You're Not Building an AI Agent. You're Building a Very Expensive Chatbot.

The architectural difference developers keep missing ,and why it's costing teams months of rework. The ticket came in on a Friday: "We need an AI agent that handles customer onboarding end-to-end." By Tuesday, the team had a working demo. A polished chat interface. It asked the right questions. The stakeholders loved it. Six weeks later, it was in production doing approximately one thing: answering FAQ questions in a slightly fancier wrapper than the old help center. This pattern is everywher...