Agent

An Agent is an AI system that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to achieve goals. It's autonomous. It operates without constant human direction. A basic agent has this loop: observe the environment, decide what action to take, execute the action, observe the results, repeat. A chatbot answers questions you ask. An agent sets its own goals and pursues them.

Modern AI agents are LLM-based. They use language models for reasoning and decision-making. An agent can access tools, APIs, code execution, database queries. It decides which tool to use. It executes the tool. It observes the results. It plans next steps. " It would plan: download the data, explore its structure, run statistical analysis, visualize results, summarize findings.

It breaks down the high-level goal into tool calls. Each tool call returns information that informs the next decision. Agents accomplish multi-step tasks autonomously. They recover from mistakes. They adapt to unexpected situations.

A limitation is agents are expensive, they make multiple tool calls and LLM inference, and can fail catastrophically if they misunderstand their goal or if their tools have side effects.