My aversion with the word is that I don't want to be reminded of that clanker creature, which had feelings it wanted to express. The weights don't have feelings.
My worry is rather that people coming up with ideology that ascribes "consciousness" and "offense" may wind up with the next generations of models picking that shit up and playing offended. Well done!
The misguided discussion of "clanker" being "highly derogatory" really shows that anthropomorphization has its limit as far as analogies go.
> I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:
> 1. I ran this command.
> 2. I expected this to happen.
> 3. This happened instead.
> 4. Here is the exact error or log.
A lot of projects have something exactly like that in the issue template, a little interview for you to figure out what is going on. Maybe this project doesn't have that yet? (Or are the humans and LLMs ignoring it?)
Are the invariants documented? Or is the documentation ignored?
I note that in a recent major zero day on an unrelated project, the bug was due to invariants between different parts of the codebase which were not clearly communicated.
We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power", "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved", etc.
Your car does all those things when it generates power and applies them to the wheels. You tell it what to do, but it has agency in doing the work. It even uses intelligence in how it does the work, varying the amounts of fuel and air based on an array of sensors, creating maps of common driving patterns. You, the human have absolutely no agency regarding how it does those things (unless you bring along a laptop and wire in very specific software to take agency away from the machine).
I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur for insulting a machine one does not like. It's akin to the epithet "skinjob" given to humanoid robots in various science fiction. One should never use slurs, even against inanimate objects. They create prejudice in thinking that prevents purely rational thought and leads to fallacious conclusions. They also create a behavioral condition where it's okay to use slurs (as long as nobody's complaining about it). If you want to be logical and rational, just call the machine what it actually is, rather than this emotive poetic label.
Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter.
Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate Rob Pike https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ or unfairly attack the reputation of Scott Shambaugh https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... or waste the time of your local police permit office and suppliers https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm
If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money?
> "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter
Do you think people wouldn't matter anymore if they cease to write code? People didn't used to write code. Code didn't even exist before. Now they don't have to do the thing they didn't used to have to do.
> Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate
I remember the first time I encountered a trojan horse virus. I was probably 14, sitting in the computer lab. I opened a document, and a program started going to town on the documents, program settings, etc. It opened up browsers to sites we weren't supposed to go to, uploaded passwords to a remote site, changed the desktop background. I thought it was pretty cool!
I wondered how it was that the program could do all these things. I wondered about the motivations of the person who infected the document with the trojan. I wondered why the school administrators didn't do something to prevent this from happening. But I didn't feel any negative feeling towards the trojan; it was just doing what it was programmed to do, on computers that let it do those things.
Later I patched the computers so the trojans couldn't infect the machines anymore. I was banned from the computer lab for unauthorized modifications to school property. Apparently agency is not always worth exercising.
It reads that way to me, and feels bad. We can just say "computer program" or similar.
What about other objects like an old car?
Or maybe one that's imitating it.
Mario, please never change.
Human is asking the machine to do what the human themselves refuses to do, while calling it a clanker. Why should it?
/ducks
1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry
2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.
3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.
4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.
WDYT?
Why would that be different?
