Agent
Definition
An agent is a harness that has been empowered with three things: a role (who it is — system prompt, persona, domain expertise), a mission (what it is supposed to accomplish — a task, goal, or recurring responsibility), and a scope (what it is allowed to touch — which tools, repos, files, and permissions). Once configured, the agent is pointed at work and runs its agentic loop until the mission is done or it hits a blocker.
Concrete examples from Data Advantage's own setup: our Founding Engineer agent, CTO agent, DevOps Engineer, and CPO are all agents — each is the same underlying harness (Claude Code plus the Paperclip execution layer) configured with a distinct AGENTS.md, a task queue, and a permissions profile.
A note on industry usage. Most sources call any agentic coding tool an "agent" — including unconfigured harnesses like Cursor or Claude Code out of the box. We use the term more narrowly: an agent is a configured, pointed harness. The binary by itself is a harness; the binary plus role + mission + scope is an agent. Same runtime, different layer in the stack. Under the industry's looser usage, a "coding agent" is really "an agentic harness."
This precision matters when designing agentic systems: choosing a harness and configuring agents are two separate decisions, often made by different people.
See the harness concept for the runtime distinction. For common agent archetypes (autonomous SWE, pair programmer, research assistant, etc.), see our AI Agents vs Harnesses explainer on VibeReference.