An agent is not a clever prompt or a powerful model. It is a loop. Strip away the framework, the tool catalog, and the system prompt, and what remains is a cycle that repeats: the model reads its situation, decides on one action, that action runs, and the result is folded back into what the model reads next time. Perceive, reason, act, observe, and then perceive again. This loop is…

Three words get used as if they were a single rising scale of sophistication: chatbot, workflow, agent. The implication is that a chatbot is a simple thing, a workflow is a more capable thing, and an agent is the advanced version of both. That framing is wrong, and the wrongness is expensive, because it leads teams to reach for the label that sounds most…

The word agent has become the default aspiration. New systems are framed as agentic before anyone has asked whether they need to be, and “we built an agent” now carries a prestige that “we built a pipeline” does not. This is an expensive habit. For the large majority of production work, the correct architecture is the deterministic workflow, and the decision rests on a single question. Does the…