I totally agree with this. I have been arguing with folks that current Reactflow based agent workflow tools are destined to fail, and more importantly, missing the point. Stop forcing AI into structured work.
I do think AI "agents" (or blocks as I like to think of them) unlock the potential for solving unstructured but well-scoped tasks. But it is a block of unstructured work that is very unique to a problem, and you are very likely to not find another problem where that block fits. So, trying to productize these AI blocks as re-usable agents is not that great of a value prop. And building a node based workflow tool is even less of a value prop.
However, if you can flip it inside out and build an AI agent that takes a question and outputs a node based workflow. But the blocks in the workflow are structured pre-defined blocks with deterministic inputs and outputs, or a custom AI block that you yourself built, then that is something I can find value in. This is almost like the function calling capabilities of GPT.
Building these block reminds me of the early days of cloud computing. Back then the patterns for high availability were not well-established and people that were sold on the scalability aspects of cloud computing and got onboard without accounting for service failure/availability scenarios and the ephemeral nature of EC2 instances were left burned, complaining about the unfeasibility of cloud computing.
As I'm building out Datayaki.com, a privacy-first AI powered data analytics tool, I ran into typing issues with tweetnacl and other AEAD libraries. So, I decided to build an API/scaffolding on top of tweetnacl that comes with strong type checks, and am hoping others find it useful as well. Inspired by the work done by Skiff (@skiff-org/skiff-crypto), but less frustrating to understand.
Just a bit of good will towards a community of fellow hackers and builders.
I do think AI "agents" (or blocks as I like to think of them) unlock the potential for solving unstructured but well-scoped tasks. But it is a block of unstructured work that is very unique to a problem, and you are very likely to not find another problem where that block fits. So, trying to productize these AI blocks as re-usable agents is not that great of a value prop. And building a node based workflow tool is even less of a value prop.
However, if you can flip it inside out and build an AI agent that takes a question and outputs a node based workflow. But the blocks in the workflow are structured pre-defined blocks with deterministic inputs and outputs, or a custom AI block that you yourself built, then that is something I can find value in. This is almost like the function calling capabilities of GPT.
Building these block reminds me of the early days of cloud computing. Back then the patterns for high availability were not well-established and people that were sold on the scalability aspects of cloud computing and got onboard without accounting for service failure/availability scenarios and the ephemeral nature of EC2 instances were left burned, complaining about the unfeasibility of cloud computing.