The Agent Era: Are We There Yet or Not?

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The Agent Era Is Here… Or Is It?

Let me warn you, as incumbents have decided. The ‘next big thing’ is here.

Every LinkedIn, Medium, X, or {insert your favorite/dreadest social media} influencer will, in the foreseeable future, endlessly generate ‘AI Agents Are Finally Here And They Are STUNNING’ type of content to tell you that they are the best thing that happened to humanity and that ‘the world is changing.’

But are they full of sh*t, or are they right for once?

To answer this, today, we are looking at the bleeding edge of AI agents, from agents that set a new record for ‘most autonomous AI software engineer’ to agents that navigate the web better than the average human, and even agents that write full scientific papers by themselves.

While some of these features are newsworthy by themselves, we have even witnessed one of these agents try to rewrite its code, an unforeseen event that has raised as many ethical and existential risk questions as anything we have seen before.

Overall, today, you will gain unique and detailed intuition into how the most powerful agents in the world work and what benefits they promise. Additionally, we will look underneath all this hype to answer the critical question:

How much will the world change over the next months, if anything?

A New Narrative

As someone who makes a living by reading AI academic research and helping people make better decisions with AI by separating truth from hype, the sheer scale of research and products coming our way indicates that the media will soon catch the trend, and the next thing you know the world is flooded with AI agent hype, making it really hard to separate reality from unsubstantiated claims.

But first, what is an agent?

Agents are the same models you’ve been reading about over the last two years but with the added capacity to take action.

In other words, they are Large Language Models (LLMs) or multimodal variants of them (models that also handle image, video, or audio) that not only can chat with you and take instructions, but will act on them.

To do so, they interact with tools (other software) to perform the actions using two known methods:

Direct interface access. The model goes into the software user interface (like seeing a Chrome window), understands what it’s seeing, and interacts with it.

To process and act over the interface, the model is given access to the DOM (the underlying code). If you’re familiar with Robotics Process Automation (RPA), they interact with the applications in the same way RPA robots do.

You can see your DOM using Chrome’s Dev Tools

APIs. Some software allows you to interact with it without seeing the user interface but through a programming interface, or API.

Here, the LLM generates a structured output, usually in JSON form, and executes a script to send the API a call to perform the action. The action is then executed in…

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