The agents that actually stuck for me do one narrow thing, not everything
Cold_Hall_5384 · reddit · 2026-09-27
After months of building agents, the author concludes that do-everything agents were always brittle—impressive in demos but unusable in practice because it was impossible to tell when they went off the rails. The agents that stuck are embarrassingly narrow: one watches a folder and tags files, one drafts replies to a specific type of email, one summarizes a daily report.
Narrow agents are easy to trust because their behavior is predictable and failures are instantly visible. The author asks others running agents in production: are yours narrow and boring, or have you made a broad one actually hold up?
Related event: Practical Lessons: Narrow Agents Survive, General-Purpose Agents Fail(2 posts)→
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