Agent

A chatbot writes you a grocery list. An agent goes to the store.

That's the whole difference. Chat is words. An agent is words plus hands — tools it can actually run. Create a file. Call an API. Run a CLI command. Come back with the receipt, not a paragraph about receipts.

Why this product has one

You can describe a stack in English: "Next, Hono, Postgres, Better Auth." A chat model can talk about that stack. An agent can run create-hackhaton-space-stack and leave a folder on disk.

The plugin, the MCP server, the JSON commands — those are hands. Without them, the model is a very confident intern with no keyboard.

Tools are the line

The line between chatbot and agent is tool calling. You publish a short menu: scaffold_project, check_compatibility. The model picks an item. Your code does the work. The model never gets a shell it wasn't given.

That's the same fence as an API. The menu is the safety. If "delete the repo" isn't on the menu, it cannot order it.

It will still be wrong

Agents hallucinate with their hands. They will invent a flag. They will pick an illegal combo. That's why this stack engine has compatibility rules — so the hands hit a wall instead of a broken project.

Treat the agent like a fast intern: give it a menu, check the work, don't hand it the master key.

What this unlocks

Once you see hands vs words, "just ask Cursor" stops being magic. You're either letting it talk, or you're letting it order off a window you installed.

Talk is a draft. Tools are a commit.