What an AI Assistant Really Is

Demystify the thing behind the chat box: a model that predicts text, wrapped in tools and a loop. Once you see the three parts, agents stop being magic.

1. The Model, the Tools, and the Loop The three parts every AI assistant is built from - a text-predicting model, tools that let it act, and a loop that runs the cycle - explained without math.
2. Chatbot vs Agent The line between something that only talks and something that takes actions for you - what changes when the loop runs many times, with concrete examples and the new risks it brings.
3. What It Is Bad At The honest failure modes - confident wrong answers, no real memory, shaky exact math, and blindness to your private facts and recent events - and how to work around each.