From Chatbots to Agents: The Evolution of AI with LLMs
AI has moved fast—really fast. Just a year ago, most people were getting excited about chatbots that could write emails or summarize articles. Now we’re talking about autonomous agents that can plan vacations, write code, schedule your meetings, and even collaborate with other agents. So what changed?
This post walks you through the natural evolution of AI systems built with large language models (LLMs), from simple use cases to tool-augmented workflows, and finally to full-blown autonomous agents.
Phase 1: Simple LLM Applications
The journey begins with basic uses of LLMs — what many people first encounter when using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
These applications are typically stateless, meaning they don’t remember previous interactions beyond a single session (unless explicitly designed to). They’re also reactive: they wait for a human to provide input, and then respond.
Typical use cases
Chatbots: Answering product questions, FAQs, or guiding users through scripted workflows.
Text Transformation: Summarizing articles, rewriting content, changing tone or format.
Coding Assistants: Auto-completing functions, translating code, or explaining snippets.
Language Tasks: Translating text, correcting grammar, extracting entities or keywords.
Knowledge Lookup (with baked-in info): "What is quantum entanglement?" or "Who won the 2014 World Cup?"
These tasks are surprisingly powerful — and for many users, this is more than enough. With the right prompt engineering, simple LLM apps can appear smart, fast, and even creative. Here is a minimal Python script demonstrating such a simple LLM application
These early LLM applications amazed users with their apparent intelligence, but their simplicity also revealed clear constraints. Understanding these limitations is crucial to appreciating why developers began moving beyond simple chatbots toward more powerful, integrated systems.
Limitations
No long-term memory or personalization.
No live data (unless fine-tuned or augmented with retrieval).
Cannot perform real actions (e.g., open files, call APIs, send emails).
Highly dependent on user prompting to get specific results.
Even well-written prompts don’t give the model true understanding — just the illusion of it. That’s why these systems can:
Repeat themselves
Miss obvious facts
Or “hallucinate” confidently wrong answers
Still, this phase laid the groundwork. But as impressive as LLMs were, one key limitation became obvious: the model didn’t know your data — your policies, documents, or systems. The next question was inevitable: how can we give it access to that knowledge, and eventually, the power to use it?
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
What if you want the LLM to answer questions using your own data — things it wasn’t trained on, like internal documents, customer support logs, engineering specs, or legal contracts? That’s where Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) comes in.
RAG is a method for dynamically injecting external information into the prompt at runtime. Instead of hoping the model knows something, you retrieve relevant content and feed it directly to the model as context.
Let’s say your company has a 60-page procurement manual. You want to ask:
“Under what conditions can a department make a purchase over $10,000 without VP approval?”
This is a perfect RAG use case:
It’s too specific for the LLM to know by default.
The answer exists somewhere in internal documentation.
The user shouldn’t have to dig manually — the system should do it.
In a RAG system, when a user asks a question, the workflow typically looks like this:
Embed the query – The user’s question is converted into a vector using an embedding model.
Search the knowledge base – The query vector is compared against vectors of your documents (stored in a vector database like Pinecone, Weaviate, or FAISS) to find the most relevant chunks of text.
Retrieve top results – The most relevant sections (e.g., paragraphs or bullet points) are selected.
Construct the augmented prompt – The retrieved text snippets are inserted into the LLM prompt alongside the user’s question, forming a rich context window.
Generate the answer – The LLM uses this context to craft a response grounded in your actual data.
This approach turns an LLM from a generic, public knowledge assistant into a domain-specific expert tuned to your organization’s private information — without retraining the model itself.
Why RAG is a breakthrough:
Live knowledge – It connects your LLM to a constantly updated knowledge base, reflecting the latest policies, procedures, or data.
Reduced hallucinations – Grounding the model in authoritative documents helps reduce confidently wrong answers.
No retraining needed – Updating your knowledge base instantly updates what your assistant knows, without retraining or fine-tuning the model.
Scalable – You can expand coverage simply by adding new documents or data to your retrieval index.
Challenges to watch for:
Chunking strategy – If documents are split poorly (e.g., too small or too large), retrieval accuracy suffers.
Quality of embeddings – Better embedding models yield more relevant search results.
Latency – Combining retrieval and generation can add delay; optimizing retrieval speed and prompt size is key for a smooth user experience.
RAG systems are now at the heart of many advanced AI applications: internal chatbots that answer questions about company SOPs, customer support assistants that read ticket histories, and knowledge workers who need answers grounded in thousands of pages of regulations or research. By bridging the gap between static model knowledge and dynamic, proprietary information, RAG enables language models to truly “know what you know.”
But even with RAG, we’re still fundamentally in the realm of one-shot responses: everything the model needs must be packed into a single prompt at inference time. While retrieval can dynamically inject up-to-date knowledge, the LLM can’t do anything beyond generating text. It can’t perform calculations, interact with APIs, or carry out multi-step processes.
For example, if your question requires both retrieving a document and checking a live system (like an inventory database or weather API), RAG alone isn’t enough — because LLMs without tools can’t call external functions or get live data beyond what’s stuffed into the prompt.
To move beyond static, context-only interactions, we need something more sophisticated: a way for LLMs to use tools, extending their capabilities from pure language generation to actively interfacing with other systems. This next evolution turns the LLM into a reasoning engine that can decide when to call APIs, perform calculations, or fetch real-time information — opening the door to far more powerful and interactive AI systems.
Phase 2: LLMs + Tools
Retrieval made it possible for LLMs to answer questions using your data, but there was still a fundamental limit: they could only respond with text. What if the best response requires action, like calculating a complex formula, querying a database, or booking a meeting?
This is where tool use changes everything.
Instead of trying to cram every possible piece of data or functionality into the prompt, we give the LLM access to external tools it can call on demand. Tools can be anything from calculators and web browsers to your internal APIs, databases, or third-party services.
Think of it like upgrading the LLM from a smart librarian — who can find information — to a digital assistant — who can find information and take meaningful action.
With tool use, the LLM no longer needs every detail packed into the prompt. Instead, it can recognize when it’s missing information, decide what steps to take, and call external tools to gather data or perform actions.
How it works in practice:
We (the developers) implement and host the tools: these can be functions, APIs, calculators, or any service your LLM can use.
When we send a prompt to the LLM, we also describe the tools we’ve made available — including each tool’s name, what it does, and what arguments it accepts.
The LLM interprets the prompt, decides whether it needs to use any of the tools, and if so, generates a structured request (like a function call) specifying which tool to invoke and with what arguments.
We, as the system orchestrator, receive this tool call, execute it in the real world, and send the results back to the LLM.
The LLM then incorporates the tool’s output into its final response to the user.
To see how this works in practice, imagine we send the LLM a pseudo prompt like this:
What’s the weather in San Francisco today? By the way, I have a tool getWeather which delivers weather for a given city and date.
Of course, this isn’t how a real prompt would look in an actual implementation — it’s just a simplified example to demonstrate the concept of tool use. In reality, tools are described to the LLM in structured formats (like function schemas), not casual text.
In this example, the LLM interprets the user’s question and realizes it needs live weather data to answer accurately. Based on the available tools we’ve told it about, it decides to call the getWeather tool with “San Francisco” and “today” as inputs.
Our system then executes this tool, fetches the current weather, and sends the result back to the LLM. The model incorporates this real-time information into a final response for the user, such as:
The current temperature in San Francisco is 66°F with clear skies.
This workflow highlights the key innovation: we provide the tools and describe them to the LLM, and the LLM determines when and how to use them — turning it from a static text generator into a dynamic assistant capable of real-world actions.
But even with tools, each request is still fundamentally a single-turn interaction: the LLM receives the prompt, decides whether it needs a tool, calls it if necessary, and produces an answer. Once the response is sent, the conversation effectively resets — there’s no memory of past attempts, and no ability to adapt or plan multiple steps.
To move beyond one-off questions and actions, we need something more sophisticated: systems that can break a high-level goal into sub-tasks, make decisions over multiple steps, handle errors, and remember context throughout a process. That’s where the concept of agents comes in.
Phase 3: Agents
Now we’re getting to the fun part.
Agents combine everything above — retrieval, tool use, and LLM reasoning — with one key idea: autonomy. Instead of handling a single prompt-response cycle, agents can work toward a high-level goal by planning, executing, and adapting over multiple steps.
An AI agent doesn’t just generate an answer — it can:
Receive a complex objective, like “Book me a flight to New York next Friday under $300, and then schedule a meeting with the team the day after I arrive.”
Break it down into sub-tasks, such as searching flights, comparing options, booking tickets, checking calendars, and sending invites.
Use tools or APIs repeatedly as needed to carry out each step.
Decide what to do next based on intermediate results (e.g., if no flights under $300 are available, look for nearby airports).
Handle errors or retries (e.g., if a payment fails or an API times out).
Optionally store memory, so it can refer back to previous decisions or actions as the task progresses.
This multi-step, adaptive behavior makes agents feel less like question-answering bots and more like collaborative digital workers capable of handling real-world workflows end-to-end.
What makes agents different from tool-augmented LLMs?
Whereas tool use lets an LLM perform one action in response to one prompt, agents can build a plan, adjust it dynamically, and execute a sequence of actions — often involving multiple tool calls across many turns — to achieve the final outcome.
Agents don’t just respond, they reason over time. For example:
If an agent tasked with “Find three laptops under $1,000 with good battery life” sees the first two search results exceed the budget, it can keep searching, compare specs, and update its plan until it finds suitable options — instead of giving up after one tool call.
Why agents matter
Agents represent a major leap forward because they let you move from simple, single-turn interactions to powerful, goal-driven systems. With agents, you can automate workflows that previously required human coordination — from booking travel and compiling reports to troubleshooting technical issues or orchestrating multi-step customer support tasks.
By combining planning, reasoning, and tool use, agents don’t just answer questions — they deliver outcomes. This shift transforms LLMs from reactive assistants into proactive collaborators capable of executing complex, real-world processes.
Trust, Transparency, and Control
One of the biggest concerns around AI agents is control. People worry about giving too much autonomy to systems that can hallucinate facts, generate faulty code, or make decisions based on incorrect assumptions. And these fears are valid—LLMs can still confidently produce incorrect outputs.
However, this is also where well-designed agents start to shine. Unlike a one-shot LLM response that might spit out an answer with no explanation, agents are explicit about their reasoning. They:
Break tasks into steps
Show you intermediate decisions
Generate and reveal tool inputs like SQL queries, API calls, or code
Justify why a certain action is being taken
This makes agents inherently more transparent than simple LLM apps. You don’t just get an answer—you see how the agent arrived at it, and you can inspect, approve, or intervene as needed. Instead of hiding complexity, agents give you a traceable process.
Think of it less like talking to a "magic box" and more like collaborating with a very capable (and very verbose) intern.
As agent frameworks mature, expect to see better UIs for reviewing steps, controls for restricting actions, and logs that help you debug or audit agent behavior—making it easier to trust these systems, not just for what they say, but for how they think.
Introducing GATE/0: A Gateway for Your LLM and Agentic Applications
As we move from simple LLM prompts to retrieval, tool use, and fully autonomous agents, one thing becomes clear: these systems are incredibly powerful — but also complex. Once agents start reasoning over multiple steps, calling tools, and interacting with live systems, it becomes critical to understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how much it costs.
That’s where GATE/0 comes in.
GATE/0 provides a unified gateway for all your LLM and agentic applications, giving you deep visibility into every prompt, tool call, and decision your agents make. It lets you trace your AI workflows just like you would trace traditional software, so you can:
Analyze costs — Understand how your LLM usage translates to spending, down to individual prompts or tool invocations.
Debug behavior — See exactly what your agents did at each step, including tool inputs, retrieved documents, and reasoning chains.
Audit decisions — Trace how agents arrived at their conclusions, making it easier to spot errors or validate outputs.
Improve reliability — Identify and fix failure points in complex multi-step processes.
As AI systems become more agentic, observability and control aren’t optional — they’re essential. GATE/0 helps you move confidently into this new era, where your LLM-powered applications aren’t just reactive bots, but intelligent, proactive agents driving real business outcomes.
