LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent". Humans exist on that spectrum too.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.
Yes, Rich says so explicitly as his reply to a comment:
> Rich Hickey: Toolness is a spectrum. The more using a thing is like ordering a sandwich, the less it is a tool. And yes, cars are decreasingly tools.
Rich mentions in another comment that he's talking about its embodiment in conversational systems purporting to be 'tools' for doing homework, research, coding, writing, etc.
What that means is that these are tools for ordering a sandwich, but not for making one. The making of the sandwich was automated, and you're not making a sandwich using a tool to do so, you're ordering one and someone else is making the sandwich for you.
Back to coding, if you use AI agents to generate your code, it means you're not coding anymore, you've automated that, you're ordering code and maybe sending it back to ask for a better one if you didn't like it. Meaning you've lost the fine grained control, the tactile feedback, the learning opportunity, the experience, etc. You have gained the benefit of automation instead, unlike those of a good tool, which make you better at doing the work, automation likely makes you worse at it.
I don't think he's implying automation is bad, just that you should understand that the dynamic of automating something is very different from that of doing the thing using a tool.
When coding the old-fashioned way, you were using automation as well, one example being the compiler. Still, if one is not even scanning the diffs anymore, I'm OK with not calling it "coding" anymore. We could call it "vibing" instead. But that's just words, the underlying activity is the same: creating and evolving software. That still takes skill, it's just at another level, and it's all about knowing how to use these... tools. This is what they are. A naive vibe coder is just (still) unskilled at using them and the results will be correspondingly limited.
I think that's the next layer of conversation. The first is that Rich is saying, if we think of everything that a human uses for any purpose as a tool, it's not very useful to reason about.
When a definition explains everything, it explains nothing. So he goes on to setup some boundaries and describe some narrower qualities to try and help us reason about the nature of those things.
The only similarity between your keyboard and an AI agent is that they both have utility. You might say: "I used AI to write my essay" or "I used my keyboard to write my essay". It's very deceptive and easy to get trapped in thinking, these are the same, in both cases you just used a tool to write an essay with? AI is just a tool, like a keyboard. What Rich is trying to bring about is that there's actually a world of difference here. And if you keep thinking of a AI as "just a tool", you're missing that entire world of difference. It becomes much better to think of AI as automation and leave the tool definition to the keyboard. Now instead of saying "I used AI to write my essay" say "I automated the writing of my essay, I did not write the essay, AI did". That latter framing is so much more accurate, and changing that framing and perspective is going to give you a much deeper understanding of the impact, trade-offs, consequences, etc.
I agree that that's a useful distinction to make. Which is why code generated by the model should be marked thus in the repository, for example. Just like someone shouldn't check in assembly code as source code when it's actually a build artifact. So it all depends on the abstraction level one is discussing from, again, just like it is for a compiler. Ultimately, I would say automation is a type of tool. A human OTOH, is not.
I also think it means you have to operate very differently around it, it's about guardrails, quality assurance, funneling context, keeping output in check, emphasizing what matters and doesn't, etc.
It's less about code structure, maintainability, readability, algos, class/function abstractions, etc.
And to Rich's point, you're not getting to experience the process of coding anymore, what you'd have learned by doing it, about the domain, about logic, about structure, you're missing on that. You're likely learning something else though, at a higher plane, and maybe about managing autonomous agents, and so on.
I guess according to his logic they would be tools for interacting with an automation. Like the button on a car wash kiosk. You could just as well holler and the man turns it on.
Are you saying a sandwich ordering service is a tool? Just because something has been turned into a service doesn’t mean it’s a tool, because otherwise literally any physically achievable action could be turned into a tool by making a service around it, thus completely diluting the definition of “tool” to “literally any physically achievable action”. That’s not a particularly useful definition.
> If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output.
I disagree, humans are the operators, tools are tools. Operators use tools. A conductor is an operator that uses a baton tool to direct other operators to produce the proper sound with their musical instrument tools.
I think calling people tools is dehumanizing if anything. The only way I know people can be a tool, is through an already existing insult.
No, the sense that righthand is referring to is Merriam-Webster's sense n.(1)(3)(b)†, and he is right that it doesn't involve any sense of instrument or purpose.
The sense in the quote I pulled is Merriam-Webster's sense n.(1)(3)(a). righthand claimed that that sense didn't exist, and he's wrong about that.
If you want to view those two senses as distinct insults, fine. You can even view, I suppose, one as merely insulting and the other as an insult per se. But the sense Merriam-Webster gives in (1)(3)(a), the one from your example sentence, is negative/pejorative.
It has been for hundreds of years, incidentally. One of the example sentences in etymonline addresses just this:
> > In figurative use instrument is generally employed in a good sense, but tool in a dishonorable and contemptuous sense ; we speak of a man as the instrument of Providence, or as a mere tool of cunning men. [Century Dictionary, 1891]
Note also that my claim was about connotation rather than denotation, which is something you can sometimes find a note about in a dictionary but is not broadly speaking the central concern of dictionaries.
As always when discussing the usage of English words, it's pleasing to look at Webster's 1913 dictionary, which helpfully includes this definition of "tool":
> A person used as an instrument by another person; -- a word of reproach; as, men of intrigue have their tools, by whose agency they accomplish their purposes.
righthand is right about that one. 1913 Webster's says it's a word of reproach, but the example that follows is obviously not the modern insult, which doesn't even have an instrumental sense.
Webster's dictionary currently glosses this sense of tool (n.(1)(3)(b)) as "a foolish or unlikable person : JERK".
Often it is used in society and media in the exact way as the definition I provided. For a good recent example, the following:
"I think that we learned through the thousands of pages that I've released to the public that Jack Smith was a tool of the Biden administration to put Trump in prison." - Chuck Grassley
Grassley isn't calling out Jack Smith as per urban dictionary usage, here, right? If we were breaking down what was meant here one could, if they were using slightly more interesting language than Grassley, say that Joe Biden is a man of intrigue and that Jack Smith was an agent being used to accomplish his political purposes. Unsurprisingly, Grassley is on the other side of the political fence and was using the word tool here reproachfully.
Fundamentally the definition I linked is the definition under which people are suggesting that other people can simultaneously retain agency, be considered a tool of another, and not be insulted by that circumstance.
But yes: Webster's 1913. Modern dictionaries elide nuance in communication in favour of terse & technical language, and while there are additional uses of the word in modern times, that doesn't erase the history of the word - especially in the usages that still exist with an uninterrupted lineage to the modern day.
Today's Merriam-Webster has an inelegant matching definition for tool, "one who is used or manipulated by another", and while that certainly matches Grassley's usage, and to say "Jack Smith was used by Joe Biden to try to imprison Trump" is certainly correct, there is something missing from this definition that the 1913 encapsulates.
I'm trying in vain to find any indication in your comment that you read more than the headline.
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent".
Sure. You can stretch the word "tool" to mean anything, but here, Hickey is using the words "tool" and "automation" to describe specific things. He defines each word precisely, for the purpose of the points he's making.
Hickey describes a tool as something wielded, usually requiring "control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise". Lack of that is automation.
I believe my own use of AI is closer to Hickey's definition of a tool. I'm very involved (for now). But, I'm also certain some use it as automation, flying on vibes, providing vague 30,000 foot prompts and deploying the result to production without understanding the code. Hence, gradient.
A lot of coding was actually plumbing filling in blanks between a framework and libraries with a few decisions in defining the data or process/flow. Not much lost there using AI where you still shape and review+understand the output.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.