What Is an Agent, Actually?
Distinguishing LLMs, agents, orchestration, and frameworks
When I wrote my first tutorials on open-source multi-agent frameworks in 2024, “agent” already meant something genuinely complicated – an LLM’s behavior already depended on scaffolding well beyond the model itself: a defined role, a memory system, a planning process, coordination layers. The complexity was real then, and it hasn’t gone away. If anything, the coordination problems have gotten harder as more agents and moving parts get added to the system.
Since then, a separate problem has emerged: marketing copy, press releases, and vendor branding each use “agent” to mean something different, which has nothing to do with whether the systems themselves are hard to build.
Ask around, and you’ll get answers that don’t share a definition. Someone building a customer-support bot means a single LLM call wrapped in a persona. Someone building with crewAI or AutoGPT means several LLMs dividing labor and debating...
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