Interested in agents but clewless noob. Please help

Hello there people. So I keep hearing about agent this, agent that, and apparently it's all the rage right now. And it also appears to be the logical next step after just chat models. But this subreddit has been swamped with so many slop threads about "this agent is far better than anything else". Every time it turns out to be slop. Also, tools that claim to be revolutionary like OpenClaw just turn out to be heavily boosted by bots. Another factor is that I don't have a GPU, so I can't test mo