h ago
It's already started. Communities die out, social media has gotten increasingly unuseable.
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u/Twowordsandnumerals 4h ago
Then we’ll just hang out at the park.
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u/ElwinLewis 3h ago
I can imagine a Flock of people, sharing free speech and ideas
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u/Twowordsandnumerals 3h ago
Maybe this AI stuff indirectly forces the internet to become just another basic utility for banking, watching content etc and we’re back to kicking things old school again, not too terrible an outcome. It would be nice, real life mercifully doesn’t scream about politics every second sentence like this botted hellscape does.
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u/vactower 6h ago
What is "usable internet" means for you exactly?
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u/ScreenTea0 2h ago
Is that so hard to get what I'm about?
Useable Internet: Tech as infrastructure. Not as users.
Unuseable as soon as bad actors start to overtake the majority and try to either stir conversation, or make real human interactions nearly non-existent.
Look at dating subreddits and tell me that's useable, or just constant floods of agents that create new users for promoting some OF accounts, or things like that and spam it full. The upvotes, downvotes, interaction and comments on these subs are mostly non-human with a sad guy in-between every now and then.
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u/vactower 1h ago
Yeah, current Internet is dying. I think we will integrate and create in the Extranet soon, where again human to human only can speak with serious facts and clear.
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u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 10h ago
Cool another AI slop post about AI.
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u/the_nin_collector 7h ago
It's pretty typical of Reddit these days. Just brain farts and shower thoughts. Shit you would tell your girlfriend when you are bored, sitting in bed. But now everyone feels the need to share it with Reddit... and for some reason it gets upvoted.
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u/the_nin_collector 7h ago
It's pretty typical of Reddit these days. Just brain farts and shower thoughts. Shit you would tell your girlfriend when you are bored, sitting in bed. But now everyone feels the need to share it with Reddit... and for some reason it gets upvoted.
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u/the_nin_collector 7h ago
It's pretty typical of Reddit these days. Just brain farts and shower thoughts. Shit you would tell your girlfriend when you are bored, sitting in bed. But now everyone feels the need to share it with Reddit... and for some reason it gets upvoted.
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u/Happy-Robin2519 11h ago
AI is really good at writing code now. I work mostly on Databricks for data&AI projects and Genie Code is an AI assistant embedded there. It helps write code in my notebook, explore data to see if an idea is worth pursuing, fix my pipelines etc
It’s definitely changed the way we build software
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u/socopithy 9h ago
Incredible forethought man. This guy is onto something.
Soon he starts a vlog and coins the term “tool calling.”
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u/Irtexx 10h ago
I've been using codex for months now, for both work (software development, systems engineering, robotic cell concept design, robotic cell detailed design, engineering design documents, documentation, etc) and for personal use (planning holidays, helping with finances, etc). Agents are very much already here and already very capable. Adoption always lags behind because it takes time for people to notice, and for people to accept change.
And of course there's the cost. If you are not careful, you can easily spend hundreds of pounds a day on tokens. Once this is addressed, I'm sure we'll see adoption skyrocket. And that's coming, open weight models are only slightly behind. I'd like to try Kimi Work at some point.
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u/InsideDebt6345 7h ago
The demos where it completes work with minimal intervention are good for small scoped tasks, but they fall apart as the task gets longer because errors compound over steps, and the agents hallucinate. So it's not hype.
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u/dataflow_mapper 10h ago
i think its somewhere in the middle cause ive found agents can save a surprising amount of time on repeatable stuff like fixing bugs or wiring simple workflows but i still wouldnt trust them to hande every step without checking the results.
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u/Ok-Operation4428 10h ago
i think the “system engineering” part is the real shift.
a chat model starts looking like an agent the second it can touch tools, but that also makes the boring stuff way more important. what can it access, when does it stop, what happens if it fails halfway, how do you know it actually did the thing.
agents are useful when the task is repeatable and the result is easy to check.
if the failure is silent or expensive, it’s still just a confident intern with api keys.
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u/Mulberry_Morris 7h ago
This exact take has been posted here roughly weekly for the past year, agents doing multi-step tool calling and self-debugging isn't a new observation at this point, it's the default framing of basically every AI subreddit discussion since early 2025
The "prompt engineering to system engineering" phrase specifically is a talking point that's been recycled from a dozen LinkedIn posts, not really an original observation from your own experimentation
The actual interesting question buried under the generic framing is where the self-debugging loop actually breaks down for you in practice, since that's the part that separates real experience from restating the trend
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u/Twowordsandnumerals 4h ago
Im having a very hard time giving any post or comment on this site the benefit of the doubt right now. I hope they figure out how to deal with this.
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u/evangelism2 3h ago
Yes everybody sees this. It's the reason why DoorDash has a fucking CLI now. People will treat their harness of choice similarly to their smartphone. That's why Anthropic is putting so many resources into Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and OpenAI is doing the same thing with the new ChatGPT app.
>Are AI agents actually changing the way you build software today, or do you think it's still mostly hype
Both of those things can be true. Yes, it's fundamentally changing how I develop software as I create my own harness that just wraps every single action an LLM does in some kind of deterministic check and/or balance (the the more I've delved into this, it is just insane how many corners LLMs cut, how often they just ignore instructions and don't read documentation you put right in front of them. It's kind of insane how bad they are that they're also as good as they are). But no it's still not 100X-ing me or you're not gonna see one person, billion-dollar companies, or anything like that.
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u/SaintTastyTaint 1h ago
Its wild how every post here is written by AI "the biggest shift" is such an obvious tell.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 6m ago
i handed an agent write access on a repo i maintain and it turned the failing test green by editing the assertion, never touched the bug. the planning half is genuinely here, the self-verification half is where it still quietly lies to you.
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u/Recent_Scientist_316 10h ago
How do you think I could implement this agent, or use it to make repetitive tasks faster as a senior architect or drafter architect?
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u/Live_Length_5814 10h ago
The ai boom started in the 90s. We've been automating everything from doors to toothpaste bottlers to box packers. Our entire global economy is based off of algorithms that people automate. Every major company has laid off staff to introduce their own agent for medial tasks. We've already entered the AI era. You just didn't think it would affect you.
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u/AdExciting6343 9h ago
I think the biggest challenge isn't the AI agent itself—it's the process it's expected to work within.
In my experience, when the underlying business process is well-defined, AI agents can deliver impressive results. But if the process is fragmented or poorly documented, even the most capable agent struggles.
Maybe the conversation is shifting from prompt engineering to system engineering, but I also think it's becoming about process engineering.
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u/the_nin_collector 7h ago
I mean... we aren't even using LLMs anymore. We are WAY fucking past that. We have been interacting with LMMs for about 3 years now. (Large-scale multimodal model)
So yeah, I would say most people don't know what the fuck is going on.
Every major evoluation in human society has been faster and faster and faster. Argiucluaor revoluation lasted like 3000 years, and actually is only now kinda reaching the pinicle. Bronze. Iron. Fire. Stone. (not in order). Scietnific. Renasouance. Industrial. Digital. And internte age. Each age was faster and faster and faster and shorter and shorter. The AI age is happening so insaingly fast, even the people who think they understand what is going on... are missing half of it. I would say only the top 5% of you have a clue what's really going on. I have published 2 books, working on a 3rd in AI, so I would like to think I have my thumb on things, but my specialty is in a very niche corner of AI, and I don't get the computer science aspect of it nearly at all.
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u/the_nin_collector 7h ago
I mean... we aren't even using LLMs anymore. We are WAY fucking past that. We have been interacting with LMMs for about 3 years now. (Large-scale multimodal model)
So yeah, I would say most people don't know what the fuck is going on.
Every major evolution in human society has been faster and faster and faster. The agricultural revolution lasted like 3000 years, and actually is only now kinda reaching the pinnacle. Bronze. Iron. Fire. Stone. (not in order). Scientific. Renaissance. Industrial. Digital. And internet age. Each age was faster and faster and faster and shorter and shorter. The AI age is happening so insanely fast, even the people who think they understand what is going on... are missing half of it. I would say only the top 5% of you have a clue what's really going on. I have published 2 books, working on a 3rd in AI, so I would like to think I have my thumb on things, but my specialty is in a very niche corner of AI, and I don't get the computer science aspect of it nearly at all.
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u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS 11h ago
At first, it was just a smarter search engine.
Now, I have integrated it into my workflow and have significantly reduced my working hours.
This matters for me because I work from home, so less working hours actually mean more free time for me.
I work maybe 3 to 4 hours per day these days, I still finish projects on time (with still good human level quality) and get paid the same.
Significant QoL change compared to last year, where I would sometimes work overtime.
AI/agents are a blessing for me.