Comment by jaggederest
9 hours ago
Agent is an old school way to say "constantly running daemon to accomplish some specific purpose", as someone who wrote a lot of performance monitoring agents. AI is using the term appropriately, but I think assuming it's always AI-first is slightly tragic.
No. The oldschool is "daemon".
Agent is an older term, apparently from the 1950s [1]:
> Alan Kay, a longtime proponent of agent technology, provides a thumbnail sketch tracing the more recent roots of software agents: “The idea of an agent originated with John McCarthy in the mid-1950’s, and the term was coined by Oliver G. Selfridge a few years later, when they were both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had in view a system that, when given a goal, could carry out the details of the appropriate computer operations and could ask for and receive advice, offered in human terms, when it was stuck. An agent would be a ‘soft robot’ living and doing its business within the computer’s world.” (Kay 1984).
[1] https://scispace.com/pdf/an-introduction-to-software-agents-...
Agent is also a long established term:
https://www.eginnovations.com/blog/agentless-vs-agent-based-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/js8h65/looking_fo...
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.2.0?topic=tools-performanc...
https://jolokia.org/agent/jvm.html
https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/javase/j...
Appreciate the references, I was the New Relic Ruby agent maintainer in 2010, as an additional reference. And we called it an agent, because it was hosted on the customer's infrastructure, but they didn't maintain or control it, we did. Regrettably no license to kill, and not much in the way of secrecy or gadgetry.
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No, the oldschool is agent for those things for which it was agent.
An agent may or may not also be a daemon. It can be a cron job where the only daemon was cron not the agent, and the agent doesn't persist and isn't a daemon.
It can be purely ephemeral where the only daemon was ssh or http or any other other generic communication service that is merely how the agent was delivered.
Countless ordinary "things that run on a host and perform tasks for some other host" were always called agents. Some of those were also daemons, just as they were also programs.
Nagios, crowdstrike, chef, puppet, ansible, vmware/kvm/virtualbox, jenkins... etc all have a slave part that runs (usually in the form of a daemon) which is and always was called the agent.