Roughly speaking - yes. Still, it's an advancement - even if it's a small one - on the usual chatbots, right?

P.S. I am well aware of all of the risks that agents brought. I'm speaking in terms of pure "maximum performance", so to speak.

Yes, and this is an incredibly powerful idea. Running fluid flow simulations inside an optimization loop (monte carlo + gradient descent) revolutionized aircraft design, nuclear simulations and geophysics. When the tool being called updates the LLM's training data, or runs experiments that the LLM can learn from, then that potentially becomes a self-improvement loop.