u/Empty-Celebration-26

In the old generation of products, you essentially had database wrappers sold in different forms: Salesforce, Hubspot, etc. And it wasn’t so hard to figure out the differences and plus most of the value was in the UI which was operated by humans.

Buying AI tools is harder. Because like hiring employees there are more nuances about how they work, what they are good at and how they can adapt to your organisation. 

The biggest abuse is the misuse of the term “Agent”.

The term Agent is typically used for any or all of the following:

• Using ChatGPT or Claude (LLM)
• Using an LLM in a Loop to achieve a specific goal like in Coding (Claude Code / Codex) - This is an Agent according to me
• A deterministic automation
• An automation with a single step using a LLM
• An automation that has a step as an Agent

I wanted to share a framework I had in mind and looking for thoughts and opinions:

Agent - LLM in a loop which uses Tools
Agentic Workflow - Structured Steps written in Code and steps that have Agents in the middle
Automation - No AI, just Code in a structured workflow

Agent is high cost, high intelligence, low reliability - Automation is low cost, high reliability, no intelligence and Agentic workflow is in the middle.

I've been trying to use this framework to explain to customers.

What do you think ? Does it make sense?

Maybe swap Automation with Workflow - really trying to land on some common ground with the experts on this subreddit.

I think people have generally have a hard time pin pointing the magic of openclaw.

I am thinking it is something like this - combines the power of a coding agent and the ability to access it through any channel for one off tasks?

I implemented a fork of it - it kept dying and wasn't reliable for anything more than one off tasks related to data gathering or artifact generation.

I also needed to work really hard to get an access control model that works without reducing the safety. Also keeping it alive - it was a really pain in the ass - needed to implement some sort of token refreshing gateway.

Wondering how others got past the access control issues - like maybe you want to give read access for a single session to your email but not unfettered access. Also you probably don't want it to get write access to hallucinate a bunch of stuff and send emails to all your customers.

What I did - Brokered access control model where a auth token for a middleware layer is minting during the session. This token can be revoked at any time and also the agent must call this token to get access to the tool - never giving direct access or sharing raw creds to the OC.