A quick trip to the uncanny valley

One of the things we're working on at Prime Radiant is a new "agentic" colleague platform called Sen. I put agentic in quotes, because Sens aren't acting as an agent on behalf of an individual human. They're something a little different. There are as many definitions of "agent" as there are agents. And there sure are a lot of 'em. If you limit it to publicly shipped coding agents, we've found about 550. (If your favorite is missing, please submit it at alltheagents.org.) A few of my favorite definitions of agent: Simon Willison's "An LLM using tools in a loop to achieve a goal" My own somewhat tongue-in-cheek: "A computer program with opinions and feels" What all the definitions typically have in common is that an agent is acting on your behalf. Today, most long-horizon agents are assistants. You give them tasks. And they're startlingly capable. We give Sen colleagues roles rather than tasks. They use the same basic technology as agents, but we treat them differently. Each has a…