alt Hacker NewsAgent Is Not the Model
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If the goal is to provide a distinction between model and agent, i think the "agent system" is doing too much heavy lifting in the example here.
A useful extension to this mental framework that i use when trying to make this distinction is the application (cursor) -> which sometimes includes an orchestrator and all of the QOL stuff like resuming, checkpointing, etc. single or multiple agents (cursor agents)-> and runs a single or many agent instances (single agent in cursor)-> service api-> model.
This is to address a confusion i often see with agent being conflated with the application that we use agents in, rather than the distinction in the article which tries to unpick agent-model confusion.
A fun one is that in claude code, you can configure 'agents' which are prompt presets + some configuration. Or sub-agents sometime are indistinguishable from the foreground agent (usually called orchestrator) in configuration except that they have different contents in their context window (forks more or less).
IMO, if there's a ubiquitous term that is unambiguous, use it (harness, model). If there's an ambiguous term you have to explain, try not to use it. Language is for communication.
An agent, in general, is just whatever carries out a task on behalf of someone/something else.
> An agent system is made up of several layers.
Why "layers"? The constituents of a Multi-agent System (MAS) [1] are called "agents". BTW: Synecdochical semantic diffusion is not uncommon in software engineering
Well first off if you ask Microsoft everything is Copilot.
Secondly the confusion is designed to benefit the bull** by using ambiguous language they can do as humpty dumpty did in Alice in Wonderland and say "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less" Which benefits whatever they are pushing.
Beware those that attempt to muddle language and avoid precision in speaking.
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.
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On other news, water wets.
> I often hear people use the words agent and model interchangeably
_what_ people. Would I hear one of my colleagues do this, I'll slap them across the face. With a 4 pounds salmon. Alive.
> to help us have more precise conversations.
What problem are you trying to solve. _Why_ you need more precise conversations. I mean, I understand what you aiming at. But is it really worth it to go nitpicking at people's mental models, is the gain worth it?
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.