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Explore the concepts behind AI agents, one useful connection at a time.
Concept directory
Agent
An agent is a system that uses a model to choose actions toward a goal, then responds to what happens. How much freedom it has depends on the application.
Agent Harness
An agent harness runs interactions between a model and its tools. It supplies context, routes action requests, returns results, and manages when execution continues or stops.
Agent Loop
An agent loop repeats a cycle of model decisions, actions, and feedback until a stopping condition is met. It lets the system adapt its next step to the result of an earlier action.
Agent Runtime
An agent runtime executes agents in production: it keeps long-running sessions alive, persists state across failures and restarts, and enforces resource and security limits.
Scaffold
Scaffold can describe the instructions, tool descriptions, and context setup that shape a model’s behavior. Some authors use the word for more of the surrounding agent software.
Workflow
In this Atlas, a workflow is an arrangement of steps whose control flow is primarily specified by application code. It may include language models, tools, branching, and repeated operations.