AI Agents Explained

What AI agents are, how the agent loop works, and why they're different from chatbots.

You tell ChatGPT to “fix the bug” and it gives you a code snippet. You copy it, paste it, realize it’s wrong, go back, paste the error, get another snippet. Repeat.

You tell Claude Code to “fix the bug” and it does everything itself. It opens your files, finds the problem, writes a fix, runs the tests. If a test still fails, it goes back, tries a different approach, and runs the tests again. When everything passes, it commits.

Same model underneath. The difference is agency.