Maybe. The problem of "execute task on a cron" is something I've noticed the industry seems to refuse to solve in general, as if intentionally denying this capability for regular people. Even without AI, it's the most basic block of automation, and is always mysteriously absent from programs and frameworks (at least at the basic level). AI only makes it more useful on "then" side, but reliable cron on "if" side is already useful.

> See this starting to happen at work...'We need AI to solve X....no you don't"

Same. Sometimes it is just people overeager to play with new toys, but in our case there is a push from the top & outside too: we are in the process of being subsumed into a larger company (completion due on April the 1st, unless the whole thing is an elaborate joke!) and there is apparently a push from the investors there to use "AI" more in order to not "get left behind the competition".

I'd say that's almost fine if they can start expressing intent correctly and thinking what good looks like. They (or some automated thing if you're building "think for them" type of products instead of "give them tools and teach them to think how to use them") can then freeze determism more and more were useful

I wrote this to help people (not just Devs) reason about agent skills

https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent...

And this one to address the drift of non determism (but depending on the audience it might not resonate as much)

https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/error-compound...

I feel this would be more useful for tasks like "Check website X to see if there are any great deals today". Specifically, tasks that are loosely defined and require some form of intuition.

The problem I'd think, for the average user, would be writing the 'then' part of any deterministic rule — that would require coding, or at least some kind of automation script (visual or otherwise) that's basically coding in a trench coat, which for most people is still a barrier to entry and annoying. I think that's why they'd use AI tbh — they can just describe what they want in natural language with AI.

AI will become this colleague who sucks at everything, but never says no, so he becomes the favorite go-to person.

People are loading huge interpreted environments for stuff that can be done from the command line. Run computations on complex objects where it could be a single machine instruction etc. The trend has been around for a long time.

Standard pendulum swing. Most people want to disengage their thinking circuits most of the time, so problems can't be evaluated one by one. There is no such thing as "this is a good solution for some problems". It can only be "this is a good solution for all problems". When the pendulum swings this far, this hard, it will swing all the way back eventually.

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