Standing on the shoulders of bias

At work, I have been doing lots of experiments with subagents. I make them supervise each other. I try to get a tree worth of them doing isolated mini-tasks. So far, the intentional limitations of the product keep me from greatness.

During that terrible experimental flop, I had the anti-benefit of seeing more into the minds of the Codex developers than I would prefer.

How?

They very helpfully named their subagents. I thought they did this to make it easier for the user to track who is doing what, but now that I understand how fragile the reasoning about self is for models, I think it’s probably useful for them too.

The first agent names I got were various ancients:

• Galileo
• Zeno
• Plato

I was annoyed. This is not the first time that automated processes have needed random names, and a set of over-anointed, dead, white guys is not an ideal set.

When Heroku, god rest its soul, ran into this problem they created an algorithm that concatenated optimistic words. Those artifacts of optimism-jibberish were the temporary subdomains for fledgling sites. That was the origin story for Sarah Allen’s consulting company Blazing Cloud, which just held on to its first Heroku subdomain name making it official. When Heroku had to distinguish in some way their internal versioning, they opted for colors. An application might be upgrading from VIOLET to INDIGO. It made tracking that process much easier than a string of numbers, and it wasn’t loaded with arrogance.

The industry has bad naming examples too. I was at a JS conference where the test runner Karma debuted with its original name: Testacular. They announced it with a swagger and a smirk knowing that the small handful of gender diversity at the conference was huddled together in very small numbers. This was a dude to dude joke, and they were sure the audience would appreciate it.

Back to subagent names: The Plato name was really the one that made me choke. I have feelings about Plato. Anyone that can walk around in this world and think of everything he touches is substandard has problems. And anyone that makes that into a philosophical stance is out to make everyone as miserable as he is. I think it’s worked. I believe Plato’s essentialism has created xenophobia, fascism, and all manor of bad shit. So every time Plato rolled by in the very small set of proper macho-nerd names, I got more pissed. It’s become my job to see the Codex developers position themselves among the gians.

The internet told me that you can change the names of Codex subagents, so that’s what I tried to do. And because Codex is a gaggle of ill-trained LLM models wrapped in chewing gum and duct tape, it half worked. When the agent announced that it was launching a new subagent, it used the dead white guys. Then when I looked at the swiftly scrolling text where the agent was mumbling to itself, it would mention the subagent by its alternate name. Double fuck. I want to know about agents named Veridian, not Bohr.

If you are rolling your eyes about my annoyance, because all those men were really smart and did revolutionize the world (like out heroes at Codex), DYOR bigot. I don’t have time.

The name “Codex” is a lot more honest. It was the precursor to a book. The thing that didn’t yet make information universally available, but was the hint of that promise. That is where we are, at the start of a possibility. For me, the wax that that proto-book is written in melts before it can be used. Your mileage may vary.

For your entertainment, I present a list of agent names from a single day of work. There were four people whose images were not available on wikipedia. One was related to a license for the image; the others just had no iamge. Two were women, and I worry that one was the first name of one of these Codex dude-bros.

Also, because the US giant President Trump has recently blessed us with his visage as Jesus, I present to you for posterity the 8-bit version transformed by AI generated scripts: