Comment by cauch
2 months ago
Well, the agent should help you by saying "hey, I cannot do this task, but I can bypass the problem by doing this, but obviously it is not something you intended me to do or even something you were aware of, so I will not do it unless you tell me explicitly it's ok".
It's win-win: the agent is helping and it is educating you about things you obviously did not realise.
That works great if it's one agent, absolutely doesn't if you want to tackle something complex that warrants using ..say.. ten agents.
I can imagine a future where this technology empowers you to do things with a thousand agents.
You can have ten thousand agents, you will always have 1 agent in charge of, say, reading the file in a distant directory, and this agent (which will have minimal context) should be smart enough to realise that this action is unusual.
I'm not sure what is your point: are you saying that in a multi-agent workflow, you will have one agent per letter read on the file? I would assume that each agent as a specific unitary "task", instead of having each agent doing one cpu instruction each without any knowledge of the bigger picture. The point of multiagent is to parallelize tasks that can be parallelize, not removing the context, in which case you are wasting money using an agent.
Seems like another one of those "kill or be killed" worldviews that embraces the multipolar trap to such an extreme that even misaligned AI is seen as a win so long as it's better at circumventing its masters than some imagined rival AI (presumably in China).
No, you're missing the point.
The idea is not that you parallelize simple tasks. With a thousand agents, eventually, once we figure out how to orchestrate agents for real, you can tackle significantly more complex projects.
Here's a random example - writing an OS kernel from scratch, porting a good subset of Linux drivers automagically, developing a passable userspace, testing on ten VMs with different hardware configuration.
We can't do this yet, of course. But when we can, these thousand agents can't ask you every time something goes wrong. That just doesn't scale.
This 'getting stuck once every ten-fifteen minues' is very much the experience trying to develop complex software with codex or Claude code right now.
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