I'm an engineer. I use AI both for my work and my personal life, basically every single day. I don't think "AI is a fad".

Here's the thing, though: For the past few months "agent" has been the buzzword. 99% of people talking about it have no clue how it works or what it is exactly, but it's the thing.

"Yo, I'm running 39 parallel openclaws in my 45k Mac Mini tower I built at home" "man these are making me so productive, I'm producing so much stuff you can't even begin to comprehend it" "this changes everything."

You've read at least ~50 variants of each of these. You see it all the time, to the point where you're wondering whether maybe you're missing out on it - maybe you really are "not gonna make it". And while thinking this you scroll down and another related post shows up.

This has pissed me off so much my hand has been forced to post here this half rant, half discussion starter: Do you really need a personal agent? Are you really spending so much time every day on the minor tasks it can do, that you actually trust it -unsupervised- to do them for you? Is it really worth the risk letting <current SOTA model> respond to your emails for you? Have you actually thought of how screwed you could be if it just... does the wrong thing?

I really can't stop coming up with questions like these every time I see one more of these posts, one more analysis on what the best set up for your personal agent is today (which is just so much better than it was 5 days ago I swear!).

I see the timeline and can't help but think: there's no way this many people have so much work that can be automated... right? And if they do have so much work that is easily automated - was that work worth doing anyway?

THE ACTUAL QUESTION: Have any of you actually set up a personal agent and kept using it 2 weeks after? Has it actually helped you with your daily tasks in any noticeable way? Am I really not gonna make it by not buying a Mac Mini?

That's it, I'm not promoting anything or building the next agentic startup btw.