A plain chatbot does one thing: it reads your message and writes a reply. An agent is different — given a goal, it decides for itself what to do next, takes an action, looks at what happened, and decides again. It keeps going until the goal is met.
That loop — decide, act, observe, repeat — is the whole idea. Everything else in this module is detail on top of that one loop.
Try it: give the agent a goal
Watch it decide, step by step, whether and how to use its tools.
Knowledge Check
5 questions — answer all, then submit
1. What makes an AI agent different from a plain chatbot?
2. What is the ReAct pattern?
3. What is 'in-context memory' for an agent?
4. Why do production agents cap the number of steps they can take?
5. What is an advantage of multi-agent systems over a single agent?