Agent Is Not the Model

yaaaaam

An agent, in general, is just whatever carries out a task on behalf of someone/something else.

llm_nerd

I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever. Often with posts like this I imagine someone had their own confusion and then somehow projected it on everyone else. Like Trump thinking people didn't know about the word groceries or that dumb ends with a b.

agentdev001

The post ends with a comment on "its not about being pedantic..." so, a few not being pedantic bits: In the table "Real world examples"; "Claude Desktop" houses three harnesses at the moment; Claude, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code. "Claude CLI", I presume, is referring to Claude Code CLI. This is distinct from the 'ant CLI', which is sometimes referred to as 'Claude CLI'. "Cursor" could be any of them- but, 'Cursor Agents', 'Cursor Cloud Agents', 'Cursor CLI', and whatever the vscode fork is called now, are distinct. Maybe not in the context of this blog post, but it isnt specified which is being referred to in the example table. "ChatGPT" sounds like the chatgpt web interface. OpenAI's desktop app is named 'ChatGPT Desktop', and now houses 'ChatGPT work' and 'Codex' (Codex Desktop, not the TUI, though it does essentially wrap the tui and give it capabilities through app-built-in tools). I believe the ChatGPT web interface's harness can change a bit, depending on settings + subscription level (remote sandboxes, etc.) Additionally, there is a distinction in available models depending on which "ChatGPT" product is being used (instant/live/etc non-5.6 luna/terra/sol suite). Inference service is more accurately 'default inference provider'. Also, this post has an ai-generated smell.

th3o6a1d

I like to think of an agent as a LLM chat loop with tool calling. The agentic behavior emerges with these ingredients. Don’t really a harness…unless you consider a shell script that runs that loop a harness.