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What is an Agent?

windsurf.com · 4,846 words · saved by 1 readers

Welcome to 2025’s edition of “term so overused to mean so many different things that it starts to lose any real meaning in conversation because everyone is confidently using it to refer to different things.” If you are a builder trying to build agentic solutions, this article might not be for you. This article is for those who have been in a meeting, a board room, or a conversation, with someone talking about AI agents and are either (a) not really sure what an agent is and how it is different from the generative AI capabilities we’ve seen so far, (b) not really sure the person using the term knows what an agent is, or (c) might have thought that they knew what an agent is until reading the first sentence of this article. While we will reference Windsurf in this article to make some theoretical concepts more tractable, this is not a sales pitch. Let’s get started. To answer the title of this article, an agentic AI system can simply be thought of as a system that takes a user input and

Welcome to 2025’s edition of “term so overused to mean so many different things that it starts to lose any real meaning in conversation because everyone is confidently using it to refer to different things.” If you are a builder trying to build agentic solutions, this article might not be for you. This article is for those who have been in a meeting, a board room, or a conversation, with someone talking about AI agents and are either (a) not really sure what an agent is and how it is different from the generative AI capabilities we’ve seen so far, (b) not really sure the person using the term

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