I produced this YouTube video tonight about a topic that has irritated me for a while, which is the discourse around so-called “AI agents.” I think the way people talk about this is extremely confusing, mystical-sounding, and unhelpful.
In the video, I write my own LLM harness (or coding agent?) called Bruenig Code to show you what exactly people are talking about. I hope you leave the video with the understanding that, ultimately, LLMs are just like other APIs: you send text to them, they send text back. Strictly speaking, they don’t do anything other than that. They don’t control your computer, run your web browser, do your shopping, or whatever. You send text to them. They send text back. That’s it.
It just turns out that, if you cleverly construct other tools around this exchanging of text through an API, you can accomplish a lot.