Stop Turning Your Cron Jobs Into Agents

The current message from engineering leadership at most companies I talk to is some version of: "find the deterministic automation in your stack and make it agentic." A recent r/devops thread captured the frustration: an SRE asked how to push back on a director who wanted every Airflow DAG converted into an agent loop because "agents are the future." This is mostly bad advice. Not because agents are bad — they're great when the problem actually needs them — but because most existing automation d