Ask HN: Are Agents Just Hype?

I have spent the last few days trying (and failing) to find real cases where AI agents actually scale in production. Outside of coding agents and dev-productivity tools, I am struggling to see anything that looks like a genuinely scalable agent system.

Most of what people are calling “agents” today are basically deterministic workflows with one or two LLM calls glued together. That is not an agent. That is a at best API pipeline.

So I am genuinely curious: are there any real examples of agents handling large, messy, multi-step workflows at scale? Not demos, not toy projects, not VC decks.