I am not sure if I agree with Holden that there’s a meaningful distinction between tools an agents. However, one definition I could think of is this:
“A tool, unlike an agent, includes blocking human input in its perceive/decide/act loop.”
Thus, an agent may work entirely autonomously, whereas a tool would wait for a human to make a decision before performing an action.
Of course, under this definition, Google’s webcrawler would be an agent, not a tool—which is one of the reasons I might disagree with Holden.
I am not sure if I agree with Holden that there’s a meaningful distinction between tools an agents. However, one definition I could think of is this:
“A tool, unlike an agent, includes blocking human input in its perceive/decide/act loop.”
Thus, an agent may work entirely autonomously, whereas a tool would wait for a human to make a decision before performing an action.
Of course, under this definition, Google’s webcrawler would be an agent, not a tool—which is one of the reasons I might disagree with Holden.