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Agent Is Not the Model

code.joejag.com

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Re: Agent Is Not the Model

#31

Post by llm_nerd »

the_af wrote: post #30
llm_nerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But a model on its own can’t do anything—it’s the agent/harness that escaped An agent/harness "can't do anything" on its own either, so how is saying "an agent escaped" somehow accurate? People talked about the model because it was the model that made the difference . It was specifically the differentiating factor. Not to mention that then you get into the weeds of meaningless arguments like "well actually the agent…

> I knew this would turn into a super boring thing where people will announce that they too misunderstood, therefore everyone does, but this is all very silly nonsense. I don't understand. You said: > I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever. but when people give you counterexamples suddenly anecdotal experience is boring and silly nonsense?

Let me help you understand.

If there was a post on HN that said "I often see people wearing socks over their pants, and this is why you shouldn't wear your socks over your pants", someone might observe "is this a thing? I don't think this is common". Invariably this comment is going to self-select for the extremely uncommon person who wears socks over their pants who will observe that of course, everyone wears socks over their pants.

When people write "people often" or "people often ask" types of blog posts, 99.99% of the time they are basically just projecting their own learning, beliefs, etc. These discussions seldom actually exist, it's super common, etc. That isn't indicative of anything.

It reminds me of this great piece - https://theonion.com/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indi...

Re: Agent Is Not the Model

#32

Post by bigbadfeline »

llm_nerd wrote: post #14

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.

> I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever.

That's because you know enough to disambiguate on the fly, which isn't true for the majority of the population. In other words, you make assumptions about others based on your own condition.

The concern here isn't that someone doesn't know what they're talking about, it's that many of those listening can be misled by the ambiguous wording of people who know very well what they are doing and can even do it deliberately.

> Like Trump thinking people didn't know about the word groceries or that dumb ends with a b.

Again, you're using yourself as source of assumptions about his audience, and worse, you transfer that to a much more complicated subject with unsettled terminology.

Re: Agent Is Not the Model

#33

Post by the_af »

llm_nerd wrote: post #31
the_af wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I knew this would turn into a super boring thing where people will announce that they too misunderstood, therefore everyone does, but this is all very silly nonsense. I don't understand. You said: > I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever. but when people give you counterexamples suddenly anecdotal experience is boring and silly nonsense?

Let me help you understand. If there was a post on HN that said "I often see people wearing socks over their pants, and this is why you shouldn't wear your socks over your pants", someone might observe "is this a thing? I don't think this is common". Invariably this comment is going to self-select for the extremely uncommon person who wears socks over their pants who will observe that of course, everyone wears socks…

I still don't understand. Your own "evidence" is completely anecdotal.

I and others (including the author of this post) have seen engineers who don't understand what the different components of the "agent system" (as TFA calls it) are, or what they are responsible for. So it's not "projecting their own learning", this actually does happen. Is it so hard for you to believe engineers, especially junior engineers, have a bit of a mess in their heads about how some things work, and need explanation?

If our anecdotal experiences are silly, then so is yours.

Re: Agent Is Not the Model

#35

Post by 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.

Re: Agent Is Not the Model

#36

Post by the_af »

ericol wrote: post #34
the_af wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the TFA has your 80 year old mother as its intended audience.

It doesn't define one.

Yes, it does. It's hosted in a software development blog called "Just Another Dev", with other entries such as "I'm AWS certified? Should you trust me?" or "Synthetic Monitoring with Cypress".

Is your 80 year old mother a software developer? If not, she's not the audience.

Don't pretend you don't understand this.

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