Typically, the term "agents" implies some autonomous collaboration. In an agent workflow, the flow itself is non-deterministic. One agent can work with another agent and keep cycling between themselves until an output is resolved that meets some criteria. An agent itself is also typically evaluating the terminal condition for the workflow.

Some folks try to orchestrate the whole operation by a higher level prompt that essentially uses function calls to more specific prompts.

Versus just using the LLM’s for specific tasks and heuristics / own code for the orchestration.

But I agree there is a lot of anthropomorphizing that over states current model capabilities and just confuses things in general.

It's also used to mean "characters interacting with each other" and sort of message passing between them. Not sure but I get the sense thats what the author is using it as

Some "agents" like the minecraft bot Voyager(https://github.com/MineDojo/Voyager) have a control loop, they are given a high level task and then they use LLM to decide what actions to take, then evaluate the result and iterate. In some LLM frameworks, a chain/pipeline just uses LLM to process input data(classification, named entitiy extraction, summary, etc).

Sequential prompts with an occasional cron job

"Agent" means that it outputs JSON with a function call name and parameters which you execute and usually then feed the results back to the LLM.