Cal Newport has an analogy to "putting a weed wacker on a dog's back to mow your lawn." The dog will wander around the yard and it may mow the lawn, but the dog will also chase after birds or run up to visitors for pets and the weed wacker could do a lot of damage.

It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild.

Yeah I like Cal’s take on it, though in this context I’d argue LLMs have even less agency, and are even less deserving of anthropomorphization than a dog is.

The difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference.

We also run agents, but for shorter spans between supervisions, and with much lower total budget.