The ai hype word for 2026 after agent in 2025 for any LLM powered application.

Well kind of, I wouldn't be surprised to see that some things marketed as agents are actually good old deterministic software.

My guess is that everything "reliable" in LLM/agentic-coding comes down to either calls to reliable/deterministic tools or providing well-defined success criteria (such as loads of unit tests) for the LLM to throw its stuff at in "agentic loops" until something sticks.

It's really funny (and a bit obnoxious) to watch the vocabulary from the outside. In 2023 everybody learned the word moat, then it's been agent(ic), from last year there's more talking about harnesses than at a bungee jumping convention. The mot du jour is frontier.

It truly proves like there's a handful of thought leaders on Twitter that everybody follows blindly and start to copy down to the lexicon and parrot everywhere else.