The agentic passive voice.

At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example of the passive voice. However, you might not know the full set of rules, because here are some sentences in the passive voice that you might not recognize:

• Claude made an error in my writeup.
• ChatGPT messed up the commitment.
• Gemini didn’t write tests.

You might think those are active sentences, but those are in fact examples of the agentic passive voice. The rule here is: whenever the actor in a sentence is a model, then it’s a passive sentence. I’m sorry if your grammar instructor never taught you this rule, but this is just the way it works now.

This is an important grammatical distinction to make, because I’m increasingly seeing folks say that Claude made a mistake, without recognizing that they’re writing unclear, nearly ungrammatical sentences that their grade-school teacher would reject. So please, aspire higher. Write in the active voice, avoiding all passive variants.