Agents Everywhere, Apparently

For the last few years companies have been working hard to convince us that AI is going to replace huge swathes of jobs and workers. This isn't cynical marketing from a few outliers, it seems to be a genuine belief held at the top of some of the biggest companies in the world, and there's enough real-world output to make the claim sound plausible on paper. Yet every time I actually sit and use one of these tools, or watch someone else use one, I see the same thing happen. It makes things up. It gets sidetracked. It forgets simple instructions halfway through a task. It builds the wrong thing entirely and then presents it back to you with full confidence.So where exactly are all these replaced jobs going to come from, when the tool that's supposed to be doing the replacing can't reliably finish what you asked it to do without a person sat next to it checking the output?The latest version of this story is agents. The world-changing breakthrough of feeding an LLM a constant stream of…