Week 3: Behind the Scenes
Day 19: Agents and Tool Use
Goal
Understand the difference between a chatbot and an AI agent.
Learn
A chatbot mostly answers. An agent can plan steps, call tools, inspect results, revise, and continue toward a goal. Tool use can include search, code execution, file editing, calendar actions, email drafts, or API calls. More autonomy creates more power and more risk.
Behind the scenes
AI tools are products wrapped around models, data, prompts, retrieval, safety systems, and user interfaces. The better you understand the wrapper, the better your results get.Example
An agent might search files, run tests, edit one bug, and report results. That power needs boundaries.
Practice
List one task that is safe for an agent and one task that should require human approval.
Checkpoint
Checkpoint
You can decide which actions need confirmation before AI takes them.