> All it is, is a bunch of LLM calls in a while loop.

Consciousness may be such a loop. Look outward, look at your response, repeat. Like the illusion of motion created by frames per second.

To me it is concerning that proper useful agents may emerge from such a simple loop. E.g just repeatedly asking a sufficiently intelligent AI, "what action within my power shall I perform next in order to maximize the mass of paperclips in the universe," interleaved by performing that act and recording the result.

There is a lot more to agents than 'change the system prompt and send it again to the same model'.

It's just that the tools to do this are non-existent and each application needs to be bespoke.

It's like programming without an OS.

honestly agree. When I first started working with agents I didnt fully understand what it really was either but I eventually fell on a definition of an LLM call that performs a unique function proactively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.