The biggest lie in AI agents right now is that more autonomy automatically means more value

I actually think the opposite is true lol the more autonomous an agent becomes, the more expensive every mistake gets when an agent is just generating text, bad outputs are annoying when an agent starts: * sending emails * editing records * touching customer data * operating browsers * triggering workflows small mistakes suddenly become operational problems and what I keep noticing is that people optimize for: look how much my agent can do instead of: how safely can it fail that second question matters way more in production some of the best systems I’ve seen are barely “autonomous” at all. they: * ask for confirmation * stop when uncertain * validate before acting * escalate edge cases * stay inside very narrow boundaries boring? yes actually useful? way more I learned this the hard way with browser-based automations. the demos looked incredible right up until real-world randomness showed up. partial page loads, stale sessions, tiny UI changes. the agent wasn’t stupid, the environment was unstable once I stopped chasing more autonomy and focused on making execution predictable, things improved fast. moved toward more controlled browser setups, played around with hyperbrowser and suddenly simpler agents started outperforming the “smarter” ones starting to think the future isn’t fully autonomous agents it’s highly constrained agents operating inside well-designed systems curious if others are feeling this shift too or if I’m becoming overly cynical lol