When Software Stops Waiting for Instructions
Ask a chatbot to fix a bug in your code, and it will describe how to fix it. Ask an AI agent to fix the same bug, and it might actually open the file, change the code, run the test suite, and submit the pull request — without asking you first. That shift, from describing action to taking it, is the whole story behind the sudden explosion of interest in “AI agents.” It’s also why the conversation about them has quietly moved away from “which model is smartest” and toward a much less glamorous question: what, exactly, is this thing allowed to touch?