@0xJeyx: Andrew Ng (founder of Google Brain) stopped asking whether something is an agent. He asks how much autonomy you gave it…
Summary
Andrew Ng shifts the focus from whether a system is an agent to how much autonomy it has, recommending building agentic workflows with deliberate autonomy levels per task rather than full autonomy.
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Cached at: 07/25/26, 06:10 PM
Andrew Ng (founder of Google Brain) stopped asking whether something is an agent.
He asks how much autonomy you gave it.
• Low: you code every step. • Medium: the model picks the tools. • High: it designs its own workflow and writes the tools it needs.
The first skill is not prompting.
It is splitting the task, then deliberately setting the autonomy level of each piece.
Do that piece by piece and you have a graph.
Lock the steps that must never vary.
Give the model judgment only where rules are weak.
Put a reviewer wherever a mistake is expensive.
Most builders still hand one agent the entire job at maximum autonomy and call it a prototype.
The 6-step guide below shows the disciplined version.
Which part of your pipeline currently has more autonomy than it has earned?
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