On the usefulness of AI agents<br>– Erik Johannes Husom

On the usefulness of AI agents

08 Apr 2026Agentic AI is having its moment (or its decade, as some have put it). I have been researching LLM-powered agents for the last two years, but research (involving publicly funded projects and academic peer review) is slow, and cannot keep up with the breakneck speed of the development and deployment going on in the tech industry as a whole. Especially not when AI tools are used to assist in programming new tools and frameworks. Small-scale experiments are quickly made obsolete by both new frontier models and ground-breaking tools from large companies. It is easier than ever to experiment with state-of-the-art AI models (it is simply a matter of connecting to an API), but having the time to conduct robust experiments while staying relevant is challenging.

Even though the speed of development is extreme, the feeling of urgency is dampened by the universal access to the technology. Most improvements have so far found their way to open-weights models and open-source software. No moat is defended for long, and the competitors regularly overtake each other. A lot of research is made public, and even closely kept secrets can be leaked through very simple mistakes. I have little fear of being «left behind» in the AI race, neither as a citizen nor as a researcher, because the technology is so accessible. Business managers and CEOs apparently see things differently, judging by the persistent urge to adopt AI as fast as possible, without properly assessing why, how, and at what cost. These tools are still brand new, and there is a huge diversity of advice on how to use them effectively. I'm particularly intrigued by how divergent viewpoints can be on the perceived usefulness of AI agents, which is what prompted me to write this post.

Absence of agents

There are many things I find fascinating about AI agents, but the most interesting thing of all is how little of use they are to me in my free time. At work, they are in one sense essential, because I make a living out of studying them. As a part of that, I experiment with coding agents, to understand how they can and will affect software engineering; there's no doubt that computer programming is changed forever. But when I close my work laptop, I don't feel any urge to ask an AI agent to do something – anything – for me.

I wonder whether my perceived lack of need for AI agents acting on my behalf is either an expression of being in a privileged position, a consequence of what I focus on in life, or whether they are actually not as useful as they are advertised to be. In many ways I'm obviously privileged – having access to free education, extensive social services, free healthcare, and freedom from censorship makes it much easier to live a stable, safe life with limited need to fight with powerful institutions to uphold my rights. I'm mentioning this because a lot of anecdotal evidence indicates how LLMs have helped people solve various challenges involving overwhelming bureaucratic processes. Since I don't face such problems (at the moment), I cannot speak much of the usefulness of AI agents in those situations, and I'm clearly privileged because of that. I will, however, comment that there's usually a difference between the benefits on the individual scale and the consequences on a collective scale.

Regarding more everyday matters, I follow a philosophy of digital minimalism, which has the natural effect that there is minimal amount if things I want to achieve with digital devices. This is perhaps one if the main reasons for why AI agents feel superfluous to me. They are (still) confined to the digital sphere, and given that I have little I want to accomplish there, I obviously won't feel the need for them. Additionally, as outlined in my post on outsourcing thinking, I have the attitude that certain mundane activities are healthy for us to do, and therefore I have less inclination for automating processes. I observe many people who are spending much time and money on using these tools, but it almost invariably seems to involve increasing the amount of time spent on the computer, rather than less.

Productivity and value

As mentioned above, the reason for examining and presenting my own standpoint, is to contribute to the discussion around the value of such agents. I notice that influential people like Simon Willison comments on the obvious demand and value that AI agents bring. The popularity of AI tools like OpenClaw indicates high demand, but I'm not sure if we can judge its value on popularity. There are enough examples of things that are both popular and detrimental.

Ed Zitron expressed on BlueSky earlier this year a strong view on the limited usefulness of AI, by questioning whether all AI can do is make «[s]ome engineers do some stuff faster», among other things. One responder observed that Zitron was simply describing a productivity increase without...