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I'll take a stab at it. An async agent is an agent that is triggered autonomously, without direct human intervention, where its execution does not have tight temporal coupling with the other components of the system (agent or otherwise).

Practically speaking, it means they often operate within a larger system, that due to its open-ended nature, produces emergent behavior, meaning behavior that was not explicitly designed.

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thats a great stab :) We dig into this in the post, but the key distinction we landed on is that the trigger can be asynchronous without the agent itself being async. A cron job, webhook, or autonomous trigger is really about scheduling, not a property of the agent’s execution model.

In other words: triggering without a human ≠ async by itself. What matters is whether the caller blocks on the agent’s work, as opposed to how or when it was kicked off.

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