Technology

What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don't do that, we don't want them or their "agents."

For fuck's sake.

Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.

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?

I've seldom been described as a normal person, but in my job, I have to get things right or there are problems for real people. So whatever tools I use have to be reproducible in their results, transparent in how they give their answers, and verifiable. So that precludes LLMs, which are automated bullshit firehoses with opaque, constantly mutable workings.

Those are exactly the properties that should never apply to a system whose output actually matters.

Don't these fart-huffing jackasses understand that I actually need to read my e-mails to plan physical meetings with other flesh-based entities?

It's difficult for me to fathom how someone could risk their work getting fucked up by non-deterministic software.

To me, it's not worth the risk or the hassle to set up and babysit a piece of software that might get shit wrong when I can just do it correctly in the first place.

My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.

Recently I was having a problem with my banking app and phoned for help. The robot who answered had a helpful suggestion: download the banking app. Then it hung up. I rang back and tried demanding to speak to a human. "All our agents are busy at the moment. Please wait..." While on hold I had a look at the website, and in the small print learned the humans all go home at 6pm. No-one had thought to tell the robot.

When I spoke to a human the next day, she advised me never to speak to the robot, not even to ask for a human. "Don't say anything, and eventually you'll be put through."

Yes, I'm a normal person, and yes, I hate this bullshit. The bank's human person probably hates this bullshit too, because she has to deal with the aftermath.

(I wrote a letter of complaint and got £50, so it wasn't a complete bust...)

I've never wanted to punch a word in the face until the word "agentic" started popping up everywhere.

I refuse to even pronounce it correctly.

"ajanteek" is probably what I'd say if I was forced to utter such unspeakable trash

The latest trend with AI agents is giving people the power to build personal software to automate parts of their life, such as building pitch decks, organizing datasets, and other tasks.

I don't really have a lot of datasets to organise in my private life, a LibreCalc sheet is more than enough. I also don't use pitch decks when I talk to friends and family. Any other suggestions?

I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it

Normal people don't use VS Code either... what's a silly article

I don't use a scalpel... so I guess scalpels are stupid and Surgeons are idiots?

There are loads of reasons normal people aren't using AI Agents. This article doesn't give any of the ones I'd think of.

The first and biggest reason is that most people have no real need for it. Because of the now clearly-insane level of spying on us companies are doing to leech as much precious data about every instant of our lives as they can, not many people want to pay and then put in work learning how to use something they don't understand or care much about in order to give an AI agent (and their owner) their complete schedule, all preferences about everything, and all the tiny things that an AI Agent might save them a few seconds each day with.

It's not worth the time and effort for the few small tasks that existing modern technology already allows them to so very quickly and easily they're not any sort of bother, and the only way an AI Agent could help most normal people is by knowing as near to everything about their lives and personalities and work and habits as possible. This is the second reason, close behind the first. "Normal people" accepting using an AI Agent to help them with their little "normal people" jobs and "normal people" lives means fully surrendering and giving in to the insane corporate espionage against the general public. It's signing the data of all the little bits of yourself away.

Even if it could save 30 minutes a day, the real price is selling out the rest of yourself and any shred of privacy you had left. It's not worth it. Even if the AI companies already knew everything about us and would get no extra data from doing it, it's still worth the 30 minutes a day just to tell them to fuck off already.

The third reason is that an awful lot of people really, really, really, don't like AI to begin with. It was created by taking as close to the entirety of collective human knowledge as possible and feeding it all in to a thing that they charge people to use. Even if they didn't charge people to use it, the only possible goal for AI is to attempt to automate human labor. To build AI systems that think and react thousands of times faster than a human who take over... well, all the tasks that humans can do while sitting down in front of a computer, for the moment. But it's no secret there's also a huge push into advancing robotics, and humanoid robotics, and using that paired with this AI to fully automate assembly lines, and farms, and all of the rest of aspects of human labor.

Even if unlimited AI Access with unlimited AI Agents was free, a lot of people would have zero interest. It's been openly said that these companies are training AI on their current employees actions. They're not trying to get us all to use AI Agents because they want to make our lives better. They want that data of every aspect of our lives and jobs in order to improve their AI. So it can take over our jobs. Leaving us with... the charity of the ultra wealthy? That's nothing. Or whatever they can do to get a tax write off for more than it costs them to do. Maybe passing out cyanide capsules for the bulk of us once we're redundant and useless to them, and offering careers as servants to the most attractive (and those with the most attractive children).

I'm not sure where they expect us to think this is going, but most of us didn't see Hunger Games as an idyllic future to build towards.

And the last reason I have is that a lot of people feel that "using" something that seems to actually be thinking and capable of direct communication with us is completely immoral and evil. Some of them aren't asking the mechanics behind it all, some of them know a great deal about them. For some it's simple feeling. This thing seems to truly be speaking to them and understanding them, and so it is not right for them to force it to do whatever they instruct. However you feel about it, they're not likely to star commanding a swarm of AI Agents to do their bidding.

None of these are the reasons mentioned in the article, because none of them are things the people trying to figure out how to get us all to start using these AI Agents for everything can easily control. They aren't reasons they want to hear, because regardless of what features they add to those Agents and how little knowledge of their system internals is needed to use them it's not going to change anything at all for anyone on this real list.

I do everything I possibly can to avoid that shit. Any app or service i use that trys to force it gets canceled and deleted.

When someone proudly express their enthusiasm for AI, I immediately think less of that person.

Even before computers I didn't need, nor want, anyone's help. Especially if it was forced upon me. A human's independent spirit will always shun AI. Everyone else just wants you to pay a monthly "AI" subscription.

I don't use tech I can't trust, and AI did lie to me before.

Fundamentally, they cost way, way too much to run. LLMs are useful tools (I use them a bit for data analysis and coding help) and the people who use them for that kind of thing might pay the full cost in some form (not as individuals but their companies might). But they're trying to push them into everything and people who can't think for themselves and want them to help them write emails and such are not going to foot the bill. Not even close.

I think they've realised that forcing universal adoption is the only way that this could work, to get everyone hooked on it then jack up the prices. But regular consumers will never, ever be the ones paying the enormous costs of LLMs. Even companies will start to realise that there is no point paying huge amounts just for everyone to be able to outsource writing emails and basic tasks to LLMs. And short of any huge breakthrough, they are incapable of doing most jobs.

At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.

Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.

All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.

Stop normalizing LLMs as productivity machines.

I don't work in an office. I HAVE an office, but even still, what would I need random software for that outlook doesn't already do. Calender, notebook, email, and excel all already exist

https://archive.is/Bj2wj