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Andreas F. Hoffmann's avatar

Thank you for sharing your learning frim that experiments! That is really useful first hand experience and helps to navigate around certain pitfalls right from the beginning. It's said at the beginning of the year whis will be the year of AI-Agents. Until now most people only write about agents or call some workflow automation "agentic". You did instead try to build a real thing and that has value! 🙋🏼‍♂️

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Karen Spinner's avatar

Thank you! I think the line between agentic AI and plain old automation is very blurry right now…and I’m very skeptical that it’s ready to be widely deployed or left unsupervised.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon actually built an entire software company staffed with AI agents and they struggled to complete basic office tasks: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2025/agent-company

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Andreas F. Hoffmann's avatar

Actually, even as your experiment was somehow brittle in its results it was encouraging for me. I think it's a matter of the right combination of task, scaffolding, context engineering and memory integration to build working agents. Not shout if it's worth the effort and runtime cost (APIs) but I found it inspiring as I'm thinking about it for a while... 😊👍🏼

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Karen Spinner's avatar

I definitely encourage you to build your own agents! It was a fun experiment, and the API costs were pretty reasonable, all things considered. Adding a database and memory weighting would likely have improved my results. 😄

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BehindThePrompt's avatar

Great read! I’ve not ventured into AI Agents that work together but I’ve a team of custom GPTs and they are also like a bunch of interns!

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Karen Spinner's avatar

Interesting! I think the line between agents and automation is really blurry…hopefully, your GPTs behave (unlike my agents) 😆

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Enemies_Of_Art's avatar

Your team seemed to turn adversarial, any thoughts on why this may have happened?

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Karen Spinner's avatar

The last set of prompts with the personality quirks kind of set them up to fail. 😆 For better results, I think I’ll need to explicitly encourage collaboration when describing each role.

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Enemies_Of_Art's avatar

That makes sense to me. You want individuality, but also a strong group identity to create an environment where the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Go team go … no different than human teams really. 👍

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