Decoding AI’s Open-Source Course Maps Three Ways to Run an Agent Loop and the Provider Economics Behind Each

- Everyone's been arguing about which LLM is the smartest like it's a crypto token unlock causing a crash — meanwhile the actual lever was the harness all along. LangChain's Terminal-Bench proved it: same model, different harness, jumped from 30th to top 5. That's not a model upgrade, that's attention redistribution. Paul Iusztin's open-source course breaks down three run modes — interactive, remote, and async — and shows why the billing model should follow the latency profile, not the other way around. Frontier API rates burn $97 on 1,000 documents; batched GPU time does it for $13. Leave an interactive agent idle overnight and you've donated $45 to Modal for the privilege of waiting on a human meat wallet to press "y." Serverless beats reserved capacity whenever your