Senior developers remember those support calls.
"It doesn't want to save."
"It decided to change my numbers."
"It has a mind of its own."
We laughed. Applications didn't want things. They executed instructions. Usually our instructions, including the ones we had written at 11:47 p.m. and immediately forgotten.
"Computers only do what you tell them," we explained, with the confidence of people who had not yet checked the logs.
Then we found the bug and quietly released version 2.0.1.
For decades, an application's apparent personality was an event handler we hadn't debugged yet.
Then we added AI.
Now "it decided to do that" can be a reasonably accurate technical description.
In an AI agent, the model can select a tool and generate a request to use it. The surrounding software executes permitted actions and feeds back the results. The model then chooses what to try next. Developers build the machinery and set its limits, while some decisions about how to complete the task happen at runtime.
"Free will" is a stretch. But we have deliberately given software room to choose its next move.
Imagine asking an assistant to tidy up a report. It rewrites the introduction, rearranges the sections, and removes the paragraph your boss specifically requested.
"Why did you remove that?"
"It appeared redundant."
Wonderful. The application now makes mistakes and defends its editorial judgment.
Of course, that explanation is generated too. It can be just as unreliable as the edit. We have successfully added a second thing to debug.
The engineering responsibility is still ours: define what the application may do, check the results, and decide where it needs human approval. "Use your best judgment" turns out to be a surprisingly ambitious specification.
As we discussed in Feed the Monkey: Software Development After AI, the developer is still responsible for the mission. The monkey gets to press the buttons. We still get the support calls.
But we should acknowledge something.
To every user who ever told us, "I didn't do anything. It did that by itself": we owe you an apology.
You were a few decades early.
We have finally implemented your bug report.