alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
clanking is just a sound made by robot's metal. not derogatory and isn't even meant to be used for agents but robots.
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
> 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.
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.