[the_mitsuhiko]

> It does, and the use of "clanker" I've seen was generally meant as a slur. It's not a neutral word in any context I've seen it in.

I can tell you that within the agentic coding community plenty of people are using it as a way to refer to coding agents by their users. That's a pretty neutral use.

> True, but I also think that "clanker" is fairly far towards one end of the spectrum, not really near the middle.

Until I saw the comments on the most recent hackernews discussion on it I would never have made that guess.

[stavros]

That's odd, even the Wikipedia entry (from Star Wars) begins with "is a derogatory term":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

That's where it originates, and (I assume) it was chosen precisely because it's derogatory.

[the_mitsuhiko]

But also if you go to the talk page you can see discussions that lead to the change of the description of that page from "slur" to "derogatory term". That discussion was, from what I can tell, about the fact that slurs are for human targets and not machines. A lot of things are derogatory, particularly when applied to tools, and we would not bat an eye in the discussion. Something makes (at least some) people feel different about clanker.