AI has traditionally been used to answer questions, generate content, classify information, or make predictions. AI agents are different. An AI agent is designed to take a goal and work toward completing it. It can decide which information it needs, choose a tool, perform an action, inspect the result, change its approach when something fails, and continue until the task is complete or until it needs a human to take over. That distinction is becoming especially visible in sof

You've probably noticed something when using AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. The model doesn't just answer - it works. It reads a file, writes some code to search through it, reads another file, runs a check, and slowly pieces together an answer. It feels almost like watching someone think out loud. That intuition is important. Because a paper out of MIT CSAIL late last year - quietly titled Recursive Language Models - essentially formalizes exactly that