is anyone on mastodon actually using AI agents for anything that isn't code/programming? what do you use it for?
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@mattdarveniza someone on the sizzle slack channel does a very similar thing for their company using an agent too
@decryption Claude is slowly but surely identifying the ~24k stamps in my grandfathers stamp collection.
@bok got a sample of the work it's done so far? I assume you got photos of all the stamps and you want back a list of the names of the stamps? what is it identifying?
@decryption it's surprisingly complex. I'm not pulling out and photographing all 24k stamps individually, so I take photos of the pages in an album and the first thing is a computer vision pass to actually figure out what is a stamp on the page and what isn't. It has to deal with overlaps, hard edges in the stamp design, and a whole lot of things.
Then identification. Stamps that are well known will be in its training data, otherwise it has to identify country/value/description and google them.
@bok is it working well? like - do you trust it to make the list properly? I assume you aren't going to manually verify each stamp. What are you going to do with the data when Claude is finished? Pick out the ones it claims are valuable and see if you can sell them?
@decryption
Wikipedia related:
* conversion between language versions: translation + matching links via Wikidata + mapping citation templates
* text shortening for abstracts, plot summaries, etc.
* searching sources
@spas_kolev do you have agents for these? Like they operate in the background without your input?
@decryption sorry, didn't read the 'agents' bit
no agents yet, but I'm considering that
@decryption I’m using agents as part of The Antidote for a few things:
- Generating daily operating reports, to track business performance, cost management and campaign attribution / effectiveness
- Handling support enquiries, where it’ll draft responses for human review based on project context (to discard or edit, never sent automatically)
- Pending: when I add a new city, after it’s gone live it’ll automatically trigger advertising campaigns in that city
My intention is to gradually move up the management stack, to take on some of the CFO, COO and CEO duties. There will always be a human at the helm, but get rid of repetitive stuff and keep guardrails in place.
@casablanca do you reckon there’s anything sizzle related I could feed an agent? I’m struggling to find anything useful for me, but I lack imagination
@decryption are any parts of your job repetitive or involve pattern matching? Those would be candidates. I guess you’ve already got the inspiration sourcing side of things nailed down. Maybe email support like me?
@casablanca I get basically no support emails because everything is automated (the old fashioned way, with a PHP script). Same with my email templates.
Would like to use an agent for marketing/getting new subscribers as I hate that work
@decryption Partly because I'm on Mastodon, and have heard plenty of explanations as to how LLMs work, I have not even been curious enough to try one out. Not once! Mind you there is really no conceivable use for them in my line of work either.
@bencourtice yeah this AI agent stuff is a step above chatting with a bot - they "do" stuff for you. Two non-work related responses I've got here:
- the agent scours the web every few days for jobs I might be interested in based off my resume, searches a wider net of ads than I could do manually
- fed the agent a few gardening PDFs and gave it access to local weather data and it runs daily to inform me when I should water/do certain gardening tasks
Sounds pretty useful
@decryption the former sounds useful, like what search engines did quite well until SEO, advertising, etc enshittiified it all...
@bencourtice a big reason why LLMs are so popular is because of SEO ruining search - they can wade through the crap (most of the time), albeit at the expense of anyone bothering to write new content for the web because they won't get paid to do it
@decryption yes Claude Code for fitness and gardening. I gave the fitness one a pdf of a routine and a tool to access my wifi scale. It tracks my workout log and working weights. I also tracks cardio fitness. The gardening one has the lawnhub pdf and access to local weather data. It tells me what to do when and logs when I do it.
@mattcomi so it runs in the background and sends you notifications?
@decryption no I just run it with remote-control and I just say “workout time” and it consults the schedule and log.
@mattcomi ahh, so kinda like a shell script that you run when you want it and it consults the files in the directory
@decryption
- Hermes for "random shit I need at the time". Often information about a specific product, quick research while outside, deep searches I don't need to be around for (if I was to do X, is there prior art, what are potential issues, what's the approximate cost)
- pi as an annoying manager keeping track of what I work on, continuously reads slack and jira changes, pokes me about things I forgot/promised
- custom Slack webhook at side job where people can ask
for a query and get it in a format needed for a specific application @decryption
@decryption
There's also a use case I'm planning, but not implemented yet - tracking what's happening with some science/product announcement. For example when I read about "breakthrough in Foo", I'd like to be notified in the future when an actual product comes out.
@viraptor I guess seeing as you use them often, you trust the work they do and the results they give you? don't you ever feel like, particularly with the research ones, that it's not got access to good sources of data or isn't influenced/biased by SEO?
@decryption Really niche and this obviously isn't an every day AI automating my life kind of thing, but I collect number plates (“neeeerd!”) and I want to hang them on my garage wall.
I'm using Claude to make 3D models of plate holders, I hate doing 3D CAD stuff as I never understood it well enough to make something decent, so it's easier for me to describe to Claude what I want, give it measurements and it goes and CADs it up for me. It's done a very good job so far.
@georgeharito do you use it via a chat interface? or have you connected an agent to the CAD app to make it for you?
@decryption Here’s a holder I made for a 1979 Swiss motorcycle plate from Nidwalden. Probably one of the more complex plate holders I’ve generated so far.
3 media files
@decryption I'm using it via the Claude plugin for VS Code (lol) on my Linux Mint Thinkpad T480s, I've given it access to the working directory and it's using OpenSCAD to create the CAD files – I just open up what it made in that working directory in OpenSCAD and check out what it's generated. When I'm happy with that, I get it to export it to .STL files so I can get them printed like prototypes.
I have a lot of plates in all different sizes, the idea for me is to get these done as protytpes from 3D printers local to me (via treatstock.com) and once I am happy with everything, large volume prints to be done via PCBway and one-offs locally, if required.
@georgeharito pretty cool it can use OpenSCAD directly - is that a GUI app or a command line thing?
@decryption I have set up 20+ agents of different skills and access to different data sources and use it as experts in my projects. Skills like Marketing, Legal, Finance, and specific to systems I consult on, they have access to all documentation on the systems and can answer questions about them.Saving me a lot of time.
@decryption Each agent has a md file I have refined with what I require from them and fine-tuned after their responses. All this I drive via Claude Code.
@gzagas yeah but what does it actually do? just answer your questions? or does it make marketing material that you publish?
@decryption both. Providing me with ideas, and then It helps me draft marketing material and creates project plans in unison to my ProjMgt agent.
@gzagas give me more info about the Marketing "agent" you've got going - what does it do?
@decryption Depends on how agentic you want to get. Examples for us:
- I'm using ChatGPT to help find jobs to apply to using a number of criteria and cross-referenced against my CV; each search is done automatically on a few different days - one per type of job I'm looking for. It's often turning up roles that I don't see on Seek/LinkedIn.
- Even more mundane, my husband uses it to feed our shopping receipts (Aldi, Woolworths, Coles) into – to do things like isolate where we could save on some purchases, where there might be additional discounts, or if certain periodic items we have to refresh on (shampoo, toothpaste, etc.) have come on special. Even things like that is useful.
- Both of us use it to help stay across complex medical items. Yes, that means giving it an understanding of our prescriptions and various health readings, but the summaries it can prepare are very useful in terms of giving us conversational trackers with GPs and specialists.
@backupbear so these are actual agents? not just typing a prompt into a chat and getting a response? these things run in the background for you?
@decryption The first two are scheduled executions – the medical one is more adhoc for me. For my husband though he's got watched folders that trigger ChatGPT reviews whenever he copies device data (sleep, overnight O2 levels) into it.
@backupbear so do you trust it with the medical data he feeds into it? Like how do you know it's not making shit up? Or overlooking something?
@decryption it's technically work-related but I have one that scours the internet daily for feedback on a feature I'm building in Canva. Mostly out of morbid curiosity/vanity but I have fixed some UX issues based on what it surfaced.