Linear Digressions

What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)

Linear Digressions

Show Notes

AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agents from every angle, building up a complete picture piece by piece rather than skimming the surface. Think of it as a structured deep dive into one of the most talked-about (and most misunderstood) topics in machine learning right now. Buckle up — ten more episodes to go.

--- Website: https://lineardigressions.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/linear-digressions/id941219323 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1JdkD0ZoZ52KjwdR0b1WoT Substack: https://substack.com/@lineardigressions

More from Linear Digressions

Oct 19, 2026

Back Next Week by Katie Malone

Oct 12, 2026

Back in Two Weeks by Katie Malone

Oct 5, 2026

As AI systems grow more powerful, they grow harder to understand — and that tradeoff has never mattered more. Most interpretability tricks give us approximations from the outside, but mechanistic interpretability takes a different approach: cracking open the model itself to trace *why* it behaves the way it does. This episode digs into what makes mechanistic interpretability fundamentally different from other explainability methods, and why it might be the most promising path toward actually understanding what's happening inside modern LLMs.

Sep 28, 2026

Labeled data is expensive, slow, and painfully hard to come by — and when you're trying to evaluate whether an AI workflow is actually doing what you want, the problem gets even messier. How do you judge whether a chatbot response was helpful, honest, or hallucination-free at scale? This episode digs into using LLMs as judges: letting the models themselves evaluate the quality of AI outputs, from simple chat exchanges all the way to complex multi-step agent behavior.

Sep 21, 2026

Originally aired on the Harvard Data Science Review podcast.

See all episodes →