Real Agents vs. Workflows

The Truth Behind AI 'Agents'

What most people call agents aren’t agents. I’ve never really liked the term “agent”, until I saw this recent article by Anthropic, where I totally agree and now see how we can call something an agent. The vast majority is simply an API call to a language model.

It’s this—a few lines of code and a prompt.

This cannot act independently, make decisions or do anything. It simply replies to your users. Still, we call them agents.

But this isn’t what we need. We need real agents, but what is a real agent?

Let's clarify this "agents" term, what they really are, and what they should be.

Learn more in the video (or written version here):

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