I think ‘agent’ may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now
Via Simon Willison:
Moving forward, when I talk about agents I’m going to use this:
An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.
I like this definition. Simon breaks down why he chose that specific phrasing for each part, it’s worth a deeper read.
There’s a lot of confusion about agents, and while it has already been turned into an elastic marketing term like “AI”, it’s helpful for product and technology discussions to have more precision.