Alex Hyett

Posted on Jun 29 • Originally published at alexhyett.com on Apr 26

Are AI Agents Worth It?

#ai #automation

I have been watching a lot of videos this week around AI agents and what people are doing with them. I never jump on anything when it is in the middle of a hype cycle and prefer to let the dust settle before looking into things. Otherwise, you can end up wasting a lot of time on things that aren't worth it.

OpenClaw rose to fame when it was released a few months ago becoming the most starred repository on GitHub. It currently has 363k stars, even React only has 245k stars.

It made headlines but not always for the best reasons, from their skills containing malware to agents going rouge and writing disparaging blog posts or achieving "inbox zero" in the fastest way possible.

Apparently things have got better since the creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger got acqui-hired by OpenAI. ClawHub the skills database now has security scans on all the skills and there have been several security vulnerabilities that have now been patched.

There are however still a lot of complaints from users on Reddit about how unreliable OpenClaw is and how many of their operations stop working after a few days.

Naturally there has been a flurry of competitor agents that have been released that claim to be better than OpenClaw:

Hermes Agent
Perplexity Computer
PicoClaw
ZeroClaw
Nanobot
NanoClaw
Nullclaw

Hermes in particular looks quite mature (in relative terms) and seems to be easier to setup than OpenClaw.

What people are doing with AI agents? #

There seems to be no end for uses for AI agents that people are developing. The top ones I have seen:

Daily briefing - Get a customised morning briefing with information from various sources such as what is on your calendar for the day and top news stories.
Email triage - We get bombarded with so many emails, some people let the LLM sort them and even respond in some cases!
Data extraction - converting data from emails and reports into a JSON format for uses with other services.
Research tasks - This could be doing research for content creation or for job applications.

In some cases, people are using tools like OpenClaw for vibe-coding instead of using Claude Code or other coding agents.

A lot of the use cases I have seen could have been done with a script and a cron job. Obviously talking to an AI on your phone to set these things up is a lot easier than doing it manually on computer, so I see the appeal, but you always have to be aware of the ongoing token cost.

I can imagine that vibe coding a tool this way is likely to use considerably more tokens than using something like Claude Code.

Personal considerations #

For me personally, it would be useful for getting ideas for YouTube videos and being able to outsource some research.

I wouldn't ever give an AI agent access to my emails even read-only. AI agents are still vulnerable to prompt injection so any information you give it has the ability to be leaked to others or can perform unwanted tasks on your system.

AI agents should always be completely isolated from your computer and your data. Don't give it access to anything you wouldn't be happy being leaked on the internet or completely deleted.

I am thinking of setting up Hermes on an isolated VM on my server and giving it very limited to access to some services on my home network to see what can be automated.

The key is to always maintain a human in the loop for anything the agent does and treat any information the agents gets from the outside world as hostile.

Have you started using AI agents at all? If so I would love to hear what your use cases are.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

As I mentioned last time I was getting quite burnout, so I took a couple of weeks off over Easter. Naturally there is a quite a backlog of interesting stuff to cover this week.

📝 Article - Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech - Not overly surprising that the big ad tech companies are pro age verification. Expect even more targeted advertising.

📝 Article - Mistral AI Releases Forge - I am surprised that so many companies have been freely giving all their data over to big AI companies. It is good to see there are some more options coming up for models trained on private data.

📝 Article - Have a fucking website - This annoys me so much too. I don't have Facebook or Instagram which makes it annoying when businesses don't have a website to list basic information.

📝 Article - Despite Doubts, Federal Cyber Experts Approved Microsoft Cloud Service - I have used both AWS and Azure, the latter definitely seems more cobbled together than AWS.

📝 Article - The Old Internet is Still Here - I have been adding more and more personal blogs to my own RSS feed. There is more out there than just the big tech companies.

📝 Article - Some things just take time - AI is making it easier to create software but often it doesn't last. Good software like everything takes time to make.

🛠️ Tool - Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator - With LocalStack's community edition getting sunset last month it is good to see alternatives popup. Also, checkout MiniStack.

📝 Article - You are not your job - The layoffs in tech are still brutal with AI seeming to replace what it means to be a software engineer.

📝 Article - A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon - I loved playing this game as a kid and recently enjoyed playing it again on my iPad thanks to Apple Arcade. It is so well optimized, written by 1 person in assembly!

📝 Article - TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression - This doesn't make AI models any smaller, but it does reduce the memory consumption of context windows. Anything that makes local AI more feasible is a plus.

📝 Article - Personal Encyclopedias - This is a cool idea. I am not sure about passing this sort of thing off to AI but as long as it is heavily reviewed it could be worthwhile.

🧩 Demo - ISBN Visualization - Something similar to this came up last year. This one is from Anna's Archive and is still quite cool.

📝 Article - If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos - The deadline for this just passed. I hope you managed to opt out in time. I moved all my private repos to a self-hosted ForgeJo last year as I knew this was coming.

🧩 Demo - Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables - It is down to 42.8% at the time of writing. This is obviously going to vary a lot on the weather at the time.

📝 Article - Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week - I am not sure I could trust anyone who would wear smart glasses.

📝 Article - Who's Teaching the Juniors? - I might need to get back to teaching on YouTube to do my bit to help. How else will juniors learn.

🎓 Guide - I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog - This looks like a cool tool for simple diagrams.

📝 Article - Do your own writing - I always write my own blog posts and video scripts, otherwise it is not going to be unique. Writing always helps me think as well, why would you want to outsource that?

🎓 Guide - Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018) - This is genius!

📝 Article - The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode - The number of things uncovered in the Claude Code source code is hilarious. You can really tell the whole thing is vibe coded.

📝 Article - Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only - They don't want to be called Microslop but persist on forcing AI into their products while also caveating that it is for entertainment purposes only.

📝 Article - Oracle slashes 30k jobs - Even more layoffs thanks to AI. “The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure”.

📝 Article - Slop is not necessarily the future - AI is getting better at writing clean code but if given free rein it still produces slop.

📝 Article - OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says - The fact that companies can do this and get the support from the US government is disgusting.

🧩 Demo - GitHub's Historic Uptime - AI coding going well for Microsoft then.

🛠️ Tool - OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio - This might be quite good for screen recording for my YouTube videos.

📝 Article - We intercepted the White House app's network traffic - A government created app shouldn't have this many calls to 3rd parties.

🎓 Guide - Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide - This is a great visual breakdown of how Claude Code works.

📝 Article - Email obfuscation: What works in 2026? - I have been getting more spam recently. I am going to try some of these techniques out.

📝 Article - It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked - The fact that Anthropic try and take down everyone sharing their code when their whole business model is built on stolen data is so hypocritical.

📝 Article - Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - This is great. Kids really shouldn't be reliant on screens from such a young age.

📝 Article - LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions - When will the privacy invasion stop? I am glad I rarely use LinkedIn.

🛠️ Tool - Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac - Interesting! I wonder how this compares with other models.

🛠️ Tool - I built a frontpage for personal blogs - I like the HackerNews style UI. I am going to have to bookmark this and add some more blogs to my RSS feeds.

📝 Article - Components of a Coding Agent - As with all tools it is important to understand how they work under the hood and not just treat them as black boxes.

🛠️ Tool - Music for Programming - The website is cool even if you don't plan on listening to anything.

🧩 Demo - Are We Idiocracy Yet? - I haven't seen Idiocracy, but it is crazy how closely the world can be compared to dystopian futures.

📝 Article - Protect your shed - It is sad that those of us that like programming now need to have personal projects to be able to use our skills.

🎓 Guide - Git commands I run before reading any code - This is cool, I never thought to do this on codebases.

📝 Article - I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii - Because why not!

🧩 Demo - Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D - This is cool idea. It only seems to work on desktop in case you try on mobile.

🛠️ Tool - LittleSnitch for Linux - This looks great, shame I am not on Linux.

🛠️ Tool - Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft - This is so neat. I better not show my kids this otherwise there will be no end of things they want me to print.

📝 Article - Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? - I am fed up with all these big tech companies trying to extract as much money as possible from everyone.xx

👾 Game - Dark Castle - This might be nostalgic for long time Mac users.

📝 Article - I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack - You can do so much with a simple VPS from Hetzner. You really don't need everything hosted in the cloud. It is usually cheaper not to.

🎓 Guide - I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI - Qwen also released Qwen 3.6 which is supposed to be even better than Gemma 4.

🧩 Demo - Make It Myself - Sums up vibe coding perfectly.

📝 Article - Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012) - I always feel better with at least 8 hours sleep but struggle to find enough hours in the day to make that possible.

🎓 Guide - Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008) - I have never written a compiler, but I could see how you could learn a lot.

📝 Article - Backpacks got worse on purpose - Enshittification isn't just for tech, even backpacks have the same issue.

📝 Article - Do you even need a database? - For most small projects the filesystem is just as good as a database.

🛠️ Tool - Nirvana Live at Dreamerz 1989-07-08 : Nirvana : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - Any Nirvana fans here?

🛠️ Tool - fikrikarim/parlor: On-device, real-time multimodal AI - This is cool, Gemma 4 is seriously capable. I am sure there are all sorts of uses for this.

📝 Article - Stop Using Ollama - I personally use LM Studio, and it does seem the better of the tools.

📝 Article - The Discipline of Showing Up - Especially in the creator economy consistency is everything.

📝 Article - Eat Your Words - I think with local models getting better and better the big AI companies are really going to struggle justifying the investments that have been made.

🛠️ Tool - Slop Cop - This is cool. A bit like Hemingway Editor but for AI.

🎓 Guide - Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner - Hetzner is definitely the way to go even with their recent price increases.

📝 Article - Vercel April 2026 security incident - FYI if you are using Vercel at all.

🐦 Tweet - Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page - Apparently this is hidden in the small print but still not great.

📝 Article - All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027 - This is great news. Generally what is required in the EU is made worldwide as it costs more for manufacturers to make 2 versions. Such as EU mandating USB-C everywhere.

📝 Article - Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training - I am glad I don't work for Meta. I wonder if employees will resign over this, they should.

📝 Article - Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan? - And so the rug pull begins!

📝 Article - Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model - I have tried this model for small tasks on my 32GB Mac, and it did well, although naturally not as fast as cloud models.

🧩 Demo - Website streamed live directly from a model - I tried this out with a few of things I am knowledgeable about, and it did a good job.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

I did a poll in my last issue asking if you preferred the modern template or the plain text version. These were the results, so I will be sticking with the modern layout going forward.

Thank you to those who voted.