Revisiting AI Agents: What's Changed? What's the Same? Do people want Agents?

As multi-step agentic AI systems evolve, performance is increasingly driven by orchestration harnesses and stepwise outcome verification rather than raw model scale. While gated sub-agent architectures help prevent error cascades, the industry faces a sharp reckoning around vibe coding security vulnerabilities and unsustainable token costs. Paradoxically, generic AI travel planning tools are causing widespread itinerary homogenization, which in turn is driving up the market value and prestige...