alt Hacker NewsAgents seem to be useful for quickly mapping a problem space through trial&error + throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Anything grindy. Reverse engineering. Performance optimizations.
That's where swarms shine I think. But that's a much much much smaller problem space than what these agents are being sold for.
Right, the key being a fast feedback loop. I have full confidence that the same LLMs that can do these crazy math proofs could also do crazy biology, even cancer research, but they simply don’t have the cycle time low enough because they require actual physical experiments, often on living things, often over long time horizons. Even if you perfectly automated a lab, made thousands of them, you’d still be unable to match the speed of iteration that one gets with pure math and computing problems.