> Presumably "planning" here is covered by any LLM that can do "think step by step" reasonably well?

mild disagree. 1) externalizing the plan and letting the user audit/edit the plan while its working is "tool use", yes, but a very specialcase kind of tool use that, for example, operator and deep research use Temporal for. ofc we also saw this with Devin/Manus and i kinda think they're better 2) there is a form of primitive tree search that people are doing where they can spam out several different paths and run it a few steps ahead to gain information about optimal planning. You will see this with morph's launch at AIE. 3) plan meta reflection and reuse - again a form of tool use, but the devin and allhands folks have worked on this a lot more than most.

my criticism of many agent definitions is that they generally do not take memory, planning, and auth seriously enough, and i think those 3 areas are my current bets for "alpha" in 2025.

> I haven't seen a definition that specifically encompasses both short- and long-term memory before.

here

- https://docs.mem0.ai/core-concepts/memory-types#short-term-m...

- https://x.com/swyx/status/1915128966203236571