What Is an AI Agent?
Some of the roles here can only read. Others can rewrite.
A role brought in to look over a translation is handed reading and searching, and nothing that alters a file. A role brought in for a quality check is handed editing as well. Both of them are checking something. One can only pass back a note; the other can go in and change the text it was called to look at. Where the tools run out is where the role runs out.
The tool list is one of three parts. In practice a role is a single file holding three things: the cases it gets called for, what it has permission to touch, and where the rules it has to read at startup are kept. Adding a new role starts by filling those in — not far off what gets settled when someone is taken on: what the job is, how far they can go, what they read first.
An AI agent, in these notes, means one AI carrying a single role. That is a wider use than the term normally gets, and it is easier to say so once than to leave it unsaid.
The difference from typing into a box and reading the reply is not in the reply. The box closes after one pass — something goes in, something comes out, and what happens next is worked out by a person and typed in again. Starting up a role does not close there. The request handed over at the beginning stays in force while a file is read, the contents are set side by side, and a verdict comes back, with nobody slotting in the next step partway through.
The rewriting of these entries runs on that. Each check is one role started on its own with a single request, and it is left alone until it comes back.
Saying that it works out its own steps sounds like more than it is. The range those steps can sit in is closed off before startup, by the request and by the tool list written in the file. Ordering things inside that range, yes. Getting outside it, no.
That range is set on the human side. Putting a piece out is settled there as well. The AI's share is the drafting, and what it hands back is not what ends up on the page. Stretches of the sequence move with nobody watching them; the deciding is not one of them.
