The Token Not Taken: Sampling, State, and the Variability of AI Agent Outputs (opens in new tab)

Agentic AI systems can behave differently across runs: the same request may produce a different plan, a different tool call, a different code edit, or a different final answer. Such variability arises from several layers that are often conflated. A foundation model is a large pretrained model, usually adaptable to many downstream tasks, that maps an input context to predictions over outputs. In many current agents, that model is embedded in an o...