When Is An Agent Not An Agent?

I watched a video this week. Anthropic engineers talking, carefully and with conviction, about the difference between agents and workflows. They were responding to a paper that drew a clean line: agents make decisions autonomously; workflows execute predetermined sequences. They were clear.

And yet, as I watched, something didn't sit right. Because I've been building these things. I've been living with them. And the systems I'm working with don't divide neatly along that line. Workflows make decisions all the time - small contextual judgements about what's relevant, what to pull, what to discard, how to phrase a reply. Those are decisions. And some of the things I've shipped that are technically just orchestrated calls feel, in use, far more agent-like than systems with proper loops underneath.

I kept getting hung up on this question.

Am I actually building an agent? Or just a clever workflow with good manners?

I'm not an engineer, so my first instinct was to assume I was the one missing something. That there must be a hard architectural line, and I just couldn't see it. But the more I sat with it, the more I came to a different conclusion: the line is real, but it is not the line that matters most.

Two questions, not one

What the engineers are doing is conflating two questions that need to be kept separate.

The first is architectural. How is the system built? Does it have a perception-reasoning-action loop? Does it decide what to do next based on the result of what it just did? Is there genuine autonomy in the orchestration? These are real properties. They map to real engineering choices. The Anthropic engineers are right that this distinction exists.

The second is behavioural. What does it do, and what does it feel like to use? Does it act on my behalf? Is it attentive? Does it reduce my cognitive or emotional load? Does it remember me? Does it surface what matters? Does it anticipate? Is it taking on responsibility I would otherwise carry alone?

The mistake - and it is a quiet, common mistake - is to assume that the architectural answer determines the behavioural one. It doesn't. You can build something with perfect agentic loops that feels like a vending machine. And you can build something architecturally linear that, through good design and well-placed context, feels like a colleague.

So we need two words each from two worlds.

Provisioning and commissioning

I want to propose two terms. They're not technical. They're not new. But they are, I think, exactly right for this.

Provisioning an agent is what you do when you build and ship a system. You provision an architecture. You provision capability. You provision a set of affordances. It's a stance of supply - what is being made available, and on what terms.

Commissioning an agent is what a human does when they ask that system to act on their behalf. You commission a portrait. You commission a piece of furniture. You commission an agent. It's a stance of trust and delegation - what you are asking something to do for you, and what you are entering into by asking it.

The same word, different criteria

The engineer says: that is an agent, because it has agentic loops. Their criteria for the word "agent" sits in the architecture. I say: that is an agent, because it feels attentive and proactive and bears some of my burden. My criteria for the same word sits in the experience. We're applying different definitional grounds to the same object, with the same label. Neither of us is wrong, but we are not talking about the same thing.

The reason agents resist a clean technical definition is, I think, simple: they are made of us.

A bridge is made of steel and engineering. An agent is made of the poetry we have written about loss, the pop songs we have written about love, the repair manuals we have written about washing machines, the code we have written about ourselves, the marketing copy, the recipes, the contracts, the diaries, the eulogies. They are made of the evidence and artefacts of human lived experience. They are crystallised intention.

Of course their definition fragments along human lines. Of course the architectural and the experiential pull apart. The thing itself was built from the commissioning impulse in the first place. We made it out of what we cared about enough to preserve.

So we shouldn't expect the engineering definition to be the whole story. It isn't, and it never was going to be.

Two practical consequences

This isn't just a tidy framing. I think it has at least two consequences that change how we work.

The first is that it lets people off the definitional hook. I see builders, especially designers and founders, sweating over whether what they've made is "truly" agentic. Worrying about a label. Worrying that someone with a more technical background will ridicule them for using the word incorrectly. Stop. If your system feels like an agent to the people commissioning it - if it's attentive, if it's proactive, if it bears some labour - then it is an agent in the sense that actually matters. Move on. Get on with the work. No one is checking your loop architecture before deciding whether to trust you.

The second is more uncomfortable, and more useful. It lets us look at things we've already built and ask the inverted question: we have provisioned an agent - but have we commissioned one?

Take my own work. I have been building a bereavement journey prototype - a system that orchestrates across DWP, HMRC, Tell Us Once, the local council, and probate. Technically, it runs on agentic loops. By the engineering definition, it is unambiguously an agent.

But by the commissioning definition? Not yet. Right now it is an extremely efficient workflow. It does nothing about the grief. It doesn't ask how the person is. It doesn't check in. It doesn't reassure. It doesn't pause when it should pause. It cuts efficiently across government services and that's all. We have provisioned an agent and commissioned a workflow.

That is a design failure, not an engineering one. And it would have been invisible to me if I had only the engineering vocabulary. With both, I can point precisely at the gap: the architectural capacity is there, the design hasn't yet used it for the thing it is for. The technical loops have not yet earned their keep.

That is an actionable, specific conversation. Here is where we should check in. Here is where we should reassure. Here is where we should surface what matters to this person's loss, not just the bureaucratic process. It moves the conversation from definitional anxiety into design work.

A behavioural manifesto, of sorts

If commissioning is the axis we have been under-naming, then perhaps it deserves its own short set of markers. Not technical requirements. Behavioural ones - things you can feel for, observe, design toward.

A system, by this lens, is being commissioned as an agent if it:

• Attends. It takes the situation seriously. It notices.
• Remembers. It carries context across moments so I don't have to.
• Surfaces. It draws my attention to what matters, not just what changed.
• Proactively acts. It does not wait to be told the obvious thing.
• Bears labour. It takes weight off me - cognitive, administrative, emotional.
• Responds. It moves with me, not at me.
• Is answerable. It is legible enough that I can understand what it has done on my behalf.

You will notice none of these are about loops. They're about the relationship.

I don't want to argue against the engineers. The architectural distinction they're drawing is real and worth preserving. Loops matter. Autonomy matters. Decision-making structure matters. If you confuse a workflow for an agent at the provisioning layer, you'll make bad technical decisions.

But there is another layer, sitting alongside, and we have been quiet about it. The commissioning layer. The layer where humans decide, through use and through feeling, what a thing actually is to them.

The work, I think, is to hold both at once. To know what we have provisioned, and to know what is being commissioned, and to keep asking whether the two are aligned. When they're not, we have specific design work to do - either to make the provisioning honest about its limits, or to make the experience deserving of the provisioning beneath it.

Agents are made of us. The definitions, the criteria, the grounds - all of it will be plural, soft, and partly human. That is not a problem to be solved. That is the shape of the thing.

So if it feels like an agent to the person who commissioned it: it's an agent. Let's get on with the work.

Anyway...