Editing Agents vs. Assistants (section)

== Where you actually are in 2026 ==

Most generalists interact with AI in the assistant-to-copilot range. And that's fine — there's enormous value there that most people haven't fully tapped yet.

But agent-level tools are becoming accessible to non-developers:
* '''Claude Projects''' — persistent context that makes Claude act more like an assistant who knows your work, less like a blank chatbot
* '''Custom GPTs''' — pre-configured assistants with specific knowledge and instructions
* '''Claude with tool use / web search''' — the AI decides when to search the web, read a document, or run code, then does it
* '''Cowork / Claude Code''' — full agent capability: reads your files, plans multi-step tasks, executes them, asks for your input at key decision points
* '''MCP (Model Context Protocol)''' — a standard that lets AI connect to your other tools (calendar, email, databases), so it can act on real information rather than just chat about it

The progression from the [[Agent Collaboration|Agent Collaboration]] exercises mirrors this spectrum exactly:
* '''Basic''' ([[Your First AI Team Meeting|Your First AI Team Meeting]]) — giving AI roles in a conversation (assistant level)
* '''Intermediate''' ([[The Handoff Protocol|The Handoff Protocol]]) — coordinating between AI sessions (copilot level)
* '''Advanced''' ([[Design Your Agent Workflow|Design Your Agent Workflow]]) — designing multi-step AI workflows (agent level)