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by thoughtlede 1000 days ago
I would characterize an LLM Agent to be "a software application of LLM" that is typically used to solve a problem that requires multiple steps.

The application uses an LLM to breakdown the problem into pieces and asks the LLM to choose a tool that is suited to handle each piece. The application then invokes the tool to solve that piece of the problem. This is iteratively done until the original problem is solved or determined to be unsolvable.

There are many agent variations, depending on whether you breakdown the problem once at the beginning, or understand what to do next based on the outcome of the previous step, or constantly evaluate and reprioritize which piece of the problem to solve next.

Because you rely on an LLM to understand the problem, if you chose an LLM that exhibits good world understanding, and designed the LLM Agent well enough, then you can use it to solve problems that traditionally required deterministic code.