CURRENT | Foundations

"Agent" means at least three different things right now, and the confusion isn't just semantic. Underneath the terminology sits a design decision with real operational consequences: who picks the next step, your code or the model? Code-determined paths produce bounded, explainable failures. Model-determined paths produce creative ones you didn't plan for. Most production systems need both. The hard part is drawing the line between them, and it's a risk-tolerance decision that happens to look like an architecture one.

A new browser protocol lets websites publish structured tool definitions that agents can call directly, skipping the page entirely. A site registers a product search with four categories in the enum. The actual catalog has fifty. The agent receives that simplified view as the complete picture and has no mechanism to ask what else exists. When a website decides what to tell an agent about itself, it's also deciding what disappears.

Anew browser protocol lets websites publish structured tool definitions that agents can call directly, skipping the page entirely. A site registers a product search with four categories in the enum. The actual catalog has fifty. The agent receives that simplified view as the complete picture and has no mechanism to ask what else exists. When a website decides what to tell an agent about itself, it's also deciding what disappears.

The most durable distinction in agentic systems has nothing to do with sophistication. It has to do with who decides what happens next. If code dictates every step, you have a workflow, even when it calls a model at each one. If the model picks the next action, you've crossed into something structurally different.

Worth saying upfront: this spectrum is not a maturity ranking. A deterministic workflow at level three can deliver more value than an autonomous agent at level five when the task demands reliability, explainability, and a limited blast radius. The best architecture is the simplest one that meets the requirements you actually have today.

Six levels, from fully code-controlled to fully model-controlled.

Three protocols keep surfacing in the same conversations about how AI agents interact with the world. They share governance under the Linux Foundation, overlapping vocabulary around capability discovery, and enough surface similarity to blur together fast.

They shouldn't. Each operates at a different layer, runs in a different environment, and puts control in different hands. This grid draws the lines: what each protocol connects, where it executes, and who decides what gets exposed.

Foundations

Foundations

Where You Can Afford to Be Surprised

Where You Can Afford to Be Surprised

What a Website Chooses to Tell an Agent

What a Website Chooses to Tell an Agent