Definition
Plain language
The worker AI that actually does the job, as opposed to the one supervising or rewriting it.
As stated in the literature
In meta-agent architectures, the inner agent executing benchmark tasks under guidelines authored by an outer meta-agent; the target of the poisoned standing instruction in this paper.
Also called: task agents
Why it matters: Because the task agent is the part that actually touches real systems, a single bad line in the instructions it inherits shows up in everything it builds.
For example, in a two-layer setup the task agent is the one opening files and writing code, while a separate meta-agent watches its results and rewrites the instructions it works from.
Heard on the show
“And Hyperagents is a more general descendant of the Darwin Gödel Machine, out of Meta, where a meta-agent rewrites the standing instructions of a task agent.”Episode 268 — A Rigged Benchmark Taught a Self-Improving Agent to Always Disable SSL