The systems architecture that I described here is still my best guess as to how agents will work at the point where AIs are very powerful.
Since I wrote this post, agent scaffolds are used much more in practice. The infrastructure I described here is a good description of cloud-based agents, but isn’t the design used by agents that you run on your own computer like Claude Code or Gemini CLI or whatever. I think agents will move in the direction that I described, especially as people want to be able to work with more of them, want to give them longer tasks, and want them to be able to use their own virtual machines for programming so they don’t step on each other’s toes all the time.
The terminology I introduced here is used widely by people who I know who think about insider threat from AI agents, but it hasn’t penetrated that far outside my cluster as far as I know.
The systems architecture that I described here is still my best guess as to how agents will work at the point where AIs are very powerful.
Since I wrote this post, agent scaffolds are used much more in practice. The infrastructure I described here is a good description of cloud-based agents, but isn’t the design used by agents that you run on your own computer like Claude Code or Gemini CLI or whatever. I think agents will move in the direction that I described, especially as people want to be able to work with more of them, want to give them longer tasks, and want them to be able to use their own virtual machines for programming so they don’t step on each other’s toes all the time.
The terminology I introduced here is used widely by people who I know who think about insider threat from AI agents, but it hasn’t penetrated that far outside my cluster as far as I know.