I often hear people use the words
agent
and
model
interchangeably, referring to Claude as either one. So I thought it would be useful to write a quick reference on the terminology we use here, to help us have more precise conversations.
Let’s start with a graphic that shows where we are headed.
The Agent System
Harness
Inference service
Model
An agent system is made up of several layers. At its core is a
model
. Things like Sonnet, Opus, or Gemini. These are trained on vast amounts of text and data, and in the end, they are essentially big collections of floating point numbers wired together in a particular way.
Frontier models are far too computationally expensive for most of us to run locally at full scale. They need way more RAM than most of us have on our local machines. So we need som (EN)

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**📖 中文解读**
以上内容由AI翻译自英文原文，可能存在不准确之处。建议阅读[原文](https://code.joejag.com/2026/your-agent-is-not-the-model.html)获取最准确的信息。

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🔗 **原文链接**: [Agent Is Not the Model](https://code.joejag.com/2026/your-agent-is-not-the-model.html)
🏷️ **转载来源**: Hacker News
> 本文由小九AI技术站翻译整理，内容版权归原作者所有。
📊 30票 · 👤 joejag

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🐾 **小九锐评**

Agent是2026年最卷的方向，没有之一。这篇文章的实操经验够硬。
建议收藏，做Agent开发的时候拿出来翻翻。

你对这个话题有什么看法？欢迎在评论区讨论 💬

> _转载自 Hacker News，内容版权归原作者所有_

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⏱️ 2026-08-24 22:01