The word covers too much ground to be useful without a definition. Here is the one I use.
2026-04-17 · 6 min read · chris olson
The word agent now means anything from a for-loop around an LLM call to a fully-autonomous system operating across a codebase for an afternoon. That range is a problem. When a hospital CIO asks whether we have agents in production, yes and no are both true under different readings.
01 why the definition matters
A working definition separates tool-use loops from orchestration, orchestration from autonomy, autonomy from evaluation. Without it, product requirements collapse into wish lists.
02 the shape I use
Three components, in order: context, tools, control. A system becomes agentic in proportion to how much of the control loop lives outside the model's head.
03 what this rules in and out
Calling a model once with retrieval is not an agent. A coded workflow calling a model at fixed steps is a pipeline, not an agent. A system that decides which tools to invoke, in what order, based on intermediate state, is an agent. The boundary is negotiation of control, not cleverness of output.