Tagged: fundamentals

AI agents are programs that perceive their environment, plan a sequence of steps, use tools to act, and loop back until a goal is achieved — unlike a one-shot LLM call that just predicts the next token.

Chatbots answer; AI agents act. Chatbots are stateless and single-turn; agents are stateful and multi-step. The line blurs when chatbots get tools, but the core architectural difference still shapes what each is good for.