AI Agents Weekly Digest - March 8, 2025

What can AI agents actually do?

March 08, 2025

The question of what AI (or AI Agents) can actually do has been long discussed on the internet. Honestly, the answer is really yet to come, however this week, it’s been THE hot topic on r/AI_Agents.

  1. What’s the most useful AI Agent you’ve seen?

    1. Top answer is: custom agents, this particular redditor built them off of smolagents, the Hugging Face framework

    2. The only other useful answer is someone talking about using LLMs to expand their data and create synthetic data

  2. Is this what current AI Agents can do?

    1. This is a dumb title, and the post got reported, but it doesn’t look like it’s breaking the rules so I approved it.

    2. Someone is using an AI Agent “manager” that decides what needs to be done and then “hires” other specialized agents to go do those things.

    3. Someone lists that in more complex agents they need to be able to:

      1. plan multi step workflows

      2. handle failures

      3. track cost and latency

      4. adapt when goals shift

  3. Best AI to search large folders of PDFs

    1. Probably the most practical question on here

    2. From someone doing a PhD, they have 1500+ PDFs to search through

    3. Top response? You don’t need an AI, you need an indexing/retrieval system, basically a good RAG system

  1. Graph - the AI Assistant nobody wants to use

    1. really weird that this is the top voted comment yet also the one “no one wants to use”

  2. SWOT analysis agent

    1. this is great! this is a real world application

  3. AI Agents for Beginners from Microsoft

    1. this is 10 projects by the Azure team that are basic agents

    2. also I posted this 🙂 (I’m completely unaffiliated with Microsoft)

Community Message Board

Special Announcements

88% of the people who voted have said YES they want a hackathon so we’ll be doing an AI Agents hackathon soon!

Reminder that Seattle Startup Summit is happening at the end of this month on 3/28. It’s basically a “who’s who” of AI dev tools.