No practical code example, sorry. The post is based on my own experience using agents, and I haven't reached a reusable generalization yet.
That said, two cases where I noticed the pattern:
Meal planning: I had a weekly ChatGPT task that suggested dinner options based on nutritional constraints and generated a shopping list (e.g. two dinners with 100g of chicken -> buy 200g). After a few iterations, it became clear that with a fixed set of recipes and their ingredients, a simple script generating combinations was enough. The agent's reasoning had already done its job — it helped me understand the problem well enough to replace itself.
QA exploration: I was using an agent to explore a web app as a QA tester. It took several minutes per run. After some iterations, the more practical path was having it log its explorations to a file, then derive automated tests from that log. The agent still runs occasionally, but the tests run frequently and cheaply.
Regarding your point about tasks that need individual reasoning every time — I think you're right, and that's actually the core of the idea. Not every task matures into a script. Extracting structured data from images probably stays deliberative if the images vary significantly. The cycle only applies to tasks that, after enough repetitions, reveal a stable pattern. The agent itself is what helps you discover whether that pattern exists.
