← Concept IndexDEFINITION WHY IT MATTERS COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH
The agent loop
Also called: perceive-plan-act-observe, ReAct loop
An agent wraps a model in a loop: perceive the situation, plan a next step, act by calling a tool, observe the result, and repeat until the task is done or a stop condition is hit.
The loop is what makes an agent able to do things — send email, browse, run code — instead of only describing them. It's also where the risk concentrates: the model's guesses now have real-world effects.
A chatbot. A chatbot answers; an agent takes actions in the world and reads back what happened.