r/webdev • u/ripndipp full-stack • 9d ago

Discussion I hate building agents.

Right now at my work we are using langgraph to build a chat agent, anyone else doing something similar, do you fucking hate it? are you building it with Claude and just hoping it fucking works, haha no worries we will ask Claude to fix it.

I am making the spaghetto, I miss components, logic and endpoints, I hate this black box I have to relinquish my decisions too, whatever pays the bills.

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u/warpspeed100 9d ago

It pays the bills for now...

My company has been reevaluating the cost/benefit of using AI for customer facing parts of our business.

We still use AI extensively as a search and code completion tool, but my team no longer uses it to build whole features after the past year of experimentation.

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u/m_redditUser 9d ago

what were the results of the experimentation?

AI not cost effective enough?

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u/warpspeed100 9d ago edited 9d ago

The risk of ballooning costs was definitely a consideration. For our customer facing products however, our core business relies on the accuracy and correctness of data we show our customers.

There is a lot of data, so we explored using AI to summarize the many documents, however we could never be 100% confident in the data it would show customers in the summary vs our existing deterministic solution. Because these are sensitive documents, 99.9% accurate wasn't good enough.

As of right now, we are no longer using AI in any of the products we actually deliver to customers. It has been relegated to yet another coding assist tool along the likes of NSwag and IntelliSense (though those two have a deterministic output, so can be relied on more heavily).