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> I find the term “agents” extremely frustrating. It lacks a single, clear and widely understood meaning... but the people who use the term never seem to acknowledge that.

This 100%. “Agentic” especially as a buzzword can piss off

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I find that Anthropic has a good, clarifying set of definitions with examples: https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

Genuinely the best piece of writing I've seen about agents anywhere.

The software "has agency"? That is, I can entrust it to carry out the task I've described, to completion, without telling it how to perform the task?

That's one of the more common definitions people use - especially people who aren't directly building agents, since the builders tend to get more hung up on "LLM with access to tools" or similar.

My problem is when people use that definition (or any other) without clarifying, because they assume it's THE obvious definition.

Workflows aside, I think "interruptible work" is what matters, really. That is, maintaining state in-between inferences so that it follows some well-defined goal.

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