The defining feature is not chat conversation, but coordination. Agents exchange concrete artifacts such as diffs, test results, failure reports, and design notes. Progress is driven by state changes in the codebase rather than by turn-by-turn chat dialogue. Work can continue asynchronously until stopping conditions are met, for example, passing tests or satisfying performance thresholds. The human orchestrator acts more like an architect and technical lead, resolving ambiguities, arbitrating disagreements, and deciding when outputs are ready to merge.
A chat-agent foundation LLM, by contrast, is optimized for interactive reasoning with a single dominant thread of control. This is the familiar chat conversational model embedded in IDEs and chat interfaces. It excels at local transformations, explanation, debugging, and short-horizon planning. Context is ephemeral and largely conversational. The agent responds to prompts, proposes changes, and waits for feedback. There is no native concept of parallel roles, persistent task ownership, or long-running autonomous execution. Architectural coherence, testing strategy, and long-term state management remain primarily the responsibility of the human.
When you know what you want to change and need help expressing or validating it quickly, the chat-agent foundation LLM is the fastest tool. Its limitation is scale. As projects grow, the cognitive load of maintaining architecture, tests, and constraints in a single conversational stream increases, and progress becomes serial.
A local-agent medium LLM, in the 7B~32B class, occupies a different position entirely. It is constrained by model capacity but empowered by locality and control. These agents are best used as embedded workers inside well-defined pipelines. They are particularly effective when given narrow responsibilities such as refactoring a module, enforcing style rules, extracting structure from text, or performing deterministic transformations. Because they run locally, they can be integrated deeply into tooling, scheduled jobs, and automated workflows without latency or privacy concerns.
However, local agents rely heavily on external structure. They do not substitute for system-level reasoning across a large codebase. Instead, they amplify it when paired with strong orchestration, clear prompts, and explicit constraints. In practice, they function best as components within a broader multi-agent system rather than as standalone decision-makers.
Seen together, these three modes form a hierarchy. The chat-agent foundation LLM accelerates individual thought. The local-agent medium LLM reliably and repeatedly executes bounded work. The multi-agent foundation LLM coordinates execution across time, roles, and abstractions.

