AI Agents Have a Grifter Problem

Every hyped technology attracts a wave of experts who discovered it last Tuesday.

AI agents are no exception.

Suddenly, everyone is selling "agentic systems", "autonomous businesses", and "one-person billion-dollar companies". Most demos are just a chatbot calling three APIs and failing silently when anything unexpected happens.

The problem is not only that people waste money.

The reputation of the technology gets damaged too.

We already saw this with crypto. There were real ideas, real infrastructure, and real engineering. But scams, speculation, and endless promises became louder than the actual technology. For many people, "crypto" became synonymous with fraud.

AI agents may be heading in the same direction.

Agents are not magic employees. They are software systems with tools, permissions, context, failure modes, and operational costs. They need testing, observability, security, and clear boundaries.

There is real value here.

But the louder the grifters become, the harder it is to separate useful engineering from a sales funnel wrapped around a prompt.

The technology deserves better than the people currently marketing it.