Botsitting
After yet another push from senior leadership, I’m finally getting around to trying to do something more interesting with our internal AI resources than just chatting with Gemini. Specifically, I’m using Antigravity and writing agent skills to query various databases, read my meeting notes, read the news, and smash it all together in the hopes of surfacing something interesting that I may otherwise have missed.
The results so far are encouraging; and, the effort is making me appreciate all the commentary around “botsitting,” which refers to all the work required to get the agent to do actually the thing and, critically, do it well enough to actually be better than whatever you were doing before. When you venture beyond the typical chatbot and code-generation use cases, the botsitting factor gets real.
The back-and-forth looks something like this:
Me:
/news[this invokes me skill to read all the stuff and tell me what’s changed lately]
Agent: [Spins for seven-ish minutes.] Okay, I made that report for you! [blah blah blah]
Me: The report loads but doesn’t have any data in it.
Agent: [Spins for a bit.] I fixed the problem!
Me: The report has rows now but only some of them show timeseries data in the chart when I click on them.
Agent: [Spins] …
You get the idea.
The interesting and disconcerting thing compared to writing actual code is that I never get the sense that I’ve fixed a problem. When I fix a bug in code, it’s fixed, and I can move on. I might break it again later of course, but I have confidence that the bug isn’t going to magically reappear the very next time I run the software.
With agent skills, the bugs seem to come and go as they please. I figured I could just get more and more verbose and explicit in my skill instructions as the bugs arise, instructing the agent how to avoid each one next time, but it’s not that simple. Something that was working fine last time, like the aforementioned report, will suddenly stop working without any changes to the relevant instructions. It feels like I’m Mickey Mouse waving a magic wand each time I run one: I can sense the power at my disposal, but I’m not sure what’s going to come from it.
I’m glad that these skills are just a side quest for me. I feel for peeps whose jobs have become full-time botsitting.