For myself, it's been super helpful in at least two ways:
1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things.
2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)
As someone who doesn't have kids and was last in school decades ago....
Do those School Learning Management Systems tell you everyday what homework your kid is expected to complete? Do you feel such a granular degree of monitoring and direction has impacted your child's opportunity to build character, intrinsic responsibility and self-management skills?
When I was a kid, teachers gave out assignments, and the student was responsible for keeping track of them, staying on top of progress, and handing in by the deadline. If a problem arose that wasn't an isolated incident or resolvable directly between the student and teacher, the feedback would flow at a much higher level e.g. scheduled parent-teacher interviews or via a phone call.
And what do parents do who don't accept the terms and conditions of said educational platforms? (e.g. due to overly broad privacy clauses or one-sided indemnities and the like)
But nowadays kids are expected to check 2-4 platforms plus their notes and there is no guaranteed time when they know it will be there. It is like the worlds worst paid disfunctional work place and one of my kids schools literally uses teams for one third of their assignments. In word format so sometimes kids overwrite it.
If you don’t accept the terms your kids life is just even harder.
Keeping track of your kids' homework is your concern? Doesn't it only become your concern, briefly, when the school contacts you about your kid not getting their homework done?
As a parent people from prior generations do not get the current situation. I actually agree that this is a useful use of the agentic work tools - and it’s the only case I mentioned above I’ve used it for successfully, if not saving of time.
Homework isn’t assigned in class any more. It’s posted on dozens of inscrutable websites in weird UX’s that are impossible for any single human to understand. Children are mystified, parents confused, teachers at their wits end.
A few times a week children miss some website or queue from some system, teachers can’t get things to share properly, this needs tending, they need to photograph this and upload that to this place as well as that but not the other one.
It’s truly remarkably astounding. I have serious doubts frontier models can navigate it either honestly. But this is in fact where I see the most chance of using these tools.
“Computers at school” is the worst idea ever, and no one who hasn’t experienced the clusterfuck of middle school in 2026 can understand it. It makes the world of the movie Brazil seem utopian.
Btw I did this Muse, giving it the ability to use its cred vault to log into her school information system and read through all the crap and other websites and collate the homework’s and their due dates, adding to my child’s calendar when they’re due and a reminder the day before with a link to the calendar. I had model the workflow formally (I do this with all LLMs for procedures) and set it up to run daily. We shall see!
Overall it was not bad. The cred vault is useful. But I’m not giving meta any information that I wouldn’t otherwise be fine with disseminating and I feel the burden the school puts on us vs the information loss is worth the trade.
Thanks! First meaningful use of an OpenClaw like system.
I'm not the person you're asking, but in general, I would also stay on top of my child's obligations - homework, chores, etc. I don't want the first sign of trouble to be a call from a teacher, or the complete absence of clean clothes for them to wear in the morning.
You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation
You equally don't teach them responsibility by always being there as the backstop though. I think missing a couple of homeworks is quite a low-stakes thing that can teach them a lot about responsibility, failure, and how to recover from it.
A lot of kids now seem to go into adulthood having never been allowed to fail, and it can really mess them up the first time it inevitably happens.
There is quite a large gap between checking in with your kid and having an AI analyse their homework and assignments and raising an alarm if anything appears to slip. The latter is a solid WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP on the helicopter parent spectrum.
Missing homework once or twice is part of life and a really good life lesson with low risk besides.
Reflow [1] is a similar attempt at a slightly different domain: bioinformatics and ETL pipelines. Reflow exposes a data model and programming model that reclaims programmability in these systems, and, by leaning on these abstractions, gives the runtime much more leeway to do interesting things. It unties the hands of the implementer.
> I want an Airflow that runs and scales in the cloud
I'd encourage you to look at Reflow [1] which takes a different approach: it's entirely self-managing: you run Reflow like you would a normal programming language interpreter ("reflow run myjob.rf") and Reflow creates ephemeral nodes that scale elastically and that tear themselves down, only for the purpose of running the program.
> has extensive observability (monitoring, tracing)
Reflow includes a good amount of observability tools out of the box; we're also working on integrating tracing facilities (e.g., reporting progress to Amazon x-ray).
> has a full API, and maybe some clear way to test workflows.
Reflow's approach to testing is exactly like any other programming language: you write modules that can either be used in a "main" program, or else be used in tests.
Reflow [1] is also well-suited for ETL workloads. It takes a different tack: it presents a DSL with data-flow semantics and first-class integration with Docker. The result is that you don't write graphs, instead you just write programs that, due to their semantics, can be automatically parallelized and distributed widely, all intermediate evaluations are memoized, and programs are evaluated in a fully incremental fashion:
I mean this as politely and constructively as possible, but this looks like it has quite a few easy to fall into failure modes. If I'm not using a twitter Future, or if I've been given a Future from somebody else, it would look like I need to ensure to surround every compositional operation with this save and restore, otherwise my context is permanently lost. Additionally, I have to trust that any code I hand a closure to will do the right thing, otherwise my context is potentially lost since I have no guarantee on which thread that closure will actually be executed on. It seems like it would be virtually impossible to avoid this happening at least once in even a simple codebase, and when context is lost, it happens silently.
You are right that this fails when you move outside of the model. However, we don't.
You may be surprised (amazed?) to learn that, internally, 100% of composition happens in this manner. We have a massive code base, and we've not seen this be an issue.
Further, we've worked with the Scala community to standardize the idea of an "execution context" which helps make these ideas portable, the particular of the implementation transparent to arbitrary producers and consumers of futures, so long as they comply to the standard Scala future API. (Twitter futures will when we migrate to Scala 2.10.)
This is true, and I look forward to the Typesafe guys fixing both the default implicit ExecutionContext as well as any contexts that Akka creates. I actually implemented an ExecutionContext that does exactly what is described above, but ultimately we had to abandon it, since pretty much any library that deals with scala standard Futures in 2.10 has places where we could not provide our custom context. I can't wait until you guys get that ported upstream, because until then, I've explicitly banned the use of thread locals across our entire stack.
1) Staying on top of my kid's school obligations, homework, etc. School Learning Management Systems are a hot mess, and I use agents to consolidate and collate, to keep track of the homework that has been done, what needs to be done, and even pre-grade homework to give feedback (most of the work is done on digital platforms too). It's been immensely time saving for these kinds of things. 2) Multiple instances of watching things passively: hotel room prices, availability of tickets, finding the best place to sell things online. In general things that require a lot of browsing, collating, and watching. These are the kinds of things that specialized software products could do as well, but with an agent they are just a prompt away, and you get exactly what you want. (More or less.)
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