This has been by far the biggest and costliest failure mode I've experienced using these tools. I've tried to mitigate it in more ways than I can count but it almost feels structurally impossible for LLMs to get this right.
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 don't think it's worth writing my own harness or switching to Pi and writing a plugin, but I definitely need to create some skills to automate much of this.
Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching).
Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.
In this era of software when you can build almost anything you can imagine, why spend that time building plugins for a harness?
Pi has optimizations as well, and development is quite active.
We are literally months into this new frontier. Mainstream harnesses are not far off from a minimal + extensible open alternative.
You don’t have to build your own plugins, as you can simply install an existing plugin that does what the mainstream harnesses do. Folks are already making the same functionality, but with more control to the user.
If you are a builder, like many reading this thread, pi is the way to go. Pi already gives you the tools to leverage LLMs to assist with building plugins, if that’s the way you want to go.
Yes, you built yourself a nice little utility.
Meanwhile, you wasted those tokens and time that could have been spent building actual, useful software instead of hobby tinkering your harness.
It's like thinking your sneaker tread design is going to make the difference between you and someone who just goes out there and runs everyday. The person that just runs is going to win the race every time while you 3D print the perfect tread design optimized for you running style...and don't actually run.
If you want to produce better results at running, you just run and optimize the externalities (gear) later. Same here: you have a magical software production factory and the only thing you want to use it for is your hobby tweaking of your perfect harness instead of...just making useful software.
:clap: :clap: I guess.
> Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else??
While you're busy trying to optimize your harness, others are just building and shipping with the magical software factory.
Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt at a unsustainable rate. Then when the "magical factory" gets mired in its own mess, it's back to the drawing board. This is the also what the makers of pi have discovered, if you listen to their talks about how pi came about. I don't believe there are any justification for the assumptions you make about their approach, nor am I seeing you presenting any either. As it is, you take just feels peevish and unfair, to be honest.
But he started to get customers. First a handful, then a dozen, then enough to get legal threats from other vendors, and this year, his first "enterprise" deal providing software in a space that was long dominated by a duopoly of legacy providers.
Guess what he did? Just rewrote it with the latest models and hired one engineer to ensure agents followed better practices. It's a legit business now built by a tiny team using a magical software factory to produce absolute trash code, but in shipping it, he found a market and customers willing to pay him for an alternative to the duopoly.
See, at the end of the day, it's cute that you have the perfectly tuned harness, but that also means whatever time you spent tuning your harness, reading up on Pi, spending tokens on your custom plugins -- all of that time and resources could have been used just building something useful.
I don't think that you really get what this new era of software is about otherwise you would understand why the experienced are spending time tinkering on the so called harness (like openclaw did)
We’re so early in this technology phase, now is the time to tinker and explore. At one point that window will close.
> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.
Do I want to become completely dependent on the pricy pay-as-you-go tool? In the long run that will make me powerless.
Their lead is only a few months, and shrinking.
Local is the future.
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.
The choice is what makes agents/agency meaningful: if I secure a real estate agent in my search for a house, they are authorized to make choices on my behalf. That’s their whole point.
Because of this use of agent, I think it’s actually not a terrible term for the LLM harness that allows them to seem to act “independently” on the operator’s behalf. I do agree with mitsuhiko though that it, along with much of our other language around LLMs, risks anthropomorphizing them too much (which is to say at all). It also becomes too easy to conflate the “agent” part (the harness) with the LLM itself, which leads to a further-inflated perception of the inherent capabilities of the LLMs and plays into the doomsayer hands of anthropic et al.
Last one I disliked was "grok", at least this one was killed by existence of Elon's "clanker" in a similar way that "Adolf" stopped being a popular name.
"Clanker" is a derogatory term for robots and artificial intelligence (AI) software. The term has been used in Star Wars media, first appearing in the franchise's 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando. In 2025, the term became widely used to express hatred or distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of AI."
For the makers of an AI harness to actively refer to the models that use Pi as "clankers" and link to the meaning of the word as "to express hatred or distaste for machines"... that seems disastrous to me. I'll let others think through the consequences that occur once this article lands in the pre-training of models.
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.
You have agency because you can refuse. Your car can't refuse your command.
First you say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" but then "to make their own top-level decisions".
Well, which one is it? If they don't have agency, then it's impossible for them to make top-level decision on their own.
Or... maybe it's that they can't have true agency, because it doesn't make sense to tell a big ball of floating point numbers to make decisions about how it plans to have impact in the world. It can't do that, even if it can play-act doing so.
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?
Now I'm laying here, wondering if it's bad to be discriminating against objects.
Okay, in case of people and words like n___er, one could argue they have a leg to stand on. But stupid computer programs? Really?
And then I remember that in my part of the galaxy, we indeed have a word to describe such people. We call them “dumbasses”.
A slur applied to anthropomorphic programs is the same mindset to someone who really believes the programs are experiencing, quite different from “rust bucket” being applied to a car they know doesn’t think and feel. While I can’t quite get offended about it, it does make me wonder if they’re not using other slurs because of the socially unacceptable nature of those slurs rather than because they’re not awful people.
Programs also have souls. Especially the little well-crafted programs which are works of art. Their authors took a part of their soul and put them into code, and you can see it in the way the code is written and in the way the programs work. They are not anthropomorphic, and yet they have a soul.
A clanker is anthropomorphic in a way that an advanced enough mimic in a dungeon that looks like your ideal waifu is anthropomorphic. It will infect you the moment you get kissably close to it. It subsists on egregious acts of copyright infringement. It’s a parasite that seeks to destroy a part of your brain and replace it with itself, making you quiver in pain each time you try to think for yourself, and the pain stops when you let it mimic your thinking while paying its creators per word-chunk it outputs.
The clanker seems anthropomorphic enough for the people it has infected, so they get offended to the point of blind rage when someone points out that no, this is its mimicry, and that it doesn’t actually experience things.
Edit: feels a bit like inventing an insult for your pet rock. If I met someone who acted superior toward an inanimate rock and used invented slang to insult it that sounded like a slur, that would feel bad to me too. What's the point except to role play a fantasy of some kind?
Trying to offend all the time is childish.
"Gosh darn it, why won't you start now you rust bucket"
I don't like swearing, and I really try to not offend people. But telling someone not to do something with the sole reason giving it's childish I dislike strongly.
I sometimes play video games, even though some people say it's childish. Or act silly with my partner. What ever floats your goat.
The same thing would apply to a person who swears endlessly without reason.
>I sometimes play video games, even though some people say it's childish.
Who cares what you do in your own time?
Here, on the other hand, someone is trying to force his opinion on public. This, I can judge. Both on merit, and the language they use.
> 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?)
It does not follow the template, it's made by a user who is also active in the openclaw repo and it's full of slop analysis.
To answer your question, remember that people will only approve a LLM's output if it matches with their perspective and priors. So if you see a slop issue, it reflects on the human user who didn't see an issue in it (thus their prompt framing or refining is wrong).
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.
Or maybe one that's imitating it.
Mario, please never change.
const perfectAgent = (prompt) => "Nope";It's a minimal TUI to "talk" to an AI. Mostly for coding. And it's build in a way where it's minimal and user can extend or write plugin without restarting.
Given the client and it being open source, they get (too) many bug reports and pull requests. So much so that every bug and PR gets auto closed, unless you are known to the developers.
We’re naming a machine here, not a human being. Even if it was a slur (I don’t consider it one) it would be directed at a piece of equipment.
I find it fascinating because I don’t think people would bat an eye if that term was used for a hammer or keyboard. Yet somehow it changes when applied to an LLM based machinery. Craftspeople often apply jargon to their tools, much of which is neutral to negative.
I guess providers will look to (further?) exploit this for marketing/strategic purposes so we should be very aware of such an important bias.
The direct wired link is: https://www.wired.com/story/the-ai-slur-clanker-has-become-a...
A full readable 7 month old snapshot is: https://archive.md/gH1f5
My apologies, it was a real sighting of something that I don't have the time right now to reproduce and investigate further <shrug>.
Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the representation of race and gender in the media,
Bailey also points out that racism within the AI industry goes as far as the actual methods used to power it. She references the negative health impact of xAI data centers in a Memphis neighborhood called Boxtown, which is 90 percent Black, as an example of environmental racism inflicted by the AI industry.
It's worth noting that her objections stem from clean air violations outlined here:
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
None of the 35 methane gas turbines that help power xAI’s massive supercomputer is equipped with pollution controls typically required by federal rules.
The term was literally created in star wars to use as a racial slur against droids
A machine does not have feelings. If you call your power drill a piece of shit you are not overstepping any bounds either.
The reason you don’t insult other humans should be obvious, but none of that translates to machines. From my perspective it’s a grave mistake that we’re even remotely entertaining the idea right now that LLMs are sentient.
From that perspective I really quite appreciate the term. That said, I can see that it really seems to trigger some folks. I’m not sure we have found the right language to refer to what we have.
So no. I cannot stress enough how much I disagree with the idea that this is in any way related to the n-word precisely because this is addressed as non humans.
That we are seriously considering if these things should be in any ways be equated to humans to me is a problem. They are not. They cannot and must not be given rights or responsibilities. They are dumb tools and if we lose sight of that, we can go down really problematic paths.
I have even on the receiving side of agent psychosis for more than a year now (because people talk to the LLM and sometimes the LLM tells people to talk to me) and there is only darkness there.
My hunch is that this term is loaded not because it's seen as a slur, but because people are currently attempting to give LLMs a soul and they are developing a certain unease about some of the consequences that come with it. For some the LLM is developing from a soul-less tool to a something with a personality, something they bond with, that's where some of those lines are blurring. I just don't think this is healthy at all.
I don't think they're even as sophisticated as trying to give Llms a soul. Much more likely that they actively look for how they can be offended at anything - there is most definitely a very large group of people who do that.
You don't need to get dragged into their nonsense. Just ignore/dismiss it
You are certain about things that experts in philosophy/consciousness/AI can't agree on.
That should make you pause, not plow ahead.
I share your dislike of the industry’s marketing, but this is coming off as more petulant than the reasonable skepticism you seem to be aiming for.
What "type of thinking"?
Industry leaders? The question and the answer that you disregard come from Alan Turing.
Funny, why do you care what other people "consider"? Let people think for themselves if the French revolution was important or not, why invoke authority/consensus.
As one of the original creators to make clanker-themed TikToks, Stewart, who goes by Chaise online, was dubbed the “clanker guy” by his fanbase after racking up millions of views. But in August, the 19-year-old content creator, who is Black, announced that he would no longer be publishing any more videos on the subject. The joke, he said, and responses to it, had become racist.
“When I go into my comment section and people are starting to call me ‘cligger’ and ‘clanka’ or ‘you’re a dirty clanker’—not voicing those slurs at AI and electronics, but at me—I don’t find that entertaining or funny at all,” Stewart explains in the video.
...
On TikTok and Instagram, however, the ongoing backlash against AI has taken on the form of short video skits, envisioning a future where robots have been fully incorporated into society. The term “clanker,” along with “tinskins,” “wirebacks,” and “oil bleeders” are used as pejoratives in these skits. But some of these skits appear to be using clankers as stand-ins for Black people, perpetuating racist tropes and scenarios that harken back to a pre–Civil Rights era.
In one skit, creator Samuel Jacob dresses up in a police officer’s uniform and throws out phrases such as, “Don’t you know clankers sit in the back of the bus, Rosa Sparks?” and “Come on George Droid, looks like it’s jail time for you, rust monkey.” Another skit by TikTokker Stanzi Potenza depicts a waitress at a diner acting out a scenario in which she’s refusing service to the subject with the words “pov: you’re a clanker in 2050” sprawled across the screen. Speaking in a Southern drawl, she tells the camera, “Didn’t you see the sign outside? We don’t serve clankers here.” The caption underneath the video is a variation of a common phrase often used by people to defend their own prejudices: “Don’t worry, I have robot friends.”
Clearly there's been some strong parallelism in usages of clanker and nagger, just as there were in usages of ginger and its anagram by Tim Minchin in his song Prejudice.
I also find this sentiment to be a uniquely American phenomenon. They tend to see racism and discrimination where it has no place being. My impression is that they have dreams about it. Bonkers to me.
The OP is still in his edgy teenager phase, apparently… yes I know they’re successful; that might actually be the reason why they pick these words.
“Look, I’m so cool for using this neo-slur even though I build AI products! Like I’m so meta you see, I should be LOVING LLMs but instead I use the word clanker! I’m so complex and intricate and yeah obviously I’m not like the other AI users building slop. Cuz if I was building slop I would be infatuated with LLMs and thus I wouldn’t be using the term clanker. And also I’m very well emotionally tuned and suuuure clanker doesn’t sound like n-er to me and if it does to you then YOU have a problem! Oh those Americans and their political correctness! So annoying! But ME I’m different and don’t care about that because I’m HONEST and don’t hide the truth. Suck it Americans!”
Btw I’m not American nor politically correct. Still, I think it’s lame to use the word “clanker” because it shows immaturity.
Because it's cool to be substratist against robots.
I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...
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?
1. They behave differently: non-deterministic vs deterministic
2. They have different mechanism: harness+llms vs codes+apis
3. They have different interfaces: clicking vs chatting
They are like boston dynamics robots vs humans
You can write one in 200 lines of code. Just a TUI for an api.