What the Heck is an AI Agent?

Everyone keeps talking about AI agents. We wanted to understand what actually makes something an agent, so naturally we explain it with eggs. Then we give the eggs a manager. Meet Big Egg. We break down how agents work, what they can do for us, and why asking one to do everything at once usually goes badly. Mary gives Muse about five minutes to impress her, Instinct emails about her overdue Revolve returns, and Josh uses Dottie to find Mary a bike. We also get into Anthropic's vending-machine experiment and explain outcome-based pricing with a very hypothetical Planet Fitness. What's your favorite personal agent, and how do you like your eggs? Drop both in the comments or email hi@outofourdepth.com. These are equally important questions. Chapters 00:00 What actually is an AI agent? 01:59 What goes into an agent 03:21 How an agent works through a task 04:17 Chatbots vs. automations vs. agents 06:12 Meeting notes that turn into follow-ups 07:24 How agentic is it? 08:29 Mary's five-minute test 09:52 What can Muse actually do? 10:53 Instinct and the overdue returns 12:17 Voice memos and emailing Mary's TA 13:25 Dottie, Muse and Grokbot 14:50 Finding Mary a bike 16:08 Stop asking it to do everything 17:41 Big Egg and the agent team 19:13 Do you need all those agents? 20:17 Our ultramarathon planning mistake 21:18 Project Vend: the blue blazer 22:35 Better tools, better guardrails 23:40 How do agents make money? 24:32 Paying for results 25:44 Explain it with a gym 27:58 Recap: what the heck is an agent? 30:17 How do you like your eggs? 31:55 Phone a friend: the runny boil Out of Our Depth: https://outofourdepth.com Run Your City: https://www.runyourcity.org AI@GSB: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/experien... Research notes Project Vend, including the blue-blazer story: https://www.anthropic.com/research/pr... More on agents, workflows and when a simpler setup is enough: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering... Our personal-agent reviews reflect what we tried at the time. The Slack prices and gym pricing models are examples, not actual offers. #AI #Podcast #OutOfOurDepth