Can someone who knows more about AI agents explain this to me?
Axios quotes an Anthropic spokesperson re: the Claude leaks, who says that this new capability is coming: "A “persistent assistant” running in background mode that lets Claude Code keep working even when a user is idle. "
Isn’t that what they claim “agents” are doing already? Or am I missing something? I would hate to learn that “agents” are just a marketing term and they don’t actually do the thing these companies claim… ;)
The term agent is very broad. It encompasses all sorts of levels of function. Claude code runs when you give it instructions, and it will keep running until it finishes those instructions but then it stops.
A persistent agent would find a new task. Even if the user didn’t explicitly tell it to work on that.
I sincerely hope that when it comes to code this only applies to changes discussed and user-approved with a Plan step in front. I’d hate to come back to it having refactored my entire app with the usual schema drift and it trying to run pwsh commands even though my app runs on a different system