Agentic vs Chat

Chatbots respond to individual messages in a turn-by-turn exchange, while agentic systems take autonomous actions across multiple steps, using tools and making decisions in a loop without waiting for human input at each turn. The key distinction is agency: an agent decides what to do next, executes that action, observes the result, and iterates until it reaches a goal or determines it needs human guidance. This shift from reactive conversation to goal-directed task execution is what makes agentic coding fundamentally different from a basic chat interface, and recognizing the boundary tells you when agent patterns are worth the added complexity versus when a simpler chat-based approach is the right tool.