posted in Technology
Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents
www.wired.com/story/why-normal-people-arent-using-ai-agents/
WIREDWhy Normal People Aren’t Using AI AgentsThe tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.
Replying to @FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
Replying to @adespoton@lemmy.ca
Good job putting to words one of the core issues I’ve had with using LLM chat for work. Stop trying to design an entire fucking system or solution and just answer the damn question I actually asked, by using natural language to search documentation and existing implementations.
I would tell it to only answer exactly what I asked, but sometimes I do get value from it “exploring” on occasion. It’s just so much damn worse with it than my newest junior co-worker who is known on our team for getting hours deep into tangential rabbit holes before coming up for air and asking seemingly nonsequiteur questions.
Replying to @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Back when search engines were becoming a thing, people would search more or less using natural language, e.g., “I want to see cat pictures and also cute kittens.” but early search engines performed poorly with that kind of query; it was much better to just type keywords, e.g. “cat kitten pictures”. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that search engines weren’t very good at the time, even if you used carefully considered keywords.
It might seem silly now, but using a search engine effectively was a skill people had to learn, and a skill not everyone had.
Using chatbots is the same thing, I think. They’re not super reliable to begin with, and on top of that, I don’t think people understand the importance of a well crafted prompt. The combination can make using them very frustrating.
I read somewhere that teaching people about how LLMs work is way better at protecting them from the harms of LLMs than trying to convince them not to use them.
This would include prompt engineering i guess! Which to be fair i do not know about.
The video makes fun of it by having the vibe coder put “… or you go to jail " at the end of every prompt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNS1ZNHQs8
YouTubeInterview with Vibe Coder in 2025