Agent, schmagent (but tools are cool)

Thomas Ptacek says everybody Should Write An Agent , because It's Incredibly Easy . You can indeed have your very own agent in a matter of a few dozen (pretty-printed!) lines of Python plus API access to a tool-call-capable LLM, per Simon Willison's definition: "an LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal" . Thomas illustrates this with a chat client for the OpenAI Responses API that lets…