Docs → chatbots → agents

A document tells. A chatbot answers. An agent acts. Most agents use a chatbot as a fancy document and wonder why nothing changed. The ladder question for every task is: does this need telling, answering, or doing? Two more distinctions you'll need. The model is the brain; the harness is the program wrapped around it that gives it tools and memory. Claude Code is a harness, and the same model behaves differently in a different one. And a workflow is not an agent: in a workflow you fix the steps in advance and the model fills in each one; in an agent the model decides the next step itself. Workflows are more predictable. Use an agent only when the steps can't be known ahead of time.