It's weird how every little automation is an "agent" these days. Weird LLM that tags your uploaded photo: Agent. A sequence of filters and pipes in a shell: Agent. Pre-saved prompt: Agent.
"AI" burns through terms quicker than even crypto did.
@tante Geez, are u living under a rock? Agents are so 2026 Q1! Loops are the future!
@inhji I know. It's batshit
Jun 26, 2026, 10:14 AM
@tante you can use multiple slurp juices on a single agent
@alpacamale
and the uv lights that burned them...
@tante
Jun 26, 2026, 7:00 AM@tante "agent" is equivalent to "something that does something" now
@tante it's like a simple if/else statement is "AI" these days...
@tante Years ago I built NurseBot for a work project. It was script running via cron that scanned few database tables for data issues in new rows and fixed obvious cases based on rules. It probably would have been sold today as revolutionary data integrity management agent platform 😄
@tante We saw it similar when "Programs" moved to "Apps"
@lobingera @tante It was the “lication” bit in “Applications” that was holding them back, clearly.
@whybird
We should have gone with "Programlications"
I think the world would be slightly better now in that case. ;)
@tante I remember Gaming Magazines describing NPC and enemies as AI at least since 1998.
Though I think people had a better understanding for this being a shortcut description.
@tante One aspect might be that it’s shared lingo that non-tech people understand. “What did you do?” – “Wrote an automation to solve recurring issue xy. It’s a script triggered via cron.” – *(blank stares and slow nods)* – “I wrote an agent to help me do xy.” – “Ooh! Great! Keep going!”
To be fair, some time ago, I started using the phrase “operator” for cronjobs in a personal project. I took that from Kubernetes. Thought it was neat somehow.
I think agents etc. are anthropomorphization.
Jun 26, 2026, 7:38 AM@tante Agentic: lacks human oversight. Think always of Agent Smith in the Matrix.
@tante
The conventional term, in computer science, is “daemon”
@tante One of those terms ”crypto” burned through: ”crypto”.
@tante Everytime someone presses the button at our front door, a bell agent jumps into action.
Jun 26, 2026, 10:11 AM@tante I have an agent on my bedside table that wakes me up every morning
Jun 26, 2026, 2:48 PM@shaedrich Does this site not convince you that LLMs can keep the time?
https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
@tante
Jun 26, 2026, 10:22 AMAnd we shouldn't use anthropomorphizing language any more
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/
@tante cron job running a bash one-liner to restart a service that crashes every couple days? Believe it or not, also an agent
Jun 26, 2026, 1:24 PM@tante I like that you used the past tense for crypto :-).
@tante we need to call the "&" in bash the agent command to really devalue it. "I'll launch an agent to measure disk usage"
du - h . > usage &
@tante next thing they'll rebrand browsers to "user agent" or something silly like that.
@tante I feel that last part. I have physical reactions to words like "agent", "AI", "skill" etc. at this point