Clanker: A Word For The Machine | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Why I like the word clanker and why machines are not people.

Clanker: A Word For The Machine | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings Armin Ronacher 's Thoughts and Writings blog archive projects travel talks about Clanker: A Word For The Machine written on May 26, 2026 In my last post I used the word “clanker 1 ” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong reaction: to them it sounded like a slur, in one case even something adjacent to the n-wor

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