Agents
Sep 21, 2025
People describe agents in different ways, but I would say an agent is an AI application that can make decisions autonomously and work “for a long time” without human intervention. That is, both generating a decision and validating it against the built-in rules happen inside the application.
Popular scenarios for agents:
- Customer support agent
- SDR (sales rep)
- Programmer
In principle, you can take a list of professions with repetitive tasks, a large number of workers, and a relatively expensive hour of work, and that will be a good list of professions/scenarios for automation with agents. All three examples above would be at the top of such a list.
For the most part, agents are still written directly against foundation model APIs, with complex logic layered on top to make them work reliably. But this is a frontier area, so best practices are being formed right now. I will write about this separately.
Take a look at Replit Agent (programming), Claude Code (programming), and Sierra (customer support) to get a sense of where the market is heading.
I also want to point out another area: automating routine tasks in the browser. There are tools for browser automation (which is in fact also an autonomous agent), like Browser Use or Computer Use from Anthropic. These are tools that let you literally say: go to that site, enter this login/password, then find this button, click it, download the results as a PDF, and so on. Still a bit raw for mass use, but the scale of future applications is already visible. And it is huge.
Originally posted in Russian on my telegram. This is a translation.