An agent doesn’t know what “job” it’s being asked to do until you tell it.

Imagine you’re blind and deaf and have temporary retrograde amnesia. You “wake up” one moment with a memory of some words in your head like “what is the bug?” …but you don’t recall the context of that question, and nor can you look/listen around to observe the context.

So you don’t know whether you’re e.g. at the office, in front of your computer, in the middle of doing some pair-programming (where, yes, you’d in investigate the bug thoroughly with tools), vs. having a conversation with a colleague over lunch (where the expectation is for you to tap into your knowledge + intuitions to either guess or say you don’t know — not to pull out your laptop.

That’s what it’s like to be one of these LLMs being prompted by some agent harness. Unless the harness injects the proper context into its “recent memory”, it just doesn’t know.