The model did not do it
Sentences with the model as the subject sound active but behave like the passive voice. Somewhere behind each one, a person is hiding.
There’s a red pen every English teacher has, just for passive voice. So you can submit “mistakes were made.” They circle it. On the margin they write down two words. Who?
I’m thinking about this red pen, because there’s a new kind of sentence appearing in incident reviews and status reports, and it makes that red pen obsolete. “model missed the tests.” “agent removed fixture.” “model misdated in the writeup.” These are active sentences, grammatically. The model is the subject, doing all this stuff. But semantically they’re just like “mistakes were made.” Something happened. Nobody did it. Recently someone was calling this the agentic passive voice. I can’t top that.
The editor’s solution still works here. Find the person who did something. And make them the subject again. Someone requested that writeup. Possibly read it. Possibly not. And sent it.
I can hear an argument coming, and I would make it too. Haven’t we been fighting for years against this idea of blame? We have blameless postmortems because if you get in trouble for making mistakes you learn how to hide mistakes. So nothing improves. I’m with you on all this.
But “blameless” has never meant “no one was here”. “an engineer ran the migration without doing a dry run, because the runbook didn’t call for a dry run” is a perfectly blameless sentence. There’s a person. There’s an action. And here’s the finger gently pointing at the system. “The agent ran the migration without doing a dry run.” There’s a shrug where the person should be. And without the person there are no interesting questions to ask. Why did it seem like a good plan? What did they check? What would have made the difference clear?
It’s complicated when you have volume. You can have an engineer supervising agents write way more than they could reasonably type, and it’s often a reasonable trade-off that nobody reads it all closely. Now most of the choices are what to accept, and if “the model did it” is a perfectly good explanation, then there’s no longer a choice to accept. It’s no longer anybody’s decision to make, and the whole thing starts gradually (very gradually) shifting to accept a little more, vet a little less.
People don’t say “the compiler was shipped with a bug in production”. I want to have that one in my back pocket. The compiler’s a tool, the agent’s a tool, somebody merged it. If there’s a bad date in my status update for leadership, I sent a bad date. Whatsoever the whence of the draft.
Seems funny to care about grammar at all, what with all the other stuff. But I suspect the sentences in a team drift toward changing their team’s beliefs about blame, like a riverbed influencing a river. Or perhaps I want my red pen back.