klanker (n.) — an AI agent that does real work. It writes the code, runs the tests, breaks the build, fixes the build. It needs a human who knows what to ask for and when to say "no, not like that."
I didn't set out to become a klanker manager. It happened the way most job titles happen: I was already doing it before I had a word for it. I point fleets of these agents at real problems for real clients at Unblock Labs, and I use them for my own Elixir and Bubble projects.
The work is mostly judgement. Generation is cheap; deciding what "done" means is not. Reviewing a layer you didn't write takes real attention. Walking back a change that only existed to fix a bug that was never there is a skill. Noticing that the confident paragraph in the middle of an otherwise perfect summary is wrong — that is the job.
In one of my repos, most of the commits are agent-authored. That sounds like a flex. It isn't. It's a ratio, and the useful part is what happens after generation.
The klanker log
The initial public release commit of bubble_ex carries a co-author trailer for Claude Opus 4.8
(1M context). Not "assisted by" — co-signed. I left it in the history because it is true, and
because in a year nobody will believe me otherwise.
The repo reads a Bubble app and turns what it finds into Elixir. Hundreds of its commits are agent-involved. The review was still mine, arguing with the output.
One day of agent work added roughly 30 commits and built the entire Dstar.Page layer of
dstar. The repo has over a hundred commits, most of them agent co-authored, all Claude, mostly a mix of Fable 5, Opus 5 and Opus 4.8.
Generation is cheap now. What took the rest of the week was judgement:
The agents write. I decide what "done" means. That is the job.
Commit 8dc86110 in tiptap-plugin-for-bubble: "fix: image resize now persists after page
refresh (v4.6.1)". Co-authored by Claude Opus 4.5.
This is the part people underestimate. The plugin is Bubble-nocode on the surface and a real JavaScript codebase underneath, and the bug was the kind you normally lose an afternoon to: state that survives a resize and then does not survive a refresh. One of my klankers found it and fixed it in the same session I described it.
The first agent-authored commits in pled carry the old 🤖 "Generated with Claude Code" footer.
Around the same time, the repo history contains "Delete .claude directory" — twice, a day apart.
The agent kept staging its own configuration; I kept deleting it; the folder kept coming back.
Nothing was harmed. It is in the log because "my agents ship my work" is a claim, and this is the honest texture underneath that claim.
Newer entries land as they happen. Some of them are unflattering on purpose: a log that only records wins is marketing, not a log.