On: Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?

[kodablah]

What's wrong with an agent being a glorified workflow? At Temporal (where I work), it seems plenty natural for agentic AI to just be AI worklows. Here's a video we put out this week demonstrating it: https://youtu.be/GEXllEH2XiQ (code at https://github.com/steveandroulakis/temporal-ai-agent).

[lolinder → kodablah]

This is what OP is explicitly not asking for—it's just a demo of a theoretical case, Temporal showing how a company that's hyped up on AI agents could use your platform to do agent-y things.

OP wants to know if anyone is actually using this stuff productively, not if anyone has tech demos. We've all seen more than enough tech demos.

[kodablah → lolinder]

I fear I'll come off as a shill, but I've seen dozens of company uses of AI in workflows in the real world. Agents are just orchestrating multiple AI steps basically (granted not all of them are using AI to _pick_ the step to take which is often what "agentic" is seen as). Some are listed at https://temporal.io/in-use alongside the many non-AI things, e.g. https://temporal.io/resources/case-studies/bugcrowd, https://temporal.io/resources/on-demand/arc-xp-washington-po..., https://temporal.io/resources/on-demand/practical-tactical-a..., and more and more. All those companies use AI workflows in real world cases, and there are many more. I only showed the tutorial to agree with OP that it is just workflows with fuzzier steps and that's ok.

[lcrmorin → kodablah]

Perfect exemple of what op is asking. This is just a demo. What problems does it solve for you or your clients so that you make money ?

[kodablah → lcrmorin]

Replied to another in this thread, but basically https://temporal.io/in-use lists many, AI and not.

[theptip → kodablah]

This is interesting stuff, and a great stepping stone. I think the excitement around true agents will come when the AI can author the workflow pipeline, so to speak, in response to a request.

This is an area where terminology is in flux but I think of weak agents as mostly-hardcoded, eg if you wrote a flight booking bot that can converse with you about flight options then go do the booking - but you specified the APIs and workflow engine. Strong agents can self-directedly follow long range goals over long time frames, eg “run this business unit for me” or “manage my portfolio”.