[simonw]

I just came round to using that term a couple of weeks ago (see https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/agents/) - I held out for the longest time because it annoyed me that everyone had a different idea of what "agent" meant.

In this case I do think the term is justified - "agentic loop" is a good way of describing a loop with a bunch of tool calls driven by an LLM.

[OutOfHere]

That indeed is the simplest definition for it. In practice, there can be parallel agent calls, asynchronous or synchronous result merger, and context compression or management. Also, there is no shame in adding manual LLM steps to an agentic workflow.