Agents are good at ambiguous, language-shaped work. They are bad at work that already has a deterministic answer.
If the task is a lookup, a rule, or a report, a script and a database view will beat an agent on cost, latency, and reliability every time — and it will not surprise you at 2am.
The cases where an agent genuinely earns its place: triaging unstructured inbound, translating between people in real time, and drafting from a body of internal documents that a human then approves.
LLMAutomationScoping