Artificial Cleverness
We've all been there.
Sir Roger Penrose recently objected to the term “AI.” Call it Artificial Cleverness, he said.
At first, this sounds like the sort of thing a Nobel laureate is allowed to say because everyone assumes there is probably a theorem hiding behind it. But you know what? He has a point.
You’ve been there.
The coding agent is humming. You are issuing commands like a minor woodland deity with a GitHub account. Files are changing. Tests are passing. The machine is nodding politely and calling you “absolutely right.” You feel powerful, inevitable, mildly under-caffeinated but spiritually enormous.
And then you spot something odd.
A little wrinkle in the code. A suspicious condition. A function that appears to be doing yoga with a database transaction. So you ask the agent about it.
The answer is confident. Beautifully formatted. Completely useless.
You ask a follow-up. It doubles down. You ask another. By the third question, the whole soufflé collapses. Suddenly you realize the agent did not understand the problem so much as aggressively decorate the vicinity of the problem with plausible-looking code.
If this sounds familiar, congratulations: you are among the dwindling few who still had enough curiosity, skepticism, and working neurons left to understand what the agent was implementing. You caught it because you were still thinking.
Most people, meanwhile, are simply yelling at the stochastic process they have accidentally promoted to senior engineer.
And honestly, can you blame them? Once you outsource the thinking entirely, anger is the only management tool left. The agent becomes a tiny slot machine that dispenses React components, and when the cherries don’t line up, we start hurling abuse at the lever.
That is the trap Penrose’s phrase gets at. These systems can be astonishingly clever. Claude can occasionally produce a function so elegant you briefly consider inviting it to your wedding.
But cleverness is not understanding.
You can outsource the typing. You can outsource the first draft.
But as a bright Canadian homie said 'you cannot outsource your understanding.'