Thinking Fast and Flowing Slow: Real-Time Reasoning for Autonomous Agents
Opening — Why this matters now AI agents are getting smarter—but not faster. Most large language model (LLM) systems still behave like cautious philosophers in a chess match: the world patiently waits while they deliberate. In the real world, however, traffic lights don’t freeze for an AI car mid-thought, and market prices don’t pause while a trading agent reasons about “the optimal hedge.” The new study Real-Time Reasoning Agents in Evolving Environments by Wen et al. (2025) calls this out as a fundamental flaw in current agent design—and offers a solution that blends human-like intuition with deliberative reasoning. ...