Chatbots Answer, Agents Finish: Where the Line Actually Falls

An article from DEV Community argues that the core difference between a chatbot and an autonomous agent is that a chatbot responds to prompts while an agent carries a goal across steps and decides its own next actions. It contends that a system which forms a plan but relies on a human to execute each step and decide when to continue is not truly autonomous. The piece cites research on agentic coding, noting it used roughly 3,500 times more tokens than single-round reasoning, costing about $1.86 per task versus $0.016. It also reports that the best frontier agent completed only 30.3% of 175 long-horizon workplace tasks in TheAgentCompany benchmark, with failures including getting stuck in loops. The author advises using chatbots for simple one-shot questions and agents for multi-step, open-ended goals.