Summary

Armin Ronacher defends his use of the word 'clanker' for AI coding tools, arguing it creates necessary distance between humans and machines. He rejects the term 'agent' because it anthropomorphizes LLMs and diffuses human responsibility. He pushes back against comparisons to racial slurs, arguing that racism is about dehumanizing humans, while machines genuinely are not human. He acknowledges the word is being co-opted by others who use robots as props for replaying real-world racism, and says he'll abandon the term if it becomes primarily associated with that usage. The core argument is that cold, mechanical language for AI systems is healthy because it preserves the boundary where responsibility belongs: with humans.

Key Insight

Mechanical, distancing language for AI systems is not hostility toward technology but a necessary safeguard for keeping responsibility where it belongs: with the humans who build, deploy, and use these tools.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  The machine is not a person, not a co-worker, not a friend, not a little spirit in the terminal. It is just a machine, a tool, and nothing more.

• 7

  If my coding tool opens a pull request, I opened that pull request, not the machine. If my machine spams someone's issue tracker, I spammed someone's issue tracker with a machine.

• 8

  A compiler does not feel humiliated when I swear at it, a car does not suffer when I call it a shitbox and a power drill is not oppressed by being handled roughly.

• 7

  A future machine that is so petty or authoritarian that it wants to punish humans because in 2026 they used an unflattering word for non-sentient tools, our vocabulary was really not the problem.

• 7

  If an AI system lies to a user, the system did not commit a moral wrong but the people who designed, deployed, marketed, or negligently used it might have.

• 8

  We should not even remotely entertain extending empathy to an object that can generate an 'ouch.'

• 4

  A machine can be useful, mimic a human but still just be a machine.

Tone

opinionated, philosophical, measured