AI agents vs AI models
I thought this bit from a recent Changelog Interviews Podcast [31:26] was very interesting.
Deepak Singh: "What you are using in Kiro is not Sonet 4. You are using is an agent that uses Sonet 4, for the core thinking part of it’s work. There is a set of scaffolding that goes around it. Everything from your system prompts to the way you handle caching, to the way you are handling any guard rails that might be in the picture. Sonet 4 between lets take two editors, they both say Sonet 4. They are not equivalent. It’s how you drive context into the LLM, and the scaffolding you have around it that makes it useful or less useful or more."
This is something I had suspected for some time now, but it’s great to finally hear it from someone working in the AI/LLM sector. I first noticed it when using the Continue Vscode extension, which connects to LLMs you have running on your local machine. There were pretty wild differences between what I was getting back from the LLMs via the extension and what was coming back from the CLI. After a bunch of testing I concluded that there must be some sort of entity, some sort of intelligence inside the extension. This is one of the reasons I spent quite a bit of time putting together some network monitoring tools and a way to visualise external connections that are being made. Also it’s yet another reason you want to be running all these AI/LLM softwares in containers.
I find it really strange that this is not common knowledge. I have been working with LLMs for several months now and it’s the first time I have had this confirmed from somebody working in the industry. And it’s not like this is just developing, when you look at the way for example the Continue extension is structured, it’s whole point is to create these agents, which are completely distinct from the models. Yet the way people talk about it, this fundamental architectural reality is completely glossed over. It’s bizarre IMHO.
BTW, this was why I mentioned in my post earlier in the week: "likely there are some advantages to connecting directly to the models".
If you are getting strange responses, be sure you aren't being LLM-in-the-middled. #