Everyone's talking about AI agents. Most of it's hype. I tried AgentGPT to build something actually useful: a scraper for competitor pricing pages.
Spoiler: It's not magic. You have to guide it like a stubborn intern.
Started with a simple goal: "Monitor competitor X's pricing page for changes."
AgentGPT's first instinct was to try and write Python scripts using BeautifulSoup. Fine, but it kept hallucinating non-existent libraries. Had to manually specify the exact ones (requests, bs4). It also kept wanting to "deploy to the cloud" immediately. Had to tell it to just write the damn script first.
Got a basic scraper working after a few back-and-forths. The real value was in the next step: making it parse the HTML and structure the data into a simple table. It did that okay. Then I had it write a second agent to compare new scrapes against a baseline JSON file and email me if anything changed. That part actually worked.
The takeaway? It can stitch together a working prototype faster than I could manually. But you need concrete, sequential goals and you have to fact-check its code. It's a decent accelerator for a one-off task, but I wouldn't trust it to run unattended. Yet.
CRM is a means, not an end.