[Agent Series Volume 1, Part 1 of 3] Ventures and Questions

So exactly what is an “AI Agent”? Or maybe the quotation marks only need to be around “Agent” since I assume the AI part is implied when talking about agents in some circles. Also, some readers might be thinking ’you should have asked this question 3 years ago’ and others might be thinking ’thank you, I’m glad you brought this up’. I think that difference is exactly why this post and my question are both so timely.

Let me give you some more context. My professional career has largely (maybe 95.8%? :)) been in tech bridging business and technology. Throughout nine years of experience, I’ve wavered between what the mix looks like. Or if you want to continue with the bridge analogy - which piece of land I’m building the bridge from. Sometimes I’ve leaned more into the business side and sometimes the tech side. Lately, the two have been melding really nicely and I think the rise of the availability of tools for builders really helps with that. As such, I’ve finally ventured out to build! I built on an idea I had years ago and now have a working prototype that I got launched quickly given the assistance of an AI tool. I also ventured out to build an agent.

In job searching, I built a kind of system involving using AI tools for resume analysis and searching for available roles that could be a potential match given my resume details. After running the loop several times then moving on to start documenting which companies I had taken a look at, the thought of using AI came to mind. It’s almost like programming. How do you know when it’s time to use recursion?

Given the excitement and many, many posts and discussions about AI agents, I thought this would be a great opportunity to build an agent that could just run the loop for me. With this, the idea of “Agent Requirements Documentation” or an “Agent Requirements Document”, ARD for short, came up. It’s like a PRD but with specific details for tooling and inputs and outputs for the desired agent. It can also be used as a feeder into AI systems to speed up agent development.

I started on the road to build an AI job search agent quite optimistically. Then, as my journey continued, I thought of the UI. Well, what would the interface look like? My original tracker is in Google Sheets. It’d be great to have some way for users to input details in a nice, clean UI then have the results presented similarly - in a nice, clean UI. This is around the time in the design process where I really started to think about what makes an AI agent an AI agent. 

When is something an agent vs. an app? If you’re wondering that too, stay tuned. I’m planning on writing at least a couple more posts along these lines - one walking through definitions of an “AI Agent” and another describing how my plans to build a job search agent resulted in something that looked more like an app.

Before I conclude this post, I want to give all Honor and Glory to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. If you check out my other posts, you’ll see that it’s been a while since I’ve posted on this blog. A LOT has happened in my life over the past two years and God has kept me through it all. Not only has He kept me but He has also blessed me with ideas and encouragement in my journey as a technologist. This includes ideas described above around ARDs, using AI to automate the job search loop, and the ideas for this and other blog posts. All Glory to God.

Thanks for reading! If you have any follow-up questions on AI Agents or my relationship with God, please feel free to reach out and contact me.

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Jewel