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You Do Not Need Every Agent
On July 17, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, posted a short question on X: “Are we still talking loops or did we shift to graphs yet?”
Note: This article was initially published at my personal blog. You can find it here.
I took it as a joke, but it captured something that has made me uncomfortable about recent conversations around AI agents. We had prompt engineering, then context engineering, then harness engineering. Soon everyone was talking about loops. Now perhaps loops are already old and we are supposed to think in graphs. Each term seems to describe something real, but people rarely stop to define what kind of thing it is: a component of the system, a design pattern, a new engineering paradigm, or simply the latest trend. Instead, they are presented as a sequence of replacements, each another thing I am expected to follow. If I learned the previous term last week, I can easily feel that I am behind again this week.
The product names make this worse. ChatGPT, Claude, ChatGPT Work, Claude Cowork, Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, OpenClaw, Atlas, and Aside can all be…
