AI agent vs chatbot — what's actually different
"Agent" and "chatbot" get used interchangeably, but they describe different things — and the difference decides whether the tool is useful in a live meeting or only after it.
A chatbot answers; it doesn't watch
Paste context in, get an answer out. Each message is mostly independent; the model doesn't maintain beliefs about your situation, doesn't track what it's confident about, and doesn't notice when the situation on your screen changed.
That's fine for drafting and one-off questions. It's inefficient mid-meeting — you'd have to type out what's on your screen instead of the agent seeing it directly.
An agent keeps a model of the session
LivePair's agent maintains persistent state across the session: what you're trying to accomplish (goals), what it has concluded so far (beliefs), how sure it is (uncertainty), and how that changed with each turn. A private deliberation pass runs between messages, updating that state before it answers you.
The result: it doesn't start cold every message. It answers inside the context of everything that already happened — which is what a human pair actually does.
Where this matters in practice
Meetings, debugging sessions, live presentations — anywhere the question depends on the last twenty minutes. A chatbot can answer 'what does this error mean'. An agent can answer 'is this the same problem we ruled out earlier' — because it remembers ruling it out.
The honest limits
More state means more ways to be subtly wrong — a stale belief can bias a new answer. That's why the uncertainty HUD exists: the agent's internal state is visible, not hidden. If its belief looks wrong, you can see it and correct it instead of trusting a black box.