Stuff I Said

An agent is a non-deterministic system, so grading it by the artifact at the end means comparing noise. Track the path instead — the sequence of tool calls it made, and the state of the workspace at each one.

An agent that does a thing on its own is a product — that's the whole word. The model inside it is a commodity you swap; the part you can't commoditize is the person deciding what it should do.

A follow-up to "What an AI Agent Actually Is" — how the parts compose into a single agent, how several agents compose into a system, and why your tool set is the part that's actually yours.

Strip away the marketing and an agent is four parts — a driver, tools, an environment, and context management. The agent is the way they come together.

"Build autocomplete for me" is a Swift question wearing a data-structure costume — value semantics, the small-string trap, and what O(1) space actually means.