Comment by robotresearcher
6 hours ago
I have two thoughts simultaneously about the anthropomorphisation of these systems:
1. we should do it less, because it distorts our ability to think about them properly. Calling these processes 'thinking', 'holidays', etc invites the reader to bring along ideas and expectations that aren't justified by what's happening in the system.
2. it's good to keep doing it, because repeated use reduces the specialness or magic that people seem to reserve for our own behavior ("It's not really intelligent/thinking/reasoning/creative") without any justification for that position beyond feelings.
I'm leaning towards the second.
I definitely belong to the latter camp. After LLMs I view everything humans do very systematically and whenever said thing still feels fuzzy I just treat it as having a noise/smoothing term
I spent a long time with custom harness design and found the terminology to be a key part of the work, since the concepts are new. I dropped the term "agent" altogether in favour of "thread" for that very reason.