Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm where the construction of the software is centered on the concept of software agents. In contrast to object-oriented programming which has objects (providing methods with variable parameters) at its core, AOP has externally specified agents (with interfaces and messaging capabilities) at its core. They can be thought of as abstractions of objects. Exchanged messages are interpreted by receiving "agents", in a way specific to its class of agents.

Historically, the concept of agent-oriented programming and the idea of centering software around the concept of an Agent was introduced by Yoav Shoham within his artificial intelligence studies in 1990. His agents are specific to his own paradigm as they have only one method, with one parameter. To quote Yoav Shoham from his paper in 1990 for a basic difference between AOP and OOP:

... agent-oriented programming (AOP), which can be viewed as a specialization of object-oriented programming.

There are multiple AOP 'frameworks', also called agent platforms, that implement Shoham's programming paradigm. The following examples illustrate how a basic agent is programmed as a hello-world program.

For the Java-platform one of the frameworks is JADE. Here is a very basic example of an agent that runs code.

At the core of JADE's AOP model is that its API supports the standard FIPA Agent Communication Language

AgentSpeak is an agent-oriented programming language based on logic programming and the belief–desire–intention (BDI) architecture.

For a literal translation of agent-oriented concepts into a scheme unobfuscated as is JADE, behind Java and Object Orientedness, Agent Speak (Jason) provides a "natural" language for agents.