Stop saying agent
A short rant. Most things being called agents are not agents. Why the word still matters.
Every company is shipping “agents” now. Their chatbot is an agent. The CRM update they pushed last week is an “agentic experience.” There’s an agentic mortgage assistant somewhere. I’ve stopped counting.
Most of these aren’t agents. They’re prompt templates with a single tool call attached. That’s fine. Templates are useful. But calling it an agent doesn’t make it one.
An agent makes decisions. It picks what to do next based on what it just saw. It can call different tools, in different orders, depending on the situation. It can stop when the goal is met and keep going when it isn’t. Almost nothing being shipped under the agent label does that.
I’m not trying to be a purist. Words shift. But when everyone calls everything an agent, we lose the ability to talk about the small number of systems that actually are. The interesting engineering problems live in those systems. The hype is hiding them.
If your “agent” does one thing in one direction with one tool, it’s a function call. Ship it. Be proud of it. Just please pick a different word.