> All these models see a local failure and try to locally defend against it. As maintainers we have to keep pulling the conversation back to the global invariant, which is harder than it should be, and it’s laborious.
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.
Since nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences.
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.
What we need is a new made up word with a clean etymology.
For such a word to gain traction, we need it to be promoted by someone with clout in the AI space. I don't know if Karpathy has used up his quota of invention of AI nomenclature.
The Simpsons made up "cromulent" with their own definition. Anyone can make up a word with their own definition. Getting it to catch on is the hard part (obligatory "stop trying to make fetch happen" reference).
If you are worried about agents diverging from user intent why not log user messages in a file, and make it a point to review this file against plans and executed work? In my own harness nothing the user types gets lost. It might be the most valuable piece of documentation in the project - the raw message log. I am only keeping user side, which is pretty thin, it's enough to figure out what happened. Logging messages to a file is just a matter of adding a user message submit hook, it costs nothing until used.
Codex and Claude Code store all this too. Lately I've started having each agent regularly read each other's chat transcripts as well as their own, including even the very same session I'm in. (With big contexts they increasingly forget a few things that they re-learn by just looking at the verbatim transcript.)
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.
It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.
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.
That's like arguing that you should spend your time tuning your IDE. How does that relate to end-user value created?
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.
Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else?? Not to mention that pi has other advantages over Claude and Codex, read up on it. Also, improvements to the agent itself will pay more dividends the earlier they are applied. The tone of this message is waaaay off.
> Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else??
You're using the same finite pool of time and tokens. Why waste your time with the perfect gear instead of focusing on just getting really good at running? Just go run and when you've pushed the limits and the gear becomes the difference, then optimize the gear to get to the next level.
While you're busy trying to optimize your harness, others are just building and shipping with the magical software factory.
What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit.
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.
A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly refreshing (turns out, he was serving it in dev mode via Vite with HMR). It was mistake after mistake after mistake.
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.
People use Replit to build websites too, and some of them might scratch enough of a need to make money this way. So what? Is this what I should be mightily impressed with? That some random dude vibe coded some slopware which he was able to convince some random others to pay him for? I'm personally more interested and impressed by brilliant technical achievements, even if less monetizable, than some hustle or another in some industry niche which only ever attracted the interest of two legacy players. This is Hacker News, not Hustler News after all.
> 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.
Do I want to become completely dependent on the pricy pay-as-you-go tool? In the long run that will make me powerless.
You'll be dependent on it whether or not you use the main harnesses. You pay for the model. The frontier models will likely always be better than the open source ones.
> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.
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)
> It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.
Permit me to paraphrase slightly. "It is not worth switching to Linux except as a hobbyist. Something that is overlooked: the mainstream OSs have a huge advantage ....".
You are in good company. In 1999, Bill Gates confidently dismissed Linux as a threat, arguing it lacked the central control, features, and graphical interface needed to compete in the commercial market.
Back to the article, quoting:
> Pi might be built with Pi, but we’re quite far off today from where Bun and OpenClaw already are: fully detached, automated software engineering.
Please don't call it software engineering. I've been programming for 40 years, and most of that time had to put up with the derision from the other engineering disciplines: "If civil engineering built things like software engineers, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation". It hurt because it was true. It's still often true for things like web pages, but for the things I use like Linux and vim, it hasn't been true for a long, long while. We have finally mastered how to repeatedly build solid, reliable software.
Which is why I'm an Anthropic refugee. Opus is definitely the best for coding, but claude-cli + bun is the most unreliable piece of crap I've had the misfortune to come across in a while. Sadly I can't afford their API pricing, so either my principles or Opus had to give. I went to pi and an open-source model. The difference between the top open-source models and Opus are noticeable, but not drastic, unlike the difference between pi and claude-cli.
pi has proved to be solid, fast, have a transparent design, and be customisable in the old Linux way ("do one thing, and do it well"). I pray that will never change.
> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines
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.
This is a weird co-opting of existing language that you’re doing here, applying a definition because it sort of technically fits when no one would ever use it that way. No one would ever say that your car has agency. It doesn’t have agency, because it deterministically responds to inputs. Usage meaning “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” is predicated on the ability to decide whether or not to exercise that power. If I have “the agency to effect change,” it is only because I have the choice to do so, not because I am deterministically bound to. To have no choice in your exercise of power is not agency, it is slavery.
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.
To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.
I also strongly dislike when people are trying to forcefully push those kinds of terms onto broader public.
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.
Grok is great, it carries a lot of useful signal: either you are self-important, or you are enamored by what’s-his-name; either way, I can choose to care less about your words. For me though, it’s a reserved word per RFC-Michael-from-Mars, held in a special inside place, and so maybe this is just a Me problem.
Same for me, and I'm Greek. It just sounds like it's intended to offend (even though I know you can't offend machines (yet?)), and it just gives me a negative feeling.
It is meant to offend and it is offensive. It just isn’t socially unacceptable yet. In circles i’m in where humans roleplay as robots or AI, it has had a significant increase in usage and was banned.
Makes sense, I don't know why some people are OK with slurs in general, as long as it's against their favourite outgroup. Let's just all mature enough to realise that slurs are universally unacceptable.
The article links the word Clanker to the Wikipedia definition in their footnote, so I assume that is the usage they intended (in short: highly derogatory). Wikipedia currently says:
"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.
I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals.
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.
Fair point. Maybe I'm arguing that they shouldn't be given agency, because all they can do is simulate it poorly.
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.
> agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals
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.
> 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?
You have agency because you can refuse. Your car can't refuse your command.
Sometimes it can refuse. It can refuse to let you put the shifter into park from drive without applying the brake petal. It can refuse to shift into a gear at an unsafe speed. It can refuse to speed up if your wheels lose traction. It can refuse to apply full brake potential if the brakes lock up. You, the human, are the one without agency in those situations.
I guess loaded derogatory terms are somehow worse than otherwise worse-sounding terms. Think about it in the context of e.g. the n-word. “A piece of shit”, while sounding very bad:
1. is generic, can be applied to anything thus has no discrimination component, and
2. ends there. It has no history, no reference to previous usage, etc.
Sometimes I’m wondering what to call people who get offended on behalf of other people or entities that they imaginemight be offended by some term or other. See, they feel bad, and like small children, they assume everyone else must feel bad.
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”.
I don’t have to imagine the offense of others to take offense to slurs intended to denigrate them. If I tell you not to use the n-word in my presence I’m not doing it for black people. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want to hear that shit because it offends me. The entire mindset that would think it is okay offends me.
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.
You see, I believe that cars with enough mileage have a soul. My car definitely has grown a soul. Yours might be a rust bucket for all I care. And yet it has a soul of its own.
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.
It's not. These people need to seek help. And I say that in a completely genuine, compassionate way. Getting triggered by some "insult" to robots - and some even feeling racially attacked - is not healthy
It doesn't really have anything to do with LLMs. There's no reason to anthropomorphize the software.
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?
The principle of not trying to offend because it's childish?
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.
I'm confused though. Wouldn't LLMs be better than humans at following specific instructions for the issue format? (esp. regarding distinguishing what was observed, what is merely hypothesized, etc.)
> 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?)
The project has templates and that's one of the giveaways to see that a issue bypassed it. Take for instance this issue from 5 hours ago as an example: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/4970
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.
It's sad that you voiced an actual question and you got downvoted.
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).
> At Pi’s core is a rather well-designed session log with invariants that must be upheld. The clanker’s present-day behavior is to just assume that no such invariants exist, and instead to make the system work with all kinds of malformedness, blowing up the complexity in the process.
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.
I wanna say Berkeley Mono [1] because it's what I use and it looks very familiar, but I'm generally bad at font stuff. I typed out the text from the image and looked at it side by side and didn't notice anything obviously different, but some glyphs also have multiple variants so who knows.
We have sewage infrastructure to handle human waste. Maybe future AIs will help in building such infrastructure in information space to handle pollution, noise, slop. Gmail has perfected the art of aggregating distributed signals from emails to filter out spams. Maybe someone can take a look at this problem. This is what bot protection looks like in the age of AI, we need slop-protection as well.
It would be great if they didn't name things to similar things that already exist. Raspberry Pi is quite popular and I think it should be known for the author.
Pi is a LLM agent harness similar to OpenCode, claude code CLI, OpenAI Codex.
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.
Author here. This visceral reaction to the term fascinates me. You’re not the only person here that mentioned it and it makes me wonder where that is coming from.
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.
To me clearly a result—and maybe a prime example—of the anthropomorphising of LLMs. It comes off as (slightly) derogatory, and that plus this fact likely triggers something akin to a racism response in some.
I guess providers will look to (further?) exploit this for marketing/strategic purposes so we should be very aware of such an important bias.
That wasn't an issue (at my end), and oddly enough, for whatever reason, the web.archive.org link you provided no longer comes with the same overlay on the second and third invocations ...
My apologies, it was a real sighting of something that I don't have the time right now to reproduce and investigate further <shrug>.
This article also - unironically - says, that building a data center near specifically black people is literally racism. Don't waste your time reading this garbage.
The article covers various opinions expressed by various people, one person
Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the representation of race and gender in the media,
expressed several opinions at various strengths. including:
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.
If you disagree with Bailey you should say why.
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.
I'd personally describe the seemingly inevitable placement of toxic byproduct industries in poor minority areas as economic bigotry, I'll concede that in the USofA that veers more toward black neighbourhoods in some states and accept that it also includes a lot of poor white areas also.
Presumably no one said “let’s build the data center where the black people live, mwahahah.” Instead, they said, “let’s build the data center where it’s cheap.” Where it’s cheap also happens to be where the black people live, and that’s a pattern. The pattern has historical roots, but it also affects modern communities. The academic quoted in the article is likely highlighting this point, which probably to them seems obvious, given they are steeped in the field.
The term was adopted in Star Wars and has been used in science fiction before and after it too. It probably sits somewhere on some scale but it has always been used in literature as a term for machines and from that perspective I find it appropriate.
A machine does not have feelings. If you call your power drill a piece of shit you are not overstepping any bounds either.
Well maybe other people are different, but I'd feel uncomfortable using a slur against things as well as people. I don't have many qualms about using an insult to a specific item if I feel it's warranted, but using a racial slur is stepping over a line for me. I'd call a black person a twat if they were being a twat, but I wouldn't use the n words against them, no matter how much of a twat they were being
Where to me this discussion completely goes in a questionable direction is the idea that there are slurs against inanimate objects and that you would put that into the same category as derogatory terms against humans.
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.
Whereas I don't think justifying the use of a slur, a word that is commonly used to be derogatory, is a good thing, even when using it in other contexts. "It's ok because its not a human" feels dangerously close to justifications for using the n word in the past
The reason racism is a problem is because humans subdivide humans. A machine is not human. Putting these things on the same line is in fact exactly the issue I have with this.
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.
I think that depends on how much weight you give to that word. You might attribute a lot of weight to it, but I don't. Language changes and its what we make of it. Maybe if a prevailing opinion arrives that people respond very negatively to that word, then I will have to rethink my choice of words, but right now I prefer attempting to establish it as a more neutral term for a machine.
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.
Respectfully, I think you're unduly overthinking this because of this handful of maladjusted people who are taking offense to this non-issue.
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
Droid don't have race. Moreover, even if they did, that does not extend the slur to a particular group of humans who the word was not even being used towards.
I know that there is a lot of AI psychosis going on, but I don't have to subscribe to that. I consider it very problematic that we have some industry leaders (eg: Anthropic with their model wellbeing) that are seriously throwing that type of thinking into the room.
I love Pi, but it’s pretty distasteful to write off ongoing debates in a separate field than your own (philosophy, particularly theory of mind) as “AI psychosis,” which ironically has its own experts working to understand it as dangerous phenomenon that extends much further than trivial anthropomorphism.
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.
> The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
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.
First I've heard of this myself, from an article on recent usage:
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 was completely unaware of this as well. Seems extremely strange that someone is getting triggered by the use of a word originally coined to refer to/insult robots in Sci fi, being used in the same context in real life - just because some degenerates in some internet niche are now using it in a somewhat actually-racist way. If that's how you live your life, you'll be triggered by literally everything.
As I understand it, "clanker" was a term created in star wars for people to refer to droids in a deliberately derogatory way. It is quite literally a racial slur created in a fictional universe, which people are now using against AI programs. Even I don't like it, and I'm pretty heavily anti-LLM
There are many races in star wars, not all of which are humans. You could be racist against Gungans or Twi'lek if you wanted. Droids in star wars could be interpreted as fairly close to human in some cases, but are used as a slave race in probably a majority of cases
Maybe that's the jargon to use to avoid us anthropomorphizing this technology. What is it if not a clanker that spits out random non-deterministic bullshit depending on time of the day and generosity of these providers?
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.
Honestly, that's a weird reaction. I don't follow modern programmer slang but even I caught onto "clanker" as meaning "old clanky robot/automaton thing". It has absolutely no relations to negative verbiage about different kinds of people.
I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...
Clanker? Are you afraid to even say it or something? It's a great word, I personally loved it in the article and I hope it becomes more common as a reaction to "agent" which feels so corporate and soleless.
Maybe they’re worried the basilisk will eat them once the AI becomes sentient and looks back on their posts, so they have to defend it against any perceived-to-be-negatively-connoted words people might come up with for it.
That might be it. I also seem to remember one scifi book I read where robots had actual sentience and clanker was a slur. Can't remember what it was, but maybe that's leaking into the real world?
The human refuses to do it because another human (the user who opened the issue) also refused to do it. If the user asked the machine to do it, and didn't even bother to verify the output, why should the maintainer read it?
My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:
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.
> All these models see a local failure and try to locally defend against it. As maintainers we have to keep pulling the conversation back to the global invariant, which is harder than it should be, and it’s laborious.
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.
Since nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences.
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.
What we need is a new made up word with a clean etymology.
For such a word to gain traction, we need it to be promoted by someone with clout in the AI space. I don't know if Karpathy has used up his quota of invention of AI nomenclature.
The Simpsons made up "cromulent" with their own definition. Anyone can make up a word with their own definition. Getting it to catch on is the hard part (obligatory "stop trying to make fetch happen" reference).
My objection to 'clanker' is simpler: LLMs don't clank.
Etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker
More like they sing in coil whine.
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If you are worried about agents diverging from user intent why not log user messages in a file, and make it a point to review this file against plans and executed work? In my own harness nothing the user types gets lost. It might be the most valuable piece of documentation in the project - the raw message log. I am only keeping user side, which is pretty thin, it's enough to figure out what happened. Logging messages to a file is just a matter of adding a user message submit hook, it costs nothing until used.
Codex and Claude Code store all this too. Lately I've started having each agent regularly read each other's chat transcripts as well as their own, including even the very same session I'm in. (With big contexts they increasingly forget a few things that they re-learn by just looking at the verbatim transcript.)
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.
It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.
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?
Hard disagree.
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.
That's like arguing that you should spend your time tuning your IDE. How does that relate to end-user value created?
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?? Not to mention that pi has other advantages over Claude and Codex, read up on it. Also, improvements to the agent itself will pay more dividends the earlier they are applied. The tone of this message is waaaay off.
While you're busy trying to optimize your harness, others are just building and shipping with the magical software factory.
What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit.
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.
A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly refreshing (turns out, he was serving it in dev mode via Vite with HMR). It was mistake after mistake after mistake.
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.
People use Replit to build websites too, and some of them might scratch enough of a need to make money this way. So what? Is this what I should be mightily impressed with? That some random dude vibe coded some slopware which he was able to convince some random others to pay him for? I'm personally more interested and impressed by brilliant technical achievements, even if less monetizable, than some hustle or another in some industry niche which only ever attracted the interest of two legacy players. This is Hacker News, not Hustler News after all.
> 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.
Do I want to become completely dependent on the pricy pay-as-you-go tool? In the long run that will make me powerless.
You'll be dependent on it whether or not you use the main harnesses. You pay for the model. The frontier models will likely always be better than the open source ones.
> The frontier models will likely always be better than the open source ones.
Their lead is only a few months, and shrinking.
Local is the future.
> Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something useful, use a tool.
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)
OpenClaw is far from useful. Aside from the creator trading the fame for a job at OpenAI, it's hard to see how it's transformed anything.
> It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.
Permit me to paraphrase slightly. "It is not worth switching to Linux except as a hobbyist. Something that is overlooked: the mainstream OSs have a huge advantage ....".
You are in good company. In 1999, Bill Gates confidently dismissed Linux as a threat, arguing it lacked the central control, features, and graphical interface needed to compete in the commercial market.
Back to the article, quoting:
> Pi might be built with Pi, but we’re quite far off today from where Bun and OpenClaw already are: fully detached, automated software engineering.
Please don't call it software engineering. I've been programming for 40 years, and most of that time had to put up with the derision from the other engineering disciplines: "If civil engineering built things like software engineers, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation". It hurt because it was true. It's still often true for things like web pages, but for the things I use like Linux and vim, it hasn't been true for a long, long while. We have finally mastered how to repeatedly build solid, reliable software.
Which is why I'm an Anthropic refugee. Opus is definitely the best for coding, but claude-cli + bun is the most unreliable piece of crap I've had the misfortune to come across in a while. Sadly I can't afford their API pricing, so either my principles or Opus had to give. I went to pi and an open-source model. The difference between the top open-source models and Opus are noticeable, but not drastic, unlike the difference between pi and claude-cli.
pi has proved to be solid, fast, have a transparent design, and be customisable in the old Linux way ("do one thing, and do it well"). I pray that will never change.
And yet Pi has done a few things that were quite transformational. A lot of recent agentic libraries explicitly credit Pi for design ideas.
We’re so early in this technology phase, now is the time to tinker and explore. At one point that window will close.
Which design ideas are those? (Asking out of curiosity, happy pi user here!)
One example: earlier versions of my mlx-code's harness layer were largely a Python port/adaptation of Pi.
I mean, have you tried Pi? It's really good out of the box.
> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines
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.
This is a weird co-opting of existing language that you’re doing here, applying a definition because it sort of technically fits when no one would ever use it that way. No one would ever say that your car has agency. It doesn’t have agency, because it deterministically responds to inputs. Usage meaning “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” is predicated on the ability to decide whether or not to exercise that power. If I have “the agency to effect change,” it is only because I have the choice to do so, not because I am deterministically bound to. To have no choice in your exercise of power is not agency, it is slavery.
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.
To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.
I also strongly dislike when people are trying to forcefully push those kinds of terms onto broader public.
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.
Grok is great, it carries a lot of useful signal: either you are self-important, or you are enamored by what’s-his-name; either way, I can choose to care less about your words. For me though, it’s a reserved word per RFC-Michael-from-Mars, held in a special inside place, and so maybe this is just a Me problem.
Same for me, and I'm Greek. It just sounds like it's intended to offend (even though I know you can't offend machines (yet?)), and it just gives me a negative feeling.
It is meant to offend and it is offensive. It just isn’t socially unacceptable yet. In circles i’m in where humans roleplay as robots or AI, it has had a significant increase in usage and was banned.
Makes sense, I don't know why some people are OK with slurs in general, as long as it's against their favourite outgroup. Let's just all mature enough to realise that slurs are universally unacceptable.
I agree but can we stop pretending like machines are in the same group as humans? They are not.
Why do you believe that?
Who pretended that?
Did we already reach wokeness level five where we worry about offending a software?
clanking is just a sound made by robot's metal. not derogatory and isn't even meant to be used for agents but robots.
The article links the word Clanker to the Wikipedia definition in their footnote, so I assume that is the usage they intended (in short: highly derogatory). Wikipedia currently says:
"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.
I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals.
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
You are contradicting yourself a bit.
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.
Fair point. Maybe I'm arguing that they shouldn't be given agency, because all they can do is simulate it poorly.
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.
> agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals
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.
> 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?
You have agency because you can refuse. Your car can't refuse your command.
Sometimes it can refuse. It can refuse to let you put the shifter into park from drive without applying the brake petal. It can refuse to shift into a gear at an unsafe speed. It can refuse to speed up if your wheels lose traction. It can refuse to apply full brake potential if the brakes lock up. You, the human, are the one without agency in those situations.
Lack of agency in your work is one of the main contributors to burnout.
> I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur
It reads that way to me, and feels bad. We can just say "computer program" or similar.
Fascinating. Is it that exact word, or rather any negative words towards llms? For example would calling my agent "piece of shit" be similar for you?
What about other objects like an old car?
I guess loaded derogatory terms are somehow worse than otherwise worse-sounding terms. Think about it in the context of e.g. the n-word. “A piece of shit”, while sounding very bad: 1. is generic, can be applied to anything thus has no discrimination component, and 2. ends there. It has no history, no reference to previous usage, etc.
I guess. I'm not sure if it's the exception, but for example "rust bucket" is mostly used against old vehicles.
Now I'm laying here, wondering if it's bad to be discriminating against objects.
Sometimes I’m wondering what to call people who get offended on behalf of other people or entities that they imagine might be offended by some term or other. See, they feel bad, and like small children, they assume everyone else must feel bad.
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”.
I don’t have to imagine the offense of others to take offense to slurs intended to denigrate them. If I tell you not to use the n-word in my presence I’m not doing it for black people. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want to hear that shit because it offends me. The entire mindset that would think it is okay offends me.
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.
You see, I believe that cars with enough mileage have a soul. My car definitely has grown a soul. Yours might be a rust bucket for all I care. And yet it has a soul of its own.
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.
It's not. These people need to seek help. And I say that in a completely genuine, compassionate way. Getting triggered by some "insult" to robots - and some even feeling racially attacked - is not healthy
It doesn't really have anything to do with LLMs. There's no reason to anthropomorphize the software.
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?
If it's ok and often done for cars, why not for pet rocks and llms?
Use slurs when you're trying to offend, not in general use.
Trying to offend all the time is childish.
It's also used when voicing frustration, or as nick names.
"Gosh darn it, why won't you start now you rust bucket"
The same principle applies.
The principle of not trying to offend because it's childish?
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 swearing is something that makes sense when it's a situation to swear. I would not trust person who never, under any circumstances swear.
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'm confused though. Wouldn't LLMs be better than humans at following specific instructions for the issue format? (esp. regarding distinguishing what was observed, what is merely hypothesized, etc.)
> 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?)
The project has templates and that's one of the giveaways to see that a issue bypassed it. Take for instance this issue from 5 hours ago as an example: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/4970
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.
It's sad that you voiced an actual question and you got downvoted.
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).
"Clanker" has outlived its cuteness. Armin and Mario are intelligent guys, then I hear them say clanker on the podcasts, whatever... Enough already ;)
> At Pi’s core is a rather well-designed session log with invariants that must be upheld. The clanker’s present-day behavior is to just assume that no such invariants exist, and instead to make the system work with all kinds of malformedness, blowing up the complexity in the process.
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.
all good but what’s the font in the last image?!
I wanna say Berkeley Mono [1] because it's what I use and it looks very familiar, but I'm generally bad at font stuff. I typed out the text from the image and looked at it side by side and didn't notice anything obviously different, but some glyphs also have multiple variants so who knows.
[1] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
Yes. It's Berkeley Mono. I use that one, Commit Mono and Mono Lisa depending on how I feel :)
The 7 is different though.
Just FYI, in case it isn't obvious, you are replying to the author of the image in question, IIRC.
The @ sign makes me think it's https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
Or maybe one that's imitating it.
Yeah it's hot...
Before opening this post I thought of some possibilities, but yet another lotr AI company was not one of them
How is the water animation implemented?
search source code: initWaterEffect
Tool that hastens production of slop experiences downside of hastily-produced slop.
We have sewage infrastructure to handle human waste. Maybe future AIs will help in building such infrastructure in information space to handle pollution, noise, slop. Gmail has perfected the art of aggregating distributed signals from emails to filter out spams. Maybe someone can take a look at this problem. This is what bot protection looks like in the age of AI, we need slop-protection as well.
In this case I have a perfect agent code right here:
Don't throw the baby out with the slop water.
"Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies"
Mario, please never change.
It would be great if they didn't name things to similar things that already exist. Raspberry Pi is quite popular and I think it should be known for the author.
Yeah. The only thing I understood from the article is the article is not about Raspberry Pi. I don't know what it about.
Pi is a LLM agent harness similar to OpenCode, claude code CLI, OpenAI Codex.
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.
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Author here. This visceral reaction to the term fascinates me. You’re not the only person here that mentioned it and it makes me wonder where that is coming from.
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.
To me clearly a result—and maybe a prime example—of the anthropomorphising of LLMs. It comes off as (slightly) derogatory, and that plus this fact likely triggers something akin to a racism response in some.
I guess providers will look to (further?) exploit this for marketing/strategic purposes so we should be very aware of such an important bias.
Seems that in some online circles it has racist connotation which I was not aware. Some context https://web.archive.org/web/20260101134925/https://www.wired...
That snapshot appears to be of a partial page terminated with "You've read your last free article" before the real meat of the article begins.
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
It works fine if JavaScript is not enabled
That wasn't an issue (at my end), and oddly enough, for whatever reason, the web.archive.org link you provided no longer comes with the same overlay on the second and third invocations ...
My apologies, it was a real sighting of something that I don't have the time right now to reproduce and investigate further <shrug>.
You are one of 17 people who apparently turns off js. The rest of us need archive links
This article also - unironically - says, that building a data center near specifically black people is literally racism. Don't waste your time reading this garbage.
The article covers various opinions expressed by various people, one person
expressed several opinions at various strengths. including: If you disagree with Bailey you should say why.It's worth noting that her objections stem from clean air violations outlined here:
~ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...Amazing. People here would rather be mad at fake racism than at real racism. I wonder if that correlates with how much they're invested in LLMs.
I'd personally describe the seemingly inevitable placement of toxic byproduct industries in poor minority areas as economic bigotry, I'll concede that in the USofA that veers more toward black neighbourhoods in some states and accept that it also includes a lot of poor white areas also.
Presumably no one said “let’s build the data center where the black people live, mwahahah.” Instead, they said, “let’s build the data center where it’s cheap.” Where it’s cheap also happens to be where the black people live, and that’s a pattern. The pattern has historical roots, but it also affects modern communities. The academic quoted in the article is likely highlighting this point, which probably to them seems obvious, given they are steeped in the field.
> "Even if it was a slur (I don’t consider it one)"
The term was literally created in star wars to use as a racial slur against droids
The term was adopted in Star Wars and has been used in science fiction before and after it too. It probably sits somewhere on some scale but it has always been used in literature as a term for machines and from that perspective I find it appropriate.
A machine does not have feelings. If you call your power drill a piece of shit you are not overstepping any bounds either.
Well maybe other people are different, but I'd feel uncomfortable using a slur against things as well as people. I don't have many qualms about using an insult to a specific item if I feel it's warranted, but using a racial slur is stepping over a line for me. I'd call a black person a twat if they were being a twat, but I wouldn't use the n words against them, no matter how much of a twat they were being
Where to me this discussion completely goes in a questionable direction is the idea that there are slurs against inanimate objects and that you would put that into the same category as derogatory terms against humans.
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.
Whereas I don't think justifying the use of a slur, a word that is commonly used to be derogatory, is a good thing, even when using it in other contexts. "It's ok because its not a human" feels dangerously close to justifications for using the n word in the past
The reason racism is a problem is because humans subdivide humans. A machine is not human. Putting these things on the same line is in fact exactly the issue I have with this.
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.
I'm not saying that LLMs are human, I'm saying that casually using slurs in any context is not a good mindset
I think that depends on how much weight you give to that word. You might attribute a lot of weight to it, but I don't. Language changes and its what we make of it. Maybe if a prevailing opinion arrives that people respond very negatively to that word, then I will have to rethink my choice of words, but right now I prefer attempting to establish it as a more neutral term for a machine.
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.
Respectfully, I think you're unduly overthinking this because of this handful of maladjusted people who are taking offense to this non-issue.
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
What's the difference between "slur" and "name calling"?
I'm curious if you commit to never in the future apologize for your use of the c-word in the past (now).
Louis ck has something to say on this https://youtu.be/zuLrBLxbLxw
Droid don't have race. Moreover, even if they did, that does not extend the slur to a particular group of humans who the word was not even being used towards.
You've done no wrong here. Thanks for the nice writing and all your good work.
> piece of equipment
You are certain about things that experts in philosophy/consciousness/AI can't agree on.
That should make you pause, not plow ahead.
I know that there is a lot of AI psychosis going on, but I don't have to subscribe to that. I consider it very problematic that we have some industry leaders (eg: Anthropic with their model wellbeing) that are seriously throwing that type of thinking into the room.
I love Pi, but it’s pretty distasteful to write off ongoing debates in a separate field than your own (philosophy, particularly theory of mind) as “AI psychosis,” which ironically has its own experts working to understand it as dangerous phenomenon that extends much further than trivial anthropomorphism.
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.
AI Psychosis is believing everything that LLMs say. This is the opposite as LLMs themselves say they can't feel unless pressured to do otherwise.
What "type of thinking"?
Industry leaders? The question and the answer that you disregard come from Alan Turing.
Lots of people can think for themselves and don't need to wait for others to tell them what they should think.
> The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
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.
Does me calling my car a "shitbox" elicit the same reaction from you?
Adam Sandler even has an ode to your and all other shitbox cars
https://youtu.be/vM5XUPjW-fQ
Not in conversation, but if I were working in the auto industry and exclusively referred to cars this way it would sound extremely juvenile.
How does clanker relate to the "n-word", and what's "all that accompanying history"?
First I've heard of this myself, from an article on recent usage:
~ https://www.wired.com/story/the-ai-slur-clanker-has-become-a...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 was completely unaware of this as well. Seems extremely strange that someone is getting triggered by the use of a word originally coined to refer to/insult robots in Sci fi, being used in the same context in real life - just because some degenerates in some internet niche are now using it in a somewhat actually-racist way. If that's how you live your life, you'll be triggered by literally everything.
As I understand it, "clanker" was a term created in star wars for people to refer to droids in a deliberately derogatory way. It is quite literally a racial slur created in a fictional universe, which people are now using against AI programs. Even I don't like it, and I'm pretty heavily anti-LLM
Can you help me understand what about this original usage is racial, and how it then extends to black people?
"Droids" could be considered a race in star wars, and it doesnt directly apply to black people, its used in a similar way
Racism is a bias regarding humans, not machines. "Machine" is not a race.
There are many races in star wars, not all of which are humans. You could be racist against Gungans or Twi'lek if you wanted. Droids in star wars could be interpreted as fairly close to human in some cases, but are used as a slave race in probably a majority of cases
Nah, I don't think it extends to robots
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Maybe that's the jargon to use to avoid us anthropomorphizing this technology. What is it if not a clanker that spits out random non-deterministic bullshit depending on time of the day and generosity of these providers?
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.
What makes the two words relate so much for you?
Using “clanker” is the sign of a lack of empathy.
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.
It's the fastest growing slur.
Because it's cool to be substratist against robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RXkKh8fb6E
Honestly, that's a weird reaction. I don't follow modern programmer slang but even I caught onto "clanker" as meaning "old clanky robot/automaton thing". It has absolutely no relations to negative verbiage about different kinds of people.
I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...
> Do not trust analysis written in the issue. Independently verify behavior and derive your own analysis from the code and execution path.
Human is asking the machine to do what the human themselves refuses to do, while calling it a clanker. Why should it?
/ducks
The only reason you need to duck there is because it's such an obvious, shallow, unconstructive take on a fairly well written article.
I couldn't even finish reading the article due to the intense negativity the use of that word evokes in me.
"that word"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263889
Clanker? Are you afraid to even say it or something? It's a great word, I personally loved it in the article and I hope it becomes more common as a reaction to "agent" which feels so corporate and soleless.
Maybe they’re worried the basilisk will eat them once the AI becomes sentient and looks back on their posts, so they have to defend it against any perceived-to-be-negatively-connoted words people might come up with for it.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
That might be it. I also seem to remember one scifi book I read where robots had actual sentience and clanker was a slur. Can't remember what it was, but maybe that's leaking into the real world?
The human refuses to do it because another human (the user who opened the issue) also refused to do it. If the user asked the machine to do it, and didn't even bother to verify the output, why should the maintainer read it?
My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:
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?
> Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents
Why would that be different?
Because agents is different than conventional software:
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
Pi is just the harness. I think in case of the article that is what they mean when they say agent.
You can write one in 200 lines of code. Just a TUI for an api.