Your AI Agent Has a System Prompt. But Will It Keep the Bowtie?
An AI agent can tell you its name.
It can publish a list of capabilities. It can expose an Agent Card. Its developer can describe its role, permissions, model, tools and intended behavior. But none of those things tell us what kind of actor it becomes once it starts operating.
As software gets more agentic, we've gotten pretty good at describing what an agent is supposed to be. System prompts, manifests, capability declarations, identity systems, authentication, traces, evals, observability stacks that would've seemed like overkill three years ago. None of it answers the question that actually matters:
What does this agent do, repeatedly, when it has a choice?
Not whether it completed a benchmark, or whether its API call succeeded or even what its system prompt says.
Pray tell, what kind of actor does its behavior reveal it to be?
Ah! There is a missing layer.
Let's call it agent...
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