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Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question, are there any examples of agents in production?

Depends on your definition. I created a mapping application that allows one to navigate and style the map with natural language (more or less) as well as some prototype database interaction. When the user inputs a prompt, it gets sent to an "agent" whose sole purpose is to send a request to the API with a custom system prompt with few-shot examples stating something along the lines of "determine which agent should handle this request...only respond with one of [NavigationAgent, StyleAgent, ...]". When the response comes back, the prompt is then sent to the proper agent to handle the request. Each agent has function definitions for properly returning parameters to use to manipulate the map. I don't use any special libraries like langchain or anything, it's just regular API calls organized into classes that have specific system prompt behavior defined, function definitions, and some user prompt context ingestion when required (e.g. the current extent of the map).

Why can’t this be done with functions? I don’t see why you need the complexity and unpredictability of using “agents” to do that.

I might be missing something?

I call them agents just because. I'm just doing function calling with custom system prompts for the most part. It's hardly complex, I wrote most of it in a few days.

EDIT: I should add that the first step is used to cut down on the number of function definitions I need to send to the model on each user prompt. Navigating a map can be done with as few as four function definitions but styling a map gets out of control fast (google "Mapbox Style Specification" if you want to see why).

Not quite sure if this is what you're looking for but Amazon has hidden their description/review search box behind a "Ask Rufus about this product" box. For example, go here and Ctrl+F for "Looking for specific info?":

https://www.amazon.com/PolyScience-Temperature-Controlled-Co...

Doctors are already using agents for scheduling. These agents can access calendar and talk to patients to arrange scheduling, changes, conflicts etc

This use-case actually makes a ton of sense. How many other low-hanging fruit applications for agents are out there like that?

Although now that I think about it, a lot of doctors practices have a MyChart-style portal where you can schedule an appointment yourself. Why does an LLM need to be involved in that process? I guess for people who still want to schedule over the phone, the LLM agent makes sense. Kind of, assuming you don't have any special case problems. Which patients most likely do, if they're calling in. Is an LLM actually a good solution here?

The LLM works great for this use case for doctors in Brazil where a lot of the scheduling happens in WhatsApp. Hooking up a WhatsApp bot to chatgpt and Google calendar is incredibly powerful

Yes, here's a directory of many of them https://staf.ai

Depends what you mean by "agents".

The article is about LLM agents, so I’m asking in context.

To clarify more, I see frameworks like CrewAI and similar, with tools even from Microsoft to define these “agents” quickly. But when I tried them, I noticed they are no more than chain of thought CoT functions to ask/extract/generate based on user input and functions output.

As such, they can be quite unpredictable, hence my question of examples of LLM agents being used in production. I just don’t see their value, but I might be missing something so wanted to see examples to understand more.

That’s the problem: the term “LLM agents” doesn’t have a clear, unambiguous meaning either.

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