AI Agents vs. Workflows: How to Spot Hype from Real "Agents"?

What most people call agents aren’t agents. I’ve never really liked the term “agent”, until I saw this recent article by Anthropic, where I totally agree and now see how we can call something an agent. The vast majority is simply an API call to a language model. It’s this. A few lines of code and a prompt.

This cannot act independently, make decisions or do anything. It simply replies to your users. Still, we call them agents. But this isn’t what we need. We need real agents, but what is a real agent?

That what we dive in into this episode...

Links;

Anthropic’s blog on agents: https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

Anthropic’s computer use: https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use

Hamul Husain’s log on Devin: https://www.answer.ai/posts/2025-01-08-devin.html