Strategy

We say “R&D” like it’s one word for one activity. It isn’t. Research and development are two different jobs with different rhythms, and a coding agent helps with each in a completely different way. This matters because most people reach for the same workflow for both. You point an agent at a problem, give it a goal, and let it run. Sometimes that works beautifully. Sometimes it produces something that looks finished and is quietly wrong. Sometimes the agent misunderstands you and the workflow starts to thrash. The difference usually isn’t the agent. It’s whether you were doing research or development, and whether you knew which one. ...

“Agent” is everywhere in AI conversations. I’d been nodding along with my own rough definition, assuming I’d sharpen it later. As an infra engineer, undefined terms are a bad habit. When a word means everything, it usually means nothing, and the ambiguity bites eventually. I watched two people use “agent” in the same meeting with clearly different meanings. Nobody flagged it. They both left thinking they’d agreed. So I asked Claude. I started with “What does agentic mean?” It sounds like some sort of concrete technology concept I needed to learn about. But it isn’t: “agentic” means “of or relating to an agent.” It sounds like a real technical term but it’s just the adjective form of the noun I couldn’t pin down. ...