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Originally published on Towards AI.
A standalone article from the series “AI and You”.
You’ve been promised the same thing as everyone else: that artificial intelligence no longer just answers questions — it does the work on its own. You assign a task, step out for a coffee, and come back when it’s done. That’s the promise of AI “agents,” talked about everywhere. It sounds great. The problem is what happens when nobody’s watching while the AI does the job.
An example a developer shared in the comments of a technical blog (article in Spanish) illustrates it perfectly. They asked an agentic AI to display a customer’s orders on a web page. The AI solved it in a way that worked… and was a disaster: for each order, it fired an independent query to the database. A hundred thousand orders, a hundred thousand queries. The code compiled, the tests passed, and the screen showed the correct data. There was just one detail: it took twenty seconds to load and saturated the database, whereas a professional would have solved it with a single query in half a second. It worked up close; it was useless from a distance.
