Comment by roadside_picnic

> The use of the word agents is interesting is mostly a coincidence, it is used today in a sense that didn't quite exist 2 years ago

I'm sorry but it's wild to me that you could write so much about "agents" without recognizing their long, established history in computer science (especially in AI) outside of OOP. Agents are basically the entire framing of Norvig and Russel's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" [0] (originally published in 1995, but drawing from much earlier work).

Not specifically AI, but not unrelated either, Agents play a major role in how we understand concurrency and mobile communication. The author of this paper, Robin Milner, is responsible, among many other things, for establishing the π-calculus (1992), which defines a formal language to describe agent communication.

If you want to go closer to the source you can take a look at Hewett's "Actor Model" [2] 1973. Which is when the field first started to formalize the idea of software agents.

The current use of the word "agent" is basically a marketing buzz-word that largely ignores the decades of research in the field of computer science around how to design intelligent interacting agents to accomplish tasks. Which is a bit of a tragedy because I personally think current LLMs could gain a lot of value if thought about in the traditional agent sense.

0. https://people.engr.tamu.edu/guni/csce625/slides/AI.pdf

1. https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/16426053/A_Calculus_of_Mo...

2. https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/73/Papers/027B.pdf