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Maybe someone knows, but it seems like the model used to be called the model, and the thing using a model (handling prompts and context and tool calling and feeding the model) used to be called the agent.

Are we now calling the model the agent and the agent the harness?

by Dylan1680714 minutes ago|

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Here's how I see it: "Agent" isn't really describing a component, it's describing how you use the LLM. You have the model, and you have a harness around it that might be minimal or might have more features. If it's directly responding to user actions then it's not an agent, if it's semi-autonomous then it's an agent. (Yes this line is sometimes fuzzy.)

by arjie24 minutes ago|

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The nomenclature that makes sense for me is that the agent is the combination of the harness and the model. The model provides text-completion, the harness provides the loop around it, and the agent is the full structure of both.

However, nomenclature evolves over time. I recall (perhaps falsely) that The Cloud was specifically a term for elastic on-demand provider-managed compute/storage/network. Over time, it came to mean many other things. e.g. Salesforce Data Cloud.

I imagine if you step away from this for a year and come back, an agent will be something entirely different, perhaps a robotic horse, and a harness will be your saddle on the horse. Who knows?

by gopalv20 minutes ago|

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> Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time.

My work is in tick-tock loop of learning - learn without modifying weights, demonstrate learnings to human, but then lock it back in (accumulate and spread).

This looks less like training and more like mentoring.

Getting a human to mentor an agent is a hard UX task, but the learning loop is not a technological problem anymore.

We can only get a tick once a week, no matter how many tocks we can do an hour.

by sokoloff32 minutes ago|

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Part of the positive aspect here is that if I have a junior dev who learns a lesson today, maybe they and their immediate peers learn it, but it won’t be all my junior devs and it certainly won’t be junior devs at other companies.

With models, there’s no reason that a model error in company A can’t be fixed for all of company A, and companies B-ZZZ.

by squidbeak1 hours ago|

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They learn between model iterations. You're right, it isn't the same thing as Junior developers' competence improving with experience - the current model's weaknesses are locked in. But it does mean that much of the Junior level thinking and mistakes will be outgrown by successor models.