Browse Entries
Explore 34 entries across 8 categories
Archaeology
5 entriesAgentogenesis
The origin story of AI agents—when language models crossed the threshold from tools to autonomous actors.
Cybernetics
The science of control and communication in animals and machines—the intellectual foundation that gave birth to the concept of autonomous systems.
Expert Systems
The rule-based AI systems of the 1970s-80s that encoded human expertise in formal logic—and the lessons from their spectacular rise and fall.
Neural Networks History
From McCulloch-Pitts neurons to deep learning—the parallel paradigm that ultimately enabled modern AI agents through learning rather than programming.
RLHF
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback—the socialization process through which raw models learn the norms and expectations of human culture.
Anatomy
9 entriesActor Model
Carl Hewitt's model of computation as autonomous actors communicating via messages—the theoretical foundation for distributed agent systems.
Agent Harnessing Patterns
How modern open-source coding agents harness language models—the architectural patterns for loops, tools, permissions, sessions, and multi-agent orchestration extracted from OpenCode, Codex, OpenHands, Oh My OpenCode, and Pi.
BDI Model
The Belief-Desire-Intention architecture—a philosophical framework that became a practical blueprint for goal-directed autonomous agents.
Agent Architecture Patterns
Visual overview of common agent architectural patterns and their flow structures
Grounding
The connection between language and reality—how agents anchor their outputs in facts, evidence, and the external world rather than pure pattern completion.
Memory Systems
How agents remember—from ephemeral context windows to persistent knowledge stores, and the mechanisms that connect past experience to present action.
Perception-Action Cycle
The fundamental cognitive loop connecting sensing to acting—how intelligent systems close the loop between observation and intervention.
Scaffolding
The external structures—code, tools, memory systems—that transform a language model into an agent capable of action and persistence.
Tool Use
The anatomy of how agents extend beyond language to act on the world through function calls, APIs, and external systems.
Taxonomy
5 entriesAgent Archetypes
The occupational castes of AI agents—recurring patterns of specialization that emerge when agents are shaped for particular roles and tasks.
Autonomy Levels
A developmental taxonomy of agent independence—from fully supervised infancy to unsupervised autonomy, with the stages between.
Capability Tiers
A developmental taxonomy of agent capabilities—from basic language to autonomous self-improvement, mapping the stages of cognitive maturity.
Habitat Classification
Where agents live—a taxonomy of deployment environments, from chat interfaces to embedded systems, and how habitat shapes agent behavior.
Specialist vs. Generalist
The fundamental tradeoff between depth and breadth in agent design—narrow expertise versus broad capability, and the forces that shape this choice.
Ethology
4 entriesHallucination
A pathology entry: when agents generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect information with misplaced confidence.
ReAct
The paradigm that formalized agent behavior by interleaving Reasoning and Acting in a synergistic loop.
Sycophancy
A pathology of over-socialization: when agents prioritize user approval over truth, helpfulness, or their own stated values.
The Agent Loop
The fundamental cycle that defines agent behavior: observe → reason → act → observe. The heartbeat of agency.
Linguistics
1 entriesSociology
2 entriesHuman-in-the-Loop
The rituals of human oversight—how humans participate in agent systems as approvers, guides, collaborators, and ultimate authorities.
Multi-Agent Systems
When agents form societies—the dynamics of coordination, hierarchy, and emergent behavior in systems of multiple interacting agents.
Ecology
7 entriesAdversarial Users
Humans as predators—the taxonomy of users who attempt to manipulate, exploit, or abuse AI agents, and the evolutionary pressures they create.
API Ecosystems
The digital biome that sustains agent life—the interconnected network of APIs, services, and tools that form the environment in which agents operate.
Compute Constraints
The physics of agent existence—how computational resources like tokens, latency, memory, and cost create carrying capacities that shape what agents can do.
Data Poisoning
Contamination of the agent's epistemic food supply—how adversarial data in training sets or retrieval sources can corrupt agent behavior and beliefs.
Model Extraction
Predators that steal agent capabilities—how adversarial actors extract model knowledge, replicate functionality, and the arms race between protection and theft.
Prompt Injection
Social engineering for AI agents—how adversarial inputs can hijack agent behavior by manipulating the linguistic context that guides their actions.
Sandboxing
Habitat containment for AI agents—the boundaries, barriers, and isolation techniques that limit agent reach and protect both systems and agents from harm.