Willison: 'Agent' Has Finally Achieved Consensus Definition — Fireside at Pragmatic Summit
simonwillison.net·medium signal
In a March 14 Pragmatic Summit fireside and accompanying Substack post, Willison declared he can now use 'agent' without scare quotes: 'An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.' He collected 211 Twitter definitions, ran them through Gemini to cluster into 13 groups, and synthesized a single canonical framing. The meta-significance: when Willison stops hedging on jargon, it signals the concept has crossed from hype to engineering discipline.