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Agents in the Wild

The State of AI Agents in the Wild

What people actually get AI agents to do, counted from the real cases in this directory. Updated with every new case; last updated Oct 23, 2026.

1,972first-person Hacker News posts about AI agents, read in full
219became cases, with a concrete task and result we could quote word for word: about 1 in 9
86 vs 78everyday life (home, money, personal admin) vs engineering, among those 219
7Verified: the headline result checked against public evidence

What the real cases are about

Topic of each of the 219 cases from Hacker News.

  • Engineering78
  • Life admin & home36
  • Personal productivity33
  • Work & operations19
  • Content16
  • Money & bills8
  • Research8
  • Marketing5
  • Shopping & errands5
  • Finance4
  • Travel & bookings4
  • Hospitality & real estate1
  • Sales1
  • Support1

The agents people actually use

How many of the 219 cases name each agent (a case can name more than one).

  • Claude67
  • Claude Code58
  • ChatGPT21
  • Gemini19
  • OpenClaw19
  • Codex15
  • Hermes Agent11
  • Cursor8
  • Grok5
  • Meta Muse4

How these numbers are made

A script searches Hacker News for first-person posts about AI agents. Each post is read in full, and only those with a concrete task and a stated result become cases. Every case links to the original post and quotes it word for word; a check rejects any case whose quote or numbers don't appear in the source. "Verified" means we also checked the headline result against public evidence, such as the project's code, its live site or the builder's own write-up. The 286 cases in the directory also include cases from blogs, X and other public sources, some first found through other public directories. They pass the same quote and number checks, and aren't counted above.

You're welcome to cite these numbers with a link to this page.

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