Clanker: A Word For The Machine

In my last post I used the word “clanker” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong reaction: to them it sounded like a slur, in one case even something adjacent to the n-word. That reaction surprised me somewhat, but it also made me realize that I should write down what I mean by the word for future reference. For me “clanker” is useful because it creates distance from the machine and that is a quality which is important to me. The machine is not a person, not a co-worker, not a friend, not a little spirit in the terminal. It is just a machine, a tool, and nothing more. Why Not Agent? I dislike the word “agent” for these LLM based tool loops with a UI attached. In everyday use an agent is someone who acts on behalf of someone else and it has agency and more importantly: responsibility. An agent…