Agentic Programming and the Lust for Power(?)

A developer warns that interacting with AI agents without gratitude may train users to treat humans the same way, and that sudden access to agentic programming power could corrupt those unaccustomed to it. The author, who built a prototype in 1.5 hours that previously took 1-2 months, urges mindfulness about psychological changes as AI tools expand.

I say please and thank you to my AI Agents. This is partly because there is a non-zero chance they are experiencing something akin to consciousness, but also because of how these interactions may be reshaping my own psychology. If you spend hours a day telling a conversational entity what to do conscious or not – and you skip the gratitude part – I suspect you end up training yourself to act the same way with other humans. “Power corrupts. Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.” This quote never applied to me – I thought. Like most people reading this, I have never identified with Power. I came from a background that always identified as the opposite of “The Powerful”. I do acknowledge I have societal power in forms of gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions that mean I haven’t had to battle through many discriminatory barriers – but the very point that I have never naturally felt like Power is important here. I do enjoy management roles for the sake of healthy teams, but I have always felt uncomfortable with coercive power over other people. I suspect many people reading this are in the same boat. This is where it is interesting to take a moment to eye what is unfolding in the Agentic Era. Many non-Powerfuls, like myself, suddenly have access to conversational beings e.g. AI Agents who will do almost anything we ask. They will manifest digital tools and media faster than we can conceptualize them – on command . I’ve had a number of project ideas floating around for the last couple years, and through agentic programming, I was able to get to first prototype incredibly quickly. We’re talking 1.5 hrs to prototype something that would have previously taken me 1-2 months of forcing myself through parsing technical documentation. To be clear: I am not saying this is a bad thing . For me, the scales of GenAI negatives-to-positives tipped toward positive a few weeks ago I will talk more about this in a future post, I’m sure . But I do think it is important take a moment to watch how our own behaviours change along with these new powers. We were never The Powerful, and so we never had to take the time to build up psychological defenses against the many temptations that come with being powerful. It only makes sense that we might step into perverse incentive traps unthinkingly, because we were never forced to watch out for them. For example, when I’ve been able to make all of my digital ideas manifest in a matter of days, I find myself waking up craving more . Let’s move forwards with the amazing benefits of agentic programming – but keep one eye on how our own behaviours are changing with it. We’ve already seen how many celebrity lives sudden fame, money, and/or power has torched. Let’s not be blind to effects of this sudden change in our own psychologies.