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I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now

simonwillison.net · 1,305 words · saved by 1 readers

I’ve noticed something interesting over the past few weeks: I’ve started using the term “agent” in conversations where I don’t feel the need to then define it, roll my eyes or wrap it in scare quotes. This is a big piece of personal character development for me! Moving forward, when I talk about agents I’m going to use this: An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. I’ve been very hesitant to use the term “agent” for meaningful communication over the last couple of years. It felt to me like the ultimate in buzzword bingo—everyone was talking about agents, but if you quizzed them everyone seemed to hold a different mental model of what they actually were. I even started collecting definitions in my agent-definitions tag, including crowdsourcing 211 definitions on Twitter and attempting to summarize and group them with Gemini (I got 13 groups, here’s the tool-using LLMS one.) Jargon terms are only useful if you can be confident that the people you are talking to share the same

I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Microsoft - Agent projects stall between demo and production. Microsoft's MVP checklist closes that gap. Try it I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now 18th September 2025 I’ve noticed something interesting over the past few weeks: I’ve started using the term “agent” in conversations where I don’t feel the need to then define it, roll my eyes or wrap it in scare quotes. This is a big piece of pers

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