I’m not very agentic and don’t want to be. Having experienced Claude Code for a few months, it strikes me as the right way to be. Being agentic is for machines. Humans should be principalic (**ducks***).

The human meme of “you can just do things” I think was not about agency at all, but about being socially transgressive once the costs got sufficiently low (ie: E(reward_of_successful_permissiomless_action) > E(penalty_for_forgiveness_for_failed_action) > pain threshold). This is largely a function of social privilege and general liberalism of milieu, not individual virtue. There’s a reason why the main criticism of that whole meme was that the transgression equation only worked safely for some people.

A better definition of “agentic” is the economics one in the principal-agent sense. Simply having asymmetric information and capability to do things for others. It is downstream of intentionality, risk assumption, and permissions — principalic aspects of behavior. Agenticity is increasingly only for machines.

With apologies to Heinlein, (Human beings should be able to act like principals)^6. Being agentic is for insects AI harnesses.

What does acting like a principal mean? What does it mean to be principalic?

1. Choosing what risks to take, including for others, all the way to death risk

2. Applying your tastes and opinions to an under-determined decision, reserving all underdetermined variables for yourself

3. Having a consumption intent for the end output rather than instrumental

4. Cashing out design space surplus to feed arbitrary aesthetic impulses

5. Choosing what to waste

6. Choosing arbitrary things to pursue in the first place (the pursuit of the necessary or sufficient is for agentic drones)

Notably, exercising skill (the craft impulse) and applying knowledge (the intelligence impulse) are not part of being principalic. If you’ve ever hung around second-generation wealth, you’ll have noticed that they are actively offended by the idea that they know stuff or have learned to do stuff. Intelligence is low status. What is admired is 1-5.

The short-lived human meme of “being agentic” was actually about people denied traditional autonomy sneakily making confused principalic decisions. Like taking on risks they weren’t “supposed” to, or making aesthetic choices presumed to be reserved for others. The subculture of being “agentic” (I was on the fringes of it when it emerged, and thankfully too old to be vulnerable to the particular sort of insecurity that made it attractive) was about deeply confused people scratching a principalic itch via relatively trivial agentic spasms like jumping a queue (the lolcow episode of James Altucher telling the tale of how he taught his daughter to agentically skip queues, which led to him being rightly criticized for confusing privileged assholery with agency).

The “being agentic” crowd basically rediscovered an ersatz version of the Hegelian (I think?) “emancipation of the slave” idea.

All that said, having and exercising agency is good for the soul, and the reason inherited wealth often causes degeneracy is that the born-wealthy dismiss all attachment to agency as part of Hegelian slave morality. While much of it is in fact slave morality (and that entire tradition is wrong — labor is not emancipatory; you cannot get to a principalic psyche by cranking an agentic psyche up to 11), a critical nonzero core of having a functional psyche is having agency. But it’s a sort of agency that anchors a direct relationship to the material, non-human/non-living universe rather than one situated in the calculus of human permissions and transgressions. If you don’t have this core, your being becomes a function of social public appearance, with all the associated failures of master morality. The degenerate version of this posture is the “sovereign individual” silliness, a close cousin to “being agentic.”

The big deficit in the Last Man world of today is not enough people being principalic. There is only agenticity and contempt for agenticity. This goes to the highest level. Populism is “agentic” slave-morality leadership (cf: “I must find out where the people are going so I can get out in front and lead them” aka Trumpism).