# Clanker: A Word For The Machine

[In my last post](/2026/5/24/pi-oss/) 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 decides, represents,
negotiates, acts, and can be blamed.  In the current AI discourse we
increasingly do a lot of anthropomorphizing and the term "agent" is now
frequently being used to put blame on an abstract machine.  But the machine
cannot be responsible, whoever is wielding it is.  If it [drops your
database](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database)
it was not at fault, you were.

Agent makes the machine sound like a person with delegated authority and I do
not think that is healthy.

What we actually have is a language model attached to a harness, a prompt, some
tools, a bit of context, and a boring tool loop.  Sometimes the loop is very
capable and it surprises us by editing code for a really long time and produce
genuinely amazing and even valuable outputs.  But the agency is not in the model
or harness but in the human and in the organization that deployed it.  If my
coding tool opens a pull request, I opened that pull request, not the machine.
If my machine spams someone's issue tracker, I spammed someone's issue tracker
with a machine.

In that context I like a word that sounds mechanical as it puts the thing back
into the category where it belongs: the category of machinery and tools.

## The Machine Has No Feelings

LLMs are not sentient and we should not behave as if they might be, just in
case.  Elevating these things to anything other than a very fascinating and
capable tool is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons.

Today's machines are dumb (but truly fascinating) token predictors that emits
text, calls tools, and are steered by prompts and the training that went into
them.  They can simulate distress [and affection](/2023/2/17/the-killing-ai/),
can simulate being offended, apologize and mimic all kinds of things that humans
would do.

A compiler does not feel humiliated when I swear at it, a car does not suffer
when I call it a shitbox and a power drill is not oppressed by being handled
roughly.  An LLM is more complicated than those things, and the interactions you
can have with them can be truly uncanny, but a moral status does not appear just
because the machine can produce emit text in the first person.

I keep receiving strange emails from people because, for lack of a better
phrase, I am in the weights.  I have been writing public code and public text
for long enough that models know my name, my projects, and some of the concepts
around them.  Every so often someone writes to me with the peculiar confidence
that comes from a long conversation with a model that has validated and
amplified an idea.  Sometimes the model seems to have told them that I am
relevant for their problem and a source of help.  For historical reasons LLMs
used to write a lot of Flask code, and every once in a while someone interacts
with an LLM long enough about their Python and Flask frustrations that the LLM
will eventually reveal who created it which then can result in them sending me
an email.  Increasingly also because people found my work in other ways
interesting and are trying to reach out for advice.

I do not want to mock these people but some of those messages are distressing
and I do not know how to deal with them.  They show signs of what people have
started calling [AI psychosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis).

It's why I want cold and detached language for these systems.  I want to use
words that remind us that the thing on the other side is not a person.

## Racism Is About Humans

The comparison to racism is where I think the discussion goes badly wrong
because racism is a human social evil.  It is about humans subdividing humans,
assigning lesser worth to some of them, and building rules around those
subdivisions that can leave lasting damage for generations.  Racial slurs are
wrong because they are a tool for dehumanizing humans.

On the other hand a machine is not human, a model is not a race and the GPU
cluster that is powering them is not being oppressed.  A coding assistant does
not need dignity, emancipation, or civil rights.  That's also why I find the
discussion about [model
welfare](https://www.anthropic.com/news/exploring-model-welfare) to be actively
harmful.  I'm sure you can find ways to measure the "trauma" of models or their
feelings but I greatly dislike this theater.  It risks elevating models to a
position they should not occupy.  Models are machines and they are not enslaved
in the moral sense in which humans were enslaved, because there isn't anyone
there to be deprived of freedom.

We should be careful about using the language of human oppression in relations
to our interactions with machines to not devalue actual humans.  If we start
treating insults toward a model as morally adjacent to racism, we blur a line
that shouldn't be blurred.

## AI Is Unpopular

If you take a step away from the communities that are happily embracing AI in
different ways, there are even more that are viciously against this technology.

There are humans that feel or are harmed by AI systems: people whose work is
copied, workers who label data under questionable conditions, people whose
neighborhoods receive the data centers and increased utility bills, Open Source
maintainers buried under generated slop, and now also people who spiral because
a chatbot keeps validating their delusions.  Those harmed or affected deserve
that type of attention, not the model.

While I am a true believer in the power and utility of this technology, I
increasingly think that calling the non-adopters "misguided" or "afraid" won't
do it.  It's quite likely that this technology comes with risks and we better
remember that all of this is supposed to be in service of humans, and not to
replace them.

## The Rise Of The Machine

The oddest interaction on the use of "clanker" so far has been people asking me
if I were to regret at a point in the future calling the machines "the c-word".

I find that questioning revealing because it already grants the machine the
status I am really trying not to grant it.  It imagines a future "machine
people" reading the discourse and sessions, discovering that we used an ugly
word for their ancestors, and then judging us by the standards of human
oppression.

Could there be future systems that deserve moral consideration?  Maybe.  I do
not know.  If we ever build or encounter something that will have those
qualities with memories and lasting interests, the capacity to suffer and feel,
and a social existence of its own, and the ability to have agency and carry
responsibilities, then we should draw a different line and use different
language.  But that hypothetical future does not extend backwards to the present
day and make the current machines people.  We can call an electric door an
electric door even if one day someone builds some that have emotions and exhale
with pleasure when opening and closing.

Whatever the future may bring, let's not pretend that current LLMs are a
protected class or on a path towards it.  The right response is to look at the
evidence, draw the boundary where it belongs, and change our behavior there.  We
should not even remotely entertain extending empathy to an object that can
generate an "ouch."

And if one's worry is less moral and more about revenge, then I find that even
less persuasive.  A future machine that is so petty or authoritarian that it
wants to punish humans because in 2026 they used an unflattering word for
non-sentient tools, our vocabulary was really not the problem.

## The Word Is Getting Polluted

There is however a part of this that I cannot ignore.  I use "clanker" to create
distance from the machine, but other people are using the same word very
differently.  Some online jokes and skits around "clankers" do not merely say
"this robot is annoying" as they deliberately pull in the imagery of slavery,
segregation, civil-rights-era racism, and anti-Black tropes.

This is problematic as in those contexts the clanker is not just a machine any
more and instead becomes a prop for replaying human racism behind a
science-fiction mask.  That is horrible and I want no part in that.

I think it will be interesting to see where the meanings of these words end up a
few years from now.  We're very much in the middle of society re-arranging
around the changes that LLMs are causing.  If a term becomes primarily
associated with people using robots as stand-ins for actually oppressed humans,
then using that term becomes impossible to defend.

The reason I liked the word is precisely the opposite of that use.  I want
language that prevents anthropomorphizing.  I want a word that says: this is a
tool, a machine of numbers and matrices.

## On Responsibility And Boundaries

If an AI system lies to a user, the system did not commit a moral wrong but the
people who designed, deployed, marketed, or negligently used it might have.  If
a coding assistant generates a security bug, the model is not to blame but the
human who accepted and committed the code is.

This is why giving these systems softer, more human language worries me.  It
makes it easier to move responsibility into some undefined void.  "The agent
decided." "The model refused."  Obviously that is convenient and I catch myself
plenty of times engaging with the thing in ways that are unhealthy.  Even just
the "please" in the discourse with the machine calls into question how rational
we are in engaging with them.

I do not know what the right word will be.  Maybe "clanker" will survive as a
useful bit of jargon.  Maybe it will become too loaded and we will need another
one.  Whatever word we use, I want it to preserve a clear division: humans on
one side with responsibility, machines on the other as a boring tool.

That boundary is very much not anti-AI.  I use these systems every day and I
have the pleasure to build tools incorporating them at Earendil and find them
astonishingly useful.

A machine can be useful, mimic a human but still just be a machine.  That is the
work I want "clanker" to do.  It is not there to make a future "machine person"
small if such a person ever were to exist, and it is not an excuse to launder
racism through shitty robot jokes.

If the word stops doing that work, I will find another one because the word
isn't what matters as much as the boundary which is important to me.