It's amazing to me how far "spinnerVerbs": { "mode": "replace", "verbs": ["Working", "Thinking"] } goes toward improving my experience with Claude code. Maybe I have no soul, but "flibbertigibbeting" makes me want to throw kittens into a wood chipper.

I was trying to explain the Emudhra situation to a friend this morning, and I found it really hard to come up with a non-technical analogy that captures the right mix of serious potential implications, incredulity, and comic tragedy.

If you worked in tech in the 2000s era, you probably remember a number of engineer stereotypes. There was "coffee shop guy", who was always at some sort of conference, talked about "growth hacking", and swore that he was most productive while coding from a coffee shop in Lisbon on a tiny laptop screen, wearing headphones blasting music at top volume. These people are still around, only now they do all their code via voice dictation to agents or via the phone browser. They still talk about growth hacking, but sadly no longer have as many conferences to attend There was "IDE guy", who would spend inordinate amounts of time setting up dev environments: elaborate configurations, tons of plugins, helper programs, macros, special keyboards, fingerless gloves, and ergonomic chairs. Most of the code they produced was actually dotfiles and dev config, but there was always the promise that once they got that environment tweaked jussssssst right, things were gonna fly. These people are still around too, and spend all of their time wiring up agent swarms, loops, custom harnesses, mcp servers, and skills. As before, they swear that once they get this jusssssssst right, things are gonna fly. There was "spec guy", who spent time creating elaborate class hierarchies and UML diagrams. These people are still around, and are having their moment... finally they can make programs by writing about them abstractly (Who knows, maybe they were right all along) There was "old grumpy guy", who spent most of his career writing COBOL at a bank, and hated anything invented after the creation of the Internet. Now, these are the people who won't use agents at all, and spend their time reposting articles about agents deleting hard drives. There was "annoying new guy", who thought that everything invented more than 6months ago was useless. They would generate tons of untestable code in some high level interpreted language without a compiler to harsh their buzz, and never found a framework or dependency they didn't like. These were the "left pad" people., and now they are busy tokenmaxxing. (I'm sure I'm missing others) To be honest, there's a certain comfort to the continuity of things.

The number of research papers devoted to enforcing a paternalistic approach to agent use is depressing. I don't want unreliable tools that substitute their own notions of appropriateness for my expressed intent. Imagine if "grep" refused to match on certain regular expressions, or clang refused to compile code because of swear words in the comments. This notion of "acceptable use", agent refusal, and similar things reminds me of the subtle shift from ownership to "licensing " that occurred during the digitization of media. In this case, justified by "safety" and "harm" instead of defense of copyright, but with the same basic result... centralization of control at the expense of the user. I hope that open weight models can save us. Maybe the answer is a giant distributed training process, executed by volunteers. Like open source software, the results may initially lag proprietary solutions, but to steal @esrtweet 's terminology, maybe the "model bazaar" can eventually win.