Agent

A model given tools, a goal, and the ability to act in loops toward it

✓ Building Blocks

Tool-usingLoops on its own outputGoal-directedNot a chatbot

What is an Agent

An agent is a model given tools and a task loop: instead of producing one reply and stopping, it can take an action, look at the result, and decide what to do next, repeating until the goal is reached or it needs a human. The defining trait is not the model itself, it is the loop around it: read state, act, observe, repeat.

This is what turns a language model into something that can actually get work done: writing a file, running a command, checking whether the command succeeded, and correcting course if it did not. A plain chat reply has no way to verify itself against the real world. An agent does, because its tools give it feedback it can act on.

Agent is a broad word, and this glossary treats several more specific terms as its variants: a subagent is an agent dispatched by another agent, a worker agent is one that runs a defined role in a fleet, an orchestrator is an agent that mainly coordinates other agents. Agent itself just means the tool-using loop, not any one implementation of it.

AY Automate