[dpflan]

Forgive me for asking, but im always curios about the definition of “agent”. What is an “agent” exactly? Is it a static prompt that is sent along with user input to an LLM service and then handles that resposne? And then it’s done? Is an agent a prompted LLM call? Or some entity that is changing its own prompt as it continues to exist?

[karmakaze]

It depends on how you look at it. If the output 'it' is a drawing, then the agent is the thing doing the drawing on the user's behalf. In more detail the output thing are commands, so then the agent would be what's generating those commands from the user's input. E.g. a web browser is a user agent that makes requests and renders resources that the user specifies.

[ponta17]

Thanks for the thoughtful question! The term “agent” definitely gets used in a lot of different ways, so I’ll clarify what I mean here.

In this project, an agent is an LLM-powered system that takes a high-level user instruction, reasons about what steps are needed to fulfill it, and then executes those steps using a set of tools. So it’s more than a single prompted LLM call — the agent maintains a kind of working state and can call external functions iteratively as it plans and acts.

Concretely, in turtlesim_agent, the agent receives an input like “draw a red triangle,” and then: 1. Uses the LLM to interpret the intent, 2. Decides which tools to use (like move forward, turn, set pen color), 3. Calls those tools step-by-step until the task is done.

Hope that clears it up a bit!

[paxys]

To put it more simply, "agent" is now just a generic term to describe any middleware that sits between user input and a base LLM.