Real-World Agents
Case studies: coding, support, research, ops.
26 posts · showing 11–20
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The Use Cases Agents Genuinely Solve Today
A criterion beats a list: complete inputs, a mechanical check, bounded blast radius. Everything clearing that bar is working in production — and the largest realized value is the least discussed.
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The Support Org After Agents: Fewer Tickets, Harder Tickets
The residual isn't a random sample of the old work — it's specifically the hardest cases, with the easy ones that used to provide pacing and training removed. Support got here first.
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What an Agent-Run Sprint Actually Looks Like
Not the same sprint faster — an inversion. Most of the week becomes specifying and reviewing, review becomes the constraint, and integration becomes the new time sink.
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Autonomous Refactors: What Makes One Safe Enough to Merge
Refactoring is what agents do best and what most easily produces an unreviewable disaster — for the same reason. One property separates the two, and it isn't how hard the change looks.
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The Ticket-to-PR Agent: Which Half of the Job It Does Well
The split wasn't by difficulty — some intricate tickets went fine and some trivial ones went badly. One question predicts it, and acting on it improves something other than your agent.
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What "End-to-End Development Agent" Actually Means Right Now
The phrase covers demos that differ by orders of magnitude. Naming the eight stages shows which two are genuinely autonomous — and why chaining them is qualitatively harder than any one of them.
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The Inbox Agent That Filed Everything Correctly and Lost Two Questions
Every filing decision was defensible, and two unanswered questions still vanished into the archive. The bug wasn't the prompt — it was that the agent judged messages while acting on conversations.
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The QA Agent That Wrote Tests That Always Passed
Coverage climbed, the build stayed green, and a real regression sailed through. An agent asked for passing tests writes passing tests — and the easiest passing test verifies nothing.
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The Sales-Research Agent and the Problem of Stale Facts
Every fact in the brief had been true. None was labelled with when — so someone opened a call congratulating a person on a role they'd left a year ago.
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The Documentation Agent That Actually Kept Docs in Sync
Ask an agent "do the docs need updating?" on every PR and you get noise reviewers close unread. Trigger on contract changes, forbid new prose, cite the source line — and run the corpus-wide contradiction check first.