Are AI agents actually doing a good job, or are we overhyping them?

I’ve been experimenting with AI agents lately, and I’m honestly starting to wonder how useful they really are in production. The demos look impressive: Give an agent a goal → it plans the steps It can use tools/APIs It can browse, write code, analyze data, send emails, etc. Multiple agents can even work together But when you actually use them for real tasks, things can get messy. Sometimes an agent spends 10 steps doing something that could have been done in 2. Sometimes it gets stuck in a loop. Sometimes it confidently makes the wrong decision. And with more complex workflows, reliability seems to drop quickly. So I'm curious about people's real-world experience, not demos: Are AI agents actually saving you significant time/money? Or are they currently more like an impressive assistant that still needs constant supervision? For those using agents in production: What tasks are they handling? How autonomous are they really? What failure rate are you seeing? Are multi-agent systems actually better than a single well-designed agent? And most importantly, would you trust an agent to complete an important task without checking its work? Would love to hear experiences from people actually building/using them.