Agentic AI Hype Is Real, Here’s What You Don’t Know

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AI agents are the new gold rush. Startups are raising millions with a landing page and a viral demo — and everyone’s calling their scripted workflow an “agent.”

Take Devin, for example — the so-called AI software engineer. The launch video went viral. People panicked. “Are engineers obsolete now?” But over a year later, Devin hasn’t replaced your dev team — or anyone’s. It was a brilliant piece of marketing, not a revolution.

In reality, even with today’s best tools, writing code with AI still needs constant prompting, verifying package versions, debugging edge cases, and rewriting chunks for scalability. No agent is shipping full apps solo — yet.

Let’s dig deeper: what are AI agents actually supposed to be? What can they do today — and what are we pretending they can do?

What Is Agentic AI Actually Supposed to Be?

A true AI agent should:

Understand a goal

Break it into subgoals

Plan actions

Execute tasks

Learn from outcomes

Adapt without human help

Sounds amazing, right? Now let’s break that down using real-life scenarios. Here’s what it would mean…