The fantasy is irresistible. You build up an AI agent, give it a list of tasks, close your laptop, and wake up to a quietly conquered to do list. It feels like hiring a night shift version of yourself who never gets tired, never complains, and is ridiculously cheap.
And sometimes, it works. Files get sorted. Notes get summarized. A draft appears where there was a blank page.
But then sometimes it deletes your inbox.
The problem is not that AI agents are dumb, it's that they can be too overconfident. Each individual step they take might be mostly right, but when you put them in charge of ten, twenty, fifty decisions stacked on top of each other, small errors snowball. A misunderstood instruction early on can turn into a mess three actions later. By the time you notice, the damage is done.
This is why so many people describe them as toddlers. It's not an insult, toddlers are capable, they can surprise you, they can even be helpful. But you do not leave them alone with sharp objects and your tax documents.
There is also a strange psychological twist. The creators of these AI agents promise us freedom, but in practice, you find yourself checking logs before bed and checking progress during dinner. Half trusting, half bracing for the worst. If you have to monitor it constantly, are you really off the clock?
Where agents shine is in narrow and clear low-stakes tasks. Summarize this. Pull that data. Draft a first pass. But they stumble when context stretches over days, when relationships are involved, when tone and timing matter.
This doesn't mean the AI agent dream is dead. We might get to a point in the future where AI agents can handle complex tasks autonomously. For now, we need to see them as being more "human" than advertised. AI agents are not autonomous coworkers. They are energetic assistants who still need supervision.
