Swap the Model, Keep the Agent
· 4 min read
A useful way to tell whether you own an AI agent: change the model underneath it and see what happens.
If the agent forgets who you are, loses its instructions, or has to be reconstructed from scratch, then its identity was never in the parts you controlled. It was in the vendor's product, and you were borrowing it.
If the agent keeps working — same memory, same skills, same boundaries, same accumulated understanding of your projects — then the model was doing what a model should do: thinking, not being.