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0 pointsmindcrime1y ago0 comments

> People have been talking about agents for at least 2 years.

WAY longer than that. What's come to the forefront specifically in the last year or two is very specific subset of the overall agent landscape. What I like to call "LLM Agents". But "Agents" at large date back to at least the 1980's if not before. For some of the history of all of this, see this page and some of the listed citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent

> Agents are just LLMs with structured output

That's only true for the "LLM Agent" version. There are Agents that have nothing to do with LLM's at all.

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simonw1y ago

Right - the term "user-agent" shows up in the HTTP/1.0 spec from 1996: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1945 and there's plenty of history of debates about the meaning of the term before then.

In 1994 people were already complaining that the term that had no universal agreed definition: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/12/michael-wooldridge/

mindcrimeOP1y ago

Yes. I am fond of saying "If you're talking about agents and think the term is something new, go back and read everything Michael Wooldridge ever wrote before talking any further". :-)

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