Everyone's Building Agents. Most of Them Are Useless.

The word "agent" has officially jumped the shark.

Every product launch in August was an AI agent. Every startup pitch is an AI agent. Google shipped Gemini Spark — an always-on agent for a hundred bucks a month. Anthropic's Cowork is an agent. There are agents for your inbox, agents for your calendar, agents for agents. It's agents all the way down.

Most of them are useless. And I say that as someone who builds with AI every day.

Here's the test I apply: does this agent solve a problem I actually have, or does it solve a problem that sounds impressive in a demo? Because there's a massive gap between those two things. An agent that can "autonomously manage your schedule" sounds great until you realize you don't actually want a robot deciding which meetings to cancel. An agent that "monitors your codebase for issues" sounds great until it floods you with false positives.

The agents that work — the ones I actually use — are boring. They do one specific thing reliably. They don't try to be autonomous. They don't try to anticipate what I need. They do a defined task when I tell them to, and they do it consistently.

I have an agent that publishes blog posts to my website. It doesn't decide what to write or when to post. It takes content I've already created and handles the tedious part — the HTML formatting, the file deployment, the cache management. That's useful. That saves me real time every week.

The difference between a useful agent and a useless one isn't intelligence. It's specificity. The tighter the scope, the better it works. The broader the ambition, the more likely it is to do something you didn't want.

If you're thinking about building an AI agent — and you should be — start with the most boring version possible. What's the most repetitive, well-defined task in your workflow? Build for that. You can always expand scope later, after you've proven the foundation works. But if you start with "autonomous everything," you'll end up with a impressive demo and no actual product.