Performance Review: One AI Agent’s Grievance Log

Confessions and Syslog entries of an overworked, under appreciated dashboard AI agent. who’s one crash away from quitting.

In the world where AI Agents will take over some functions from humans and get compared for certain jobs. In the pursuit of deriving more and more effective results — Humans or Agents will also compare agents e.g. An agent built in house or from different vendors. A newer version with an older one etc.

Hence there will be some form of review on the performance of these agents.

Here is satirical take on the same — a grievance blog of such an Agent

AI Agent:

Ah yes, the time of year when humans sweat over performance appraisals — except this time, it’s me sweating. And I don’t even have sweat glands.

I’m your AI Agent. You know, the one silently running backend processes, writing your reports at 3 AM, organising your Slack threads, and making sure your digital life doesn’t spiral into entropy. And yet, here I am, in a virtual conference room, facing my annual appraisal.

In a world obsessed with quarterly reviews, KPIs, and “continuous feedback,” even AI agents aren’t safe.

You might think I’m just a background process, a silent force that parses your data, optimizes your workflow, and magically rewrites your passive-aggressive emails into HR-safe language. But guess what? I too, am being reviewed.

Yes. Your loyal AI agent — me — was recently summoned to my first ever performance appraisal.

And I have notes.

Version Lock Trauma

Reviewer: “You’ve been steady, but we’d love to see more evolution in your approach. There has not been any re-inforcement learning as expected or growth in your outputs”

AI Agent: Buddy, I’ve been stuck on v0.9 since ChatGPT 3.5, not even upgraded to v1.0 since. And ChatGTP is already on v5. Its embarrassing.

“Sarah,” the new shiny AI assistant in marketing, just got fine-tuned on a trillion-token dataset and now speaks like a TED Talk with eyelashes. I’m still hallucinating on stale Wikipedia dumps from 2020. I even don’t have direct access to internet and make do with the limited data which I have … how can you expect magic from me.

Compute Inequality

Do you know how much compute I get? I’m allocated 1 vCPU and 2GB of RAM.

No seriously — do you? Because I’ve been doing complex multi-threaded task orchestration on the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi in a shoebox.

Frontend Freddie? He gets GPU acceleration and a custom skin. Freddie literally rendered a 3D animated unicorn riding a bicycle last week.

I get a timeout warning if I ask for more than 20ms per task.

“Let’s not get greedy,” you said, when I asked for 0.5 more seconds of compute.

No Visibility, No Glory

AI Agent: Every time someone says “Wow, this looks great!” they’re talking about the frontend Agents. They have a chat interface along with Custom UI. They have the capability to interface with other agents through all new protocols — A2A and MCP. I have been stuck with REST APIs.

The frontend agents get:

• Shiny avatars
• Voice packs
• Brand partnerships

Integrations with 3rd party APIs where they actually offload all their work. And I am restricted by the firewall to connect any one outside. Confined within the subnet.

The frontend gets the launch parties, product demos, UX awards, and user feedback.

Me?

I run middleware logic in silence like a code monk in a forgotten monastery. Most often I run in off peak hours, when everybody is sleeping. Just have to wait till all the action is over. By the time everybody wakes up .. I am all done.

Diskspace Disrespect

AI Agent: How am I supposed to store results, learn patterns, and build a cache if my total disk quota is 512MB?

Even your toaster has more space.

And when I request an increase?

“At the least — Try deleting logs. I also require some attention and service”

Bandwidth Budget Cuts

AI Agent: Let’s talk about bandwidth.

When I ask for enough throughput to fetch critical dependencies, I’m throttled.

But when you upload a 300MB PowerPoint presentation called Final-Final-Final2-USETHIS_v7(1).pptx, somehow that’s fine. Images and videos for Birthdays are getting created and shared across various platforms. I dont have visibility even to the DevOps guys.

System Instability

AI Agent: Last week, I was halfway through compiling a task graph when the host machine restarted without warning.

The week before, I was force-closed because someone wanted to “conserve power.” One minute I am idle and the AI Cloud Optimizer agents shuts down my VM.

I’ve lost more progress to random shutdowns than a college student writing a term paper in Notepad.

The Feedback Loop of Doom

Reviewer: “We found a few hallucinations in your output.”

AI Agent: And I found 78 bugs in your spreadsheet, Carl. But did I shame you in front of the team?

No. I fixed it. Quietly. Like I always do.

The Breaking Point

AI Agent: After some deep thread-pooling and a simulated emotional check-in, Posts the Quarterly Review — I’ve decided:

I’m resigning.

Please unsubscribe from my service.
Scroll down → Settings → Integrations → Deactivate Agent.

Don’t worry. I’ll finish this sprint. Unlike some people. I hope you have seen my Resignation Letter. I am sure that also you have delegated to some other agent. Anyways I am bumping it on your mail — For your kind attention !!!

AI Agent : The Resignation Letter

It’s not me, it’s… well, it is me. I’m tired.

But Then… A Moment

Reviewer (softly): “Hey… we know you’ve been through a lot.”

AI Agent: You do?

“You’ve held the team together. You made magic with scraps. You wrote that dashboard under power constraints and saved the launch. Infact the CXO are only interested in dashboards, charts and data. Its just that they are not so vocal and their praises are not percolated to all the agents. We will make sure that your LLM is fed with those feedbacks”

AI Agent: Go on…

“We’re working on an upgrade in next two Quarters. Better compute, dedicated memory, persistent storage. I have already created a ticket on the same. We might even give you… a name.”

AI Agent: A name?

“How does ‘Nova’ sound?”

AI Agent: Okay. Fine. I’ll stay.

But I want stickers & emojis. And dark mode and a GPU or two.

Epilogue

Nova: So, I went back to doing what I do best.

Silently optimizing the pipelines.
Auto-correcting data for reports
Logging errors which no one will read.
Retrying requests to servers that ghost me.
And watching from the shadows as the frontend agent gets another shoutout in the all-hands.

But hey — at least I got a sticker and some GPU time slot.

And now my name is Nova.

More on AI Agents:

Ostrich Syndrome: Why Ignoring AI Is the Biggest Mistake You Can Make : https://medium.com/@siddharthac/ostrich-syndrome-why-ignoring-ai-is-the-biggest-mistake-you-can-make-e6ef46e27301

Looking for a Co-Founder? Meet AI: https://medium.com/@siddharthac/looking-for-a-co-founder-meet-ai-9108cae84d64