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Comment by robotswantdata | Hacker News Reader

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive.

Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

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Lets go back to waterfall even harder and write the super correct and detailed design doc.

You jest but this is precisely what we have done. Our customers have downright rejected SCRUM. It is considered a waste of money.

At a recent AI workshop management made clear that they see AI as rendering sprints and scrums obsolete, that Kanban makes a lot more sense, and that estimating effort/story-points is also becoming meaningless. Which is a strong silver lining if you ask me.

I want to understand how AI leads to this outcome.

I think it's to do with the bottleneck shifting away from code generation and towards specifying and reviewing and integrating code. The process of working with AI agents to produce specs, tech specs, code, and reviews lends itself more to a flow-based structure (like kanban).

Bear in mind this is a B2B enterprise company with a mix of legacy and greenfield. And management has invested heavily into designing a robust spec/context-based workflow for using agents. Might be different elsewhere.

Personally I don't think scrums, planning, retros etc were better than kanban even before AI, at least if you have switched-on, motivated and smart people on your team. They actually made things less agile, and story-points give a false sense of predictability. Imo the crucial factor may be that AI agents are smart and switched-on (with the right context).

Its a good excuse to move away from a shitty process, I'll take it! Fuck SCRUM, fuck Agile. No one was doing it anyway. I had to quit an Agile job because I was shipping shit without ever getting a lick of feedback, and this was not some webdev low stakes work, it was for planning expensive real world installations.

The next AI I’m working on is going be amazing and change the world. Please back my series A you won’t regret it.

(Let’s not talk about my blockchain startup and my VR startup and my NFT startup). My house is nice though.

Are you sure about that one?

What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans?

In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

Obviously your support chatbot with talk to your flavor of clawd that will call Claude Code that will code a solution that will be reviewed by Codex that will merge and release it and then will ping clawd that will send an email to the user announcing that their issue has been fixed. /s just in case

Most support agents lack... well, agency. If you connect a chatbot to an FAQ, that's exactly what you get. Just another instance of enterprise software being badly designed, badly written etc. It doesn't mean that it's actually an impossible problem.

They won't ever give agents the ability to actually do things for customers that can impact the company in some kind of negative fashion. At least not willingly.

That's sort of the whole point of talking to customer service though. Getting something done that you want that involves them having to do work for you. AKA you taking value from the company.

So yeah they're basically always going to be useless garbage if put together according to business requirements.

Other services should just be automated already.

They'll do the same thing we do in software development - proper sandboxing, context curation, reviews on high impact actions. I presume real customer service is really expensive, as I've seen many companies prefer to just quickly refund, or drop you as a customer entirely, rather than fix your problem. It can't get much worse than that.

I’ve been involved in building a system that reads structured data from a special form of contracts from a specific industry. Prices, clauses, pick up, delivery, etc. A couple hundred datapoints per contract. We had many discussions around how to present and sell an imperfect system. The thing is, the potential customers are today transcribing the contracts manually and we quickly realized that people make a ton of mistakes doing that. It became obvious when we were working on assertion datasets ourself. It’s not a perfect system and you have to consider how you use the data (aggregating for price indexing for instance), but we’re actually doing better than what people are achieving when they have to transcribe data for hours a day.

The voice agents in development right now feel 100x the current chatbots deployed by companies.

I had same opinion till a few months ago, now would prefer the [redacted company so as to not give free marketing] AI agent. You’ll start seeing this wave in around 3-6 months as most are in trial

Just sounds like gassing because you are invested in it yourself.

It's always different this time. It always will only take a couple more months or years. And then people move on to the next hype topic.

> It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

True, but also there are perception biases that lead us to believe progress is exponential, even though it might as well be an S-curve.

I'm having a hard time finding the right terms, but I'm sure there is some bias to think that "the line goes up".

Well ain't this a chronological oddity. Always 6 months away!

I don't want Codex dammit! I'm a Claude Code man.

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