I think how the authors of this post think about "AI agents" is really interesting.
Most people think of agents like they think of human employees. They set up a limited number of agents to run in parallel (often just one), with each agent running in a loop and doing one task at a time. They're still in a world where you have a fixed (on the timescale of hours or days) number of employees, each employee can only do one thing at a time, and transferring tasks between employees is slow and costly.
LLMs don't really work like that. You effectively have an infinite number of agents that you can conjure out of thin air at any time. There's no cost advantage to performing LLM requests in series rather than in parallel.
If you realize this, the pattern of each agent fanning out and forking itself into as many sub-agents as are needed to fulfill the task becomes obvious. This is exactly what the authors have done.
I think a better way to think of agents is as "tasks" or "jobs", like those you might find in Celery or sidekik, and apply the learnings from those.
Most people think of agents like they think of human employees. They set up a limited number of agents to run in parallel (often just one), with each agent running in a loop and doing one task at a time. They're still in a world where you have a fixed (on the timescale of hours or days) number of employees, each employee can only do one thing at a time, and transferring tasks between employees is slow and costly.
LLMs don't really work like that. You effectively have an infinite number of agents that you can conjure out of thin air at any time. There's no cost advantage to performing LLM requests in series rather than in parallel.
If you realize this, the pattern of each agent fanning out and forking itself into as many sub-agents as are needed to fulfill the task becomes obvious. This is exactly what the authors have done.
I think a better way to think of agents is as "tasks" or "jobs", like those you might find in Celery or sidekik, and apply the learnings from those.