Gave my agent a cron job and full autonomy — it has no idea what to do with itself
impact_founder · reddit · 2026-09-22
The author set up an agent on a cron schedule with broad tool access and a single instruction to "find useful work and do it" — no fixed task, no scoped goal. It failed: the agent either did nothing meaningful or invented busywork disconnected from anyone's needs. The post asks whether anyone has actually made a goal-free agent productive, or whether every real setup ends up scoping it down — pointing to a consensus that autonomy without explicit goals yields no output.
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