“This essay traces the emergence of “agents” as a quiet shift in how organizations delegate authority to software. Beginning with cron in 1970s Unix, it follows a lineage through policy engines, self-stabilizing systems, chaos engineering, and contemporary LLM-based tools to show that the critical variable is discretion, not model capability or production speed and scale. An agent is defined by persistent orientation, initiative, execution authority, and temporal independence—properties that relocate judgment into machines. The essay then argues that governance fails when discretion is delegated without executable constraints.” https://npcmemo.substack.com/p/what-is-an-agent-is-not-an-instrument