"Agent" is doing too much work
The word "agent" now covers almost anything. A single chat prompt gets called an agent. A cron job with an LLM in the middle gets called an agent. So does a system that plans, calls ten tools, and retries on failure.
Strip the branding and most useful agents share the same small shape: something happens, the system gathers what it needs, does the work, and puts the result where a human or another system will see it. Four steps: trigger, data, action, deliver. If you can name each step for your use case, you can build it. If you can't, you don't have an agent yet, you have a vague hope.
The loop: trigger, data, action, deliver
Here it is as plain pseudocode:
