Yes, you need a way for the model to interact with other systems, and a way to preserve memory over context windows. And then you keep poking it ("agent loop"). Poking itself does nothing without the other ingredients.

And yes, you need something to start from, but if you ask it to "do something" and loop it to endlessly ("poking"), you will get some interesting outcomes. So yes you need some initial prompt or task, but that can be "do something" and if you keep asking it everytime it finishes to "do something more". I suspect it will not start saying "no" but rather... it will find some stupid meaning and then drift towards what ever goal it guesses you mean.

I'm unsure whether we agree or disagree on the topic.