You have already trained a model and used it inside a program. Today the question is different: what happens when software is given a goal and allowed to plan, use tools, and act in a loop until the job is done?
That kind of software is called an AI agent. You will direct one on the board, then take turns being the agent yourselves.
A chatbot answers. You ask a question, it replies with text. The conversation stops until you type again.
An AI agent is a model given a goal. It can:
- Plan the steps needed to reach the goal
- Act by using tools (write a file, run code, search, send a message)
- Observe what happened (an error message, a result, a web page)
- Adjust the plan and try the next step
It keeps looping through plan, act, observe, adjust until the goal is met or it is stopped. A chatbot waits; an agent keeps going.
Your class is about to direct an AI coding agent. One person is the error-spotter: their job is to call out when something looks wrong. Everyone else confirms the goal, predicts the next step before it happens, and names which phase is running: plan, act, observe, or adjust.
Goal: write a short program that asks for two numbers and prints their sum. If anything breaks, fix it.
Your teacher will run a live agent on the board, or walk through a worked example one move at a time. Before each new move is shown, write or say: next phase = ? next action = ?
After the run, answer as a class:
- Which steps were plan, act, observe, adjust?
- Where did the agent need a human watching it?
- How is this different from a chatbot that only explains how to add two numbers?
- Observe and adjust is debugging: the agent runs a test, reads what went wrong, and fixes it. Where did you see that today?
Now you take the roles yourselves. Your teacher will model one tiny loop with the whole class first, then you work in pairs.
Director: state the goal. After each full loop, decide whether another loop may start, or stop the agent. You do not plan or do the work.
Agent: do only one full loop at a time:
- Plan one step out loud
- Act it on paper or on screen
- Report what you observed
- Say how you will adjust
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