It pretty clearly means AI that does things, as opposed to just presenting things. There can be a debate about the technical word "agent" in swe, but i dont see the confusion in the particular context of gen AI. Same for things like MCP, why does everyone suddenly have a stroke and argue over things with clear meaning now?
The title seems like clickbait but also reflects an annoyance/frustration with overuse as marketing/sales tends to do. I ignore that and ask what <i>exactly</i> does your product do, then decide how to categorize it.<p>My hand-wavy definition is basically as a chatbot gives an AI multi-modal input and output to a user, an agent has 'hands' which can produce an effect on a system rather than reporting to the user directly via media. The method of integration isn't really important, it could be using a public network API or as part of a compiled static binary, whatever.
Anthropic blog has a nice distinction between LLM Workflows and Agents:<p>LLM Workflows: predefined code paths. Includes retrieval/tools/memory, routing based chatbots, orchestrator-worker, iterative evaluator etc<p>Agents: dynamically direct themselves. reasoning and planning, typically using tools based on env feedback in a loop.
Have we struggled with defining what a daemon is?<p>When “it becomes challenging to benchmark performance and ensure consistent outcomes,” should I worry that different products don’t fully comprehend client-server architecture?