AI Agents: Where They Earn Their Keep, Where They Don't
The “AI agent” label is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now. It covers a chatbot that drafts an email, a model that ships code on its own, and an autonomous system that operates a browser on your behalf. Same word, very different stakes. There are roughly four shapes these tools come in: chat, copilot, coding agent, autonomous agent. The lines blur, but the autonomy levels don’t. Here’s what each is good at, where each breaks, and how to decide which one to actually reach for. ...