Agent Is Not the Model
code.joejag.com
code.joejag.com
In the table "Real world examples";
"Claude Desktop" houses three harnesses at the moment; Claude, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code.
"Claude CLI", I presume, is referring to Claude Code CLI. This is distinct from the 'ant CLI', which is sometimes referred to as 'Claude CLI'.
"Cursor" could be any of them- but, 'Cursor Agents', 'Cursor Cloud Agents', 'Cursor CLI', and whatever the vscode fork is called now, are distinct. Maybe not in the context of this blog post, but it isnt specified which is being referred to in the example table.
"ChatGPT" sounds like the chatgpt web interface. OpenAI's desktop app is named 'ChatGPT Desktop', and now houses 'ChatGPT work' and 'Codex' (Codex Desktop, not the TUI, though it does essentially wrap the tui and give it capabilities through app-built-in tools). I believe the ChatGPT web interface's harness can change a bit, depending on settings + subscription level (remote sandboxes, etc.) Additionally, there is a distinction in available models depending on which "ChatGPT" product is being used (instant/live/etc non-5.6 luna/terra/sol suite).
Inference service is more accurately 'default inference provider'.
Also, this post has an ai-generated smell.
Secondly the confusion is designed to benefit the bull** by using ambiguous language they can do as humpty dumpty did in Alice in Wonderland and say "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less" Which benefits whatever they are pushing.
Beware those that attempt to muddle language and avoid precision in speaking.
Don’t really a harness…unless you consider a shell script that runs that loop a harness.
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.
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.
> I often hear people use the words agent and model interchangeably
_what_ people. Would I hear one of my colleagues do this, I'll slap them across the face. With a 4 pounds salmon. Alive.
> to help us have more precise conversations.
What problem are you trying to solve. _Why_ you need more precise conversations. I mean, I understand what you aiming at. But is it really worth it to go nitpicking at people's mental models, is the gain worth it?