What is an AI agent — CCA-F Exam Prep

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L2.16|What is an AI agent
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Real person
A software engineer at a whiteboard drawing two diagrams. Left: a single arrow from 'user' to 'chatbot' and back. Right: a loop with arrows going from 'observe' to 'decide' to 'act' and back around. The loop diagram is circled in green. Modern office.

Devin shipped a feature. Nobody told it to.

In 2024, Cognition Labs released Devin, an AI that could take a GitHub issue, read the codebase, write the fix, run the tests, and open a pull request. No human in the loop.

The CEO of a YC startup gave Devin a bug report. Devin read the error log, found the broken function, traced it to a database migration, wrote the fix, tested it, and submitted a PR. Took 15 minutes.

A chatbot answers questions. An agent completes tasks.