# Category 19 — Agentic Autonomous Thinking

This category covers LLM-driven agents that plan, reflect, self-evaluate, coordinate, and act with human-like autonomy. The central question is not "how do we make output text sound human" but "what cognitive architecture makes an AI's *thinking* feel human" — deliberative, self-correcting, goal-directed, coherent across time, and capable of hedging, giving up, or changing course.

## Angle Files

- [A-academic.md](./A-academic.md) — 36 peer-reviewed and pre-print papers: ReAct, Reflexion, Self-Refine, Tree of Thoughts, Generative Agents, MetaGPT, SWE-agent, the metacognition cluster (KnowRL, SaySelf, AutoMeco, ReflectEvo, HumanLLM, HugAgent), and 2025–2026 additions: self-evolving agent surveys (arXiv:2508.07407), memory survey (arXiv:2603.07670), SEAgent, Meta-R1, ICML 2025 metacognitive learning position paper, and the Agentic Reasoning comprehensive review (arXiv:2504.19678).
- [B-industry.md](./B-industry.md) — 19 first-party engineering posts from Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Cognition, LangChain, Hugging Face, Sakana AI, Adept, Reflection AI, and Imbue — including Project Vend, Agentic Misalignment, "Don't Build Multi-Agents," and the "Agent = Model + Harness" essay. Updated with ChatGPT Agent (Jul 2025), Claude Managed Agents (Apr 2026), A2A/MCP protocol context, and SWE-bench escalation to SWE-bench Pro.
- [C-opensource.md](./C-opensource.md) — 22+ repos across four waves: classic goal-loopers (AutoGPT, BabyAGI), multi-agent role-play societies (MetaGPT, CrewAI, AutoGen), infrastructure runtimes (LangGraph v1.0+, Letta, smolagents), and the thinking-as-artifact strand (Thoughtful Agents, SWE-agent, AgentKit, Voyager). Updated with OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Claude Agent SDK, Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit, and MCP ecosystem (5,800+ servers, 97M downloads/month).
- [D-commercial.md](./D-commercial.md) — 19 commercial products with positioning claims, traction data, and pattern analysis: Devin (2.0/2.2 updates, $20/mo entry), Jules, ChatGPT Agent (replaces Operator), Claude Computer Use, Sierra, Decagon, Parloa, Manus → Meta, Genspark, Reflection AI, Imbue, Relevance AI, Lindy, Microsoft Copilot agents, Rabbit R1, Adept → Amazon, MultiOn, Mava, Orby → Uniphore. Updated with Claude Managed Agents, A2A protocol adoption, SWE-bench Pro context.
- [E-practical.md](./E-practical.md) — 17 practitioner posts from Hacker News, r/AI\_Agents, r/LocalLLaMA, r/singularity, Twitter/X, YouTube, and dev.to: loop-prevention patterns, the FSM mental model, 12-Factor Agents, hierarchical memory, Anthropic's 73%/0.8% autonomy-in-practice numbers, the 17-week production report, and Anthropic's 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report (autonomy trust grows with usage: 20% → 40% full-auto between new and experienced users).

## Synthesis

- [SYNTHESIS.md](./SYNTHESIS.md) — the distilled synthesis across all five angles
- [INDEX.md](./INDEX.md) — legacy category summary — superseded by SYNTHESIS.md, preserved for traceability

> **Filesystem note:** On macOS (case-insensitive), `index.md` and `INDEX.md` resolve to the same file. The legacy summary content that was previously here is reproduced verbatim in `SYNTHESIS.md` for traceability.
