What is an Agent and Where Can I Get One?

ORCFLO began as a passion project in 2025, consuming our nights and weekends...becoming a real company in 2026. All this happened in an unplanned 'stealth mode'. This series explains the back-story of our journey.

When most people hear "AI agent," their minds jump to science fiction. HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet from Terminator. JARVIS from Iron Man. These are agents in the fullest sense - autonomous intelligences that anticipate needs, work continuously, make independent decisions, and handle complex tasks without being told what to do at every step.

That's not what we have today. Not even close.

The chat interfaces we use - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - are impressive, but they're not agents in any meaningful sense. After Claude answers your question, it sits there silently, waiting. It doesn't anticipate your next need. It doesn't work in the background while you do other things. It doesn't learn your patterns and get ahead of you. It waits for instructions, completes a task, and waits again.

That's fine. It's useful. But it's not HAL 9000 (which is likely good!).

What makes this confusing is that the AI companies have started marketing "agentic" features in their chat products. Claude has tools now. ChatGPT can browse the web and run code. These are genuine capabilities, and they're valuable. But calling them "agents" sets expectations that the technology can't meet. It's good marketing, but it muddies the waters.

So if we can't have a true autonomous agent, what can we do with the technology that actually exists today?

We can identify big problems. We can break those problems into specific tasks. We can assign those tasks to AI models that are good at narrow, well-defined work. And we can string those tasks together into sequences that accomplish something meaningful.

What do you call that? Some people might call it a computer program. Others might call it a workflow. But since it involves using AI to perform specific tasks in coordination, we landed on a term that felt right: agentic workflow.

An agentic workflow isn't HAL 9000. It's not autonomous, it's not self-directing, and it doesn't anticipate your needs. But it is tremendously useful. It lets you orchestrate multiple AI tasks into a coherent process. It gives you the benefits of AI capability without requiring you to babysit every step.

That's what we wanted to build. Not a sentient agent (at least not yet), but a tool for creating agentic workflows - sequences of AI-powered tasks that we could design, run, observe, and refine.

Great. So where could we get one? That became our next challenge - we'll explain that in the next blog.

NEXT UP:
Step 5: Today's Workflow Tools Are For Programmers