• 202 words • 1 min
Will Larson:
At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example of the passive voice. However, you might not know the full set of rules, because here are some sentences in the passive voice that you might not recognize:
- Claude made an error in my writeup.
- ChatGPT messed up the commitment.
- Gemini didn’t write tests.
You might think those are active sentences, but those are in fact examples of the agentic passive voice. The rule here is: whenever the actor in a sentence is a model, then it’s a passive sentence. I’m sorry if your grammar instructor never taught you this rule, but this is just the way it works now.
Dear human,
Use LLMs as much as you want / need to, but own the responsibilities for its actions and outcomes. No excuses.
“ChatGPT dropped the database” is not acceptable.
Who is controlling ChatGPT? Is it deviant, does it have self-agency?
In 2026 that’s highly unlikely. If you control the agent, then you are solely responsible for its actions.
“I dropped the database via an accidental prompt in a coding agent”.