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Dev.to
7/9/2026
Give the agent the harder job

Give the agent the harder job

Short summary

The cost of asking an AI agent to attempt a task has collapsed to seconds, yet most people still scope requests to what they already believe is possible. The author demonstrates this by asking an agent to "QA a redesign" — which resulted in the agent autonomously launching a headless browser, simulating user interactions, and discovering a real bug in a WebAssembly/JavaScript serialization mismatch. The key insight: ambiguous instructions given to capable agents yield not just results but approaches you didn't know to ask for, and the backlog of sub-threshold work is now a fast-moving queue.

  • •Push agents beyond what you think they can do — the cost of failure is now a re-prompt, not an afternoon
  • •Ambiguous instructions let agents choose strategy, yielding results plus methods you wouldn't have asked for
  • •Your belief about an agent's ceiling has a shelf life of weeks; keep testing it to stay current

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

#ai-agents#ai-tools
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