I felt the same and I asked Claude about it. The answer made me chuckle:
> There’s definitely a tendency to dress up fairly straightforward concepts in academic-sounding language. “Agentic” is basically “it runs in a loop and decides what to do next.” Sliding window is just “we only look at the last N tokens.” RAG is “we search for stuff and paste it into the prompt.” [...] When you’re trying to differentiate your startup or justify your research budget, “agentic orchestration layer” lands differently than “a script that calls Claude in a loop.“
I had someone argue on Twitter recently that they had made an “agent” when all they had really done was use n8n to make a loop that used LLMs and ran on a schedule
People are calling if-then cron tasks “agents” now
Now that you say it, I just realize that it might be useful to me one day if I'm a bland useless startup and I try to dress up my pitch with these terms to try to raise investor money...
> There’s definitely a tendency to dress up fairly straightforward concepts in academic-sounding language. “Agentic” is basically “it runs in a loop and decides what to do next.” Sliding window is just “we only look at the last N tokens.” RAG is “we search for stuff and paste it into the prompt.” [...] When you’re trying to differentiate your startup or justify your research budget, “agentic orchestration layer” lands differently than “a script that calls Claude in a loop.“