Jim’s Daily Rant. When Programming Was Easy Before Agentic AI.

In 1969 I wrote my first computer program using the COBOL Language. It was for a water company to take a walking route meter readings and generate the customer bill and a monthly route history.

The process required only my imagination and guidance later from the water facility. Life was slow and easy.

Everything keyed off the water-meter number. That returned the customer information.

I started with the customer NAME.

The NAME Section was columns in a database, titled:

   Customer Account Number, Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial.

  This was prior to Agentic AI. This was when the programmer controlled the game.

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“Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision.” Source

Now Agentic AI has been given the liberty to control the game, based on what is asked of it by either the population or management's “perceived” expectations, with “perceived” defined by AI in guessing what Management or that person will ask for later on.

Under Agentic AI, the NAME Section might be columns in a database, titled:

Customer Account Number;

Prefix. (Mr., Miss, Mrs.);

Last Name:

Last2: (Hyphen & 2^nd Last).

First Name: Middle Name:

Maiden Last; Professional Title: (Doctor, Esquire, Your Honor, General, Mum)

Old Last prior to marriage, Legal Name Change & date, Protective Custody & date):

Night Name: IE “Fancy Price”.

Current Sex: (Selection of 13).

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Here’s the new AI’s problem that we are learning about.

Based on the query of “Does this name live in this county?” it will return the possibilities it finds.

However, if the Query is “Give me a dossier on this person in this county” then that is a real problem.

AI must guess the purpose of the dossier, the depth of it, all while taking it seriously.

It starts by deciding how it will go about the task. It pulls all legal records, newspaper articles, utility accounts, criminal records.

Then it decides to search back in time by locating prior addresses. Then prior records in the last locale. Then back to older addresses.

It may have opened an account in all those locations and begun data base searches but has not yet terminated those instructions.

When it planned its search, it may not have put Time-Out limits or budgets on itself and thus once a week updates its search routines, long after Management has decided not to hire Fancy Price for that position.

They may not have hired her but it may end up costing them a fancy price just thinking about it.