Everyone Wants to Be an Agent. Simon Willison on OpenAI's Shift

The new default for AI products

Researcher and developer Simon Willison comments on the current race in the AI industry on the X network. According to his observations, a massive rebranding is underway, where every vendor is trying to profile their tool as an "agent". A word that until recently denoted a specific technical approach is becoming a mandatory marketing label.

Willison compares this shift to OpenAI's historical move, when the company took its desktop app built on the Codex model and, instead of building a separate brand for developers, immediately named it ChatGPT.

The end of specialized tools

This trend highlights a fundamental shift in user expectations. They are no longer looking for an isolated tool to solve a single task, but a general interface capable of autonomously completing tasks across domains. When a product doesn't have "agent" in its name, the market begins to perceive it as outdated.

For vendors, this means the need to unify fragmented portfolios under one strong brand, similar to what Anthropic just did with the merger of Claude Cowork and Chat. The customer does not want to figure out which specific model or application to use for a given task.

Bundled complexity

The problem arises when marketing gets ahead of reality. Many tools that call themselves agents today are actually just better RAG applications with predictable workflows. A customer expecting an autonomous agent capable of planning and self-correction then runs into the limits of a fragile architecture.

Moreover, the confusion of terms makes it difficult for engineers to navigate, as they need to know exactly whether they are deploying a deterministic tool or a system that chooses its own path to the goal.

What will determine survival

The proof of success will not be who adds the word "agent" to their landing page first. What will decide is the system's ability to reliably hold context over long tasks and the real added value that autonomy brings to the user compared to the good old "generate" button.

Lilith's verdict

A year ago we argued about what is and isn't AI. Today we're doing the same drill with the word agent. Until it can pay an invoice and not lose its fingers in the process, it's just a chatbox with a longer prompt.