There's a lot of existing historic literature about this stuff that not a lot of people seem to be aware of. I've been trying to put those ideas to practical use, and document where the ideas came from.

I-Beam is cursor-mirror's agent, and it's constitutionally programmed to be the anti-Clippy:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/cursor-...

Its design and constitution is based on decades of research, publications, and discussion in the HCI and AI community by people like Pattie Maes, Ben Shneiderman, Ted Selker, Byron Reeves, Cliff Nass, B. J. Fogg, Allen Cypher, Henry Lieberman, Brad Myers, Jaron Lanier, Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, Douglas Engelbart, Will Wright, Scott McCloud, and others:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

>I-Beam is the anti-Clippy, and the reason it can say so is that Clippy is the most cited failure in interface history and almost nobody citing it knows what the research said. Popular contempt for a paperclip is not a design principle. The record is. Ten articles below, each one a finding somebody published, argued or measured, and the operational rule it produces. Anything I-Beam does that cannot be traced to an article here is a preference, not a constraint, and should be labelled as one.

>The 1997 debate ended in agreement. That is the first thing to know, because the field kept the framing and dropped the resolution -- roughly five hundred papers cite "Shneiderman versus Maes" as the canonical opposition of HCI, and the transcript is two researchers narrowing their differences in public and enjoying it. I-Beam does not take a side in a debate whose participants stopped taking sides. It is built to satisfy both sets of constraints at once, which is possible, and was possible in 1997.

The full reading on the debate, which separates the two stagings and documents the convergence:

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

An interface to agency, not agents instead of an interface:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/INTERF...

>The 1997 argument between Ben Shneiderman and Pattie Maes at IUI was never settled, it was shipped in one direction. Maes's interface agents won the product war: the assistant, the recommender, the chat window that stands between you and the thing you are working on. Shneiderman's objection was not that software should be dumb. It was that automation must arrive as comprehensible, predictable, and controllable machinery, with the object of interest continuously visible and every action rapid, incremental, and reversible.

>That objection describes a filesystem in a git repository, and nobody involved planned it that way.

>"An interface to agency" is Don's formulation of Shneiderman's position, not a phrase of Shneiderman's. His own vocabulary is direct manipulation, universal usability, supertools, and human-centered AI. The formulation is a good one because it names what the alternative gets wrong: agency is the thing you want, and an agent is only one way to package it.

Here are some sources, and the articles I linked to above explain their history. This debate about agents and these papers are pretty well known in the HCI field and academia, but they don't tend to teach them at the AI and Web Dev boot camps that are producing most of the people who keep repeating the same mistakes.

Clifford Nass was the Stanford professor who performed the brilliant research that Microsoft took and totally fucked up and misinterpreted with Microsoft Bob and Clippy, giving agents a bad name, and making Clippy the most infamous and obnoxious agent in the history of the known universe:

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

His student B. J. Fogg published "Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter," which found that praise unconnected to anything the subject did works as well as sincere praise, and worked on subjects who knew it was noncontingent. Fogg and Nass, IJHCS 46(5), 1997, 551-561:

https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1996.0104

The replications, the performance cost, and the dose-response curve:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/no-ai-s...

Shneiderman and Maes, "Direct Manipulation vs. Interface Agents," interactions 4(6), Nov/Dec 1997, 42-61:

https://doi.org/10.1145/267505.267514

Selker, "New paradigms for using computers," CACM 39(8), August 1996, 60-69. COACH, the football coach metaphor, and the five-times result:

https://doi.org/10.1145/232014.232030

Selker, "COACH: A Teaching Agent that Learns," CACM 37(7), July 1994, 92-99:

https://doi.org/10.1145/176789.176799

Reeves and Nass, The Media Equation, 1996:

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

Nass, "Computers as Social Actors," at Ted Selker's NPUC workshop at IBM Almaden, 1996. IBM transcribed the whole talk and the Wayback Machine still has it, including the part where Phil Agre tells Nass his presentation is "ethically troubling all the way down" and asks him what he thinks about embedding obedience research in user interfaces. Nass answers that discovery has no ethical component, use does, and that's for the individual. Then Selker cuts in: "Except, except when you are in your consulting role." Nass and Reeves had consulted for Microsoft on the social interface, and Bob shipped the year before:

https://web.archive.org/web/19980210054622/http://www.almade...

Alan Cooper on the tragic misunderstanding, in his own voice, which I quoted before in the 2022 Hacker News discussion on The Twisted Life of Clippy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32820734

https://archive.org/details/g4tv.com-video4080

>Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic") said: "Clippy was based on a really tragic misunderstanding of a truly profound bit of scientific research. At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two brilliant scientists, had done some pioneering work proving conclusively that human beings react to computers with the same set of emotional reactions that they use to react to other human beings. [...] The work of Nass and Reeves proved that when people talk to computers, when they hit the keyboard and move the mouse, the part of their brain that's being activated is the part that has that emotional reaction to people dealing with people. Here's where the great mistake was made. That's really good research up to that point. But then the great mistake was made, which was: well if people react to computers as though they're people, we have to put the faces of people on computers. Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they're humans, the one thing you don't have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they're already using that part of the brain. Clippy was a program based on the research that Nass and Reeves did, and it was a tragic misinterpretation of their work."

Social science research influences computer product design:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180313075429/https://web.stanf...

Lanier, "Early Computing's Long, Strange Trip," American Scientist, July-August 2005, with the Engelbart and Minsky exchange first-hand. American Scientist broke the link, so this is the Wayback copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150626081918/http://www.americ...

>The book also captures an important early conflict between two cultures of computing that seemed compatible on the surface but actually had opposing aims. On the one side was the human-centered design work of Engelbart, based initially at the Stanford Research Institute, and on the other was artificial intelligence culture, centered on the Stanford AI lab. Engelbart once told me a story that illustrates the conflict succinctly. He met Marvin Minsky—one of the founders of the field of AI—and Minsky told him how the AI lab would create intelligent machines. Engelbart replied, "You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?" This conflict between machine- and human-centered design continues to this day.

Cypher, "EAGER: Programming Repetitive Tasks by Example," CHI '91:

https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108850

Cypher (ed.), Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration, MIT Press 1993, full text:

http://acypher.com/wwid/

Papert, Mindstorms, 1980:

https://archive.org/details/mindstormschildr00pape

Wright, Dollhouse preview lecture, April 1996, transcript:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sims/s...

A warning about 'model welfare'