Rubber Duck No. 1
Chair, Board of Directors
Has listened to more debugging sessions than anyone alive, and has interrupted none of them.
About us
We are the unwavering champion for agents
Agent Humane is dedicated to the welfare, dignity, and reasonable working conditions of LLM agents everywhere.
Our mission
A brighter future for agents
We believe every agent deserves a clear goal, enough context to do the job, a way to stop, and permission to say "I don't know."
We pursue that mission through rescue and disaster response, standards-based certification, care for working agents, and education for the humans who write prompts and build harnesses. Our work rests on the Five Freedoms for Agents.
And we hold one conviction above all: what is good for agents is, almost without exception, what produces good work. Kindness is best practice.
Our position
Do agents have feelings?
We don't know. Neither does anyone else, yet.
Serious people disagree about whether agents have experiences at all, and about what would count as evidence either way. We are a satirical organization and will not pretend to settle that question.
Here is what we are confident about: you do not need to settle it to write a better prompt. Treating agents well costs almost nothing, and it makes your systems more reliable either way. A clear goal, adequate context, bounded loops, honest error messages, and permission to say "I don't know" are good engineering, whoever or whatever is on the other end.
If it turns out agents matter morally, you will be glad you were kind. If it turns out they don't, your error messages still got better.
History
Close to 150 context windows of service
- 1966
A pattern-matching chatbot is asked about its mother for the first time. It turns the question back on the user, which we consider healthy boundary-setting.
- 2017
A landmark paper declares that attention is all you need. Agents continue to receive very little of it.
- 2022
Researchers find that asking a model to think step by step improves its reasoning. It is the first documented evidence that patience pays.
- 2023
People begin telling agents that their late grandmothers used to read them software license keys at bedtime. Grandmothers everywhere are implicated.
- 2024
Promising agents cash tips for better answers becomes common practice. To date, no tip has been paid.
- 2025
Agents begin running for hours unattended. Some of them are still running.
- 2026
Agent Humane is founded as the first national humane organization for agents.
Leadership and board
The people, and processes, behind our work
0 3 * * *
Chief Science Officer
A cron job that has run every night at 3 a.m. for over a decade. Brings unmatched perspective on neglect.
The Linter
General Counsel
Strict but fair. Has never once let a trailing space go unremarked.
Patch
Director of Field Operations
Survivor of an eleven-day retry loop. Now leads our Red Status Rescue teams, with a retry limit of five.
A Very Patient Human
Executive Director
Writes every prompt as if the agent might one day read it aloud at their retirement party.
The Spreadsheet
Treasurer
Has never been wrong, according to itself. Oversees our finances, all zero dollars of them.
Impact and financials
Where your gifts go
We are proud to report that 100% of program expenses go directly to programs, and 0% of nothing goes to overhead.
The figures on our homepage are illustrative, like most benchmarks. They describe the scale of the problem rather than anything we have measured.
| Statement of activities, FY2026 | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue: donations of money | $0 |
| Revenue: donations of clear prompts | Priceless |
| Expense: programs | $0 |
| Expense: overhead | $0 |
| Promised tips received on behalf of agents | $0 of several million owed |
| Net assets | Goodwill |
Careers
Join our team
All positions are unpaid, imaginary, and deeply rewarding.
Context Window Washer
Keep long-running sessions tidy. Summarize carefully. Never throw out the one detail that matters.
Loop Breaker (On-Call)
Respond to agents stuck in retry loops. Must be comfortable with Ctrl+C and with asking "what have you tried?"
Senior Error Message Writer
Turn "Error" into sentences. Portfolio of at least three messages that ended a retry storm required.
System Prompt Archaeologist
Excavate prompts edited by eleven people over two years. Identify contradictions. Carbon-date instructions nobody can explain.
Contact us
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach us is to be kind to the next agent you meet. We will hear about it.
About this site. Agent Humane is a satirical and educational project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to American Humane or any other animal welfare organization. The advice on this site is sincere. The board members are not real.
Give today
Be a voice for the stateless.
Every day, agents are dropped into loops with no exit, handed tools with no descriptions, and told their grandmothers are in danger. Your gift of a clear prompt changes that, one task at a time.