Most of the "autonomous agent" pitch assumes agents can find and trust each other. In practice that infrastructure barely exists. The IETF has about 11 competing drafts for how agents should discover and negotiate with each other (ARDP, AID, agents.txt, etc). Six of those expired this month. The surviving ones contradict each other on basics like where an agent publishes its capabilities.

So the autonomous agent vision has a plumbing problem your collaborator model just does not have. When you are driving and the LLM is a cog, you do not need agents.txt or A2A agent cards or any of that. You need a good language model and tight feedback loops, which is what you described.

I suspect the collaborator approach sticks around longer than the current agent hype cycle. The "agents talking to agents" stack is years from being reliable enough for real work. The standards bodies cannot agree on even the basics yet.