No one knows what the hell an AI agent is

Barely anyone will use this term in 2 years, just like nobody talks about copilots anymore. But for now: everything is labelled as agent.

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?

It's the blast processing that enables clipped to say "It look like you are writing a letter"

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 exactly does your product do, then decide how to categorize it.

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:

LLM Workflows: predefined code paths. Includes retrieval/tools/memory, routing based chatbots, orchestrator-worker, iterative evaluator etc

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?

When “it becomes challenging to benchmark performance and ensure consistent outcomes,” should I worry that different products don’t fully comprehend client-server architecture?

Some terms are all encompassing. This is one. Similar to the components or monad arguments.

They invested billions into AI so you can be damn sure they call everything AI.