🛠 How AI Coding Agents Are Built
Hadley Wickham demystifies the architecture of modern AI agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. He argues that an agent is not "magic," but rather a harness consisting of six fundamental tools: reading, writing, editing, listing files, searching, and executing shell commands.
🌍 The article provides a technical decomposition of agentic systems, highlighting critical aspects of security (protection against path traversal) and efficiency (minimizing tokens through surgical edits).
👤 Understanding that an agent is a set of tools allows for a more conscious approach to developing custom solutions and understanding the limitations of existing products.
Source 1: https://tidydesign.substack.com/p/a-coding-agent-is-six-functions-in