Concepts & capability filters
agentsintermediate
Agent
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).
- Category
- agents
- Difficulty
- intermediate
- Aliases
- None tracked
- Last reviewed
- 2026-04-21
Key facts
- 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.