GitHub - Xophmeister/wean: Seize the means of production from our agentic overlords ✊

It occurred to me that agentic AI tools can exacerbate the feeling of estrangement from ones own work, per Marx's Theory of Alienation, and are in direct contradiction to Naur's treatise of Programming as Theory Building. (See my original post on this, on Mastodon.) Agentic AI tools can be useful, but they shouldn't become a crux. So I wrote this simple script to seize the means of production!

Rather than disabling these tools altogether, this script wraps them with an exponential start-up timeout, resetting each calendar day, with a helpful message to remind you that you should be in control of your own work.

Usage

This is distributed as a Nix function, that can be used in your NixOS configuration, for example, like so:

{ pkgs, ... }:

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (callPackage ./path/to/wean.nix {
        package = pkgs.claude-code;
        binary = "claude";
    })
  ];
}

or, with Home-manager:

home-manager.users.YOU.home.packages = with pkgs; [
  (callPackage ./path/to/wean.nix {
      package = pkgs.github-copilot-cli;
      binary = "copilot";
  })
];

I don't use NixOS

I gotchu, bro. The script is simple enough to modify for other platforms, but I've included a wrapper template script that you can use to wrap any binary you want:

1. Copy wean.sh and wean-wrap-template.sh to a location in your $PATH, which is of higher precedence than the original binary you want to wrap (e.g., ~/.local/bin) and rename the template script to whatever you like (e.g., claude).

2. Modify the WEAN and WRAP variables in this copy to point to the path of wean.sh and the original binary you want to wrap (e.g., /usr/bin/claude):

   @@ -2,8 +2,8 @@
   
    # wean.sh wrapper template for non-Nix systems
   
   -readonly WEAN="/path/to/wean.sh"
   -readonly WRAP="/path/to/wrapped/binary"
   +readonly WEAN="${HOME}/.local/bin/wean.sh"
   +readonly WRAP="/usr/bin/claude"
   
    [[ -x "${WEAN}" ]] || { echo "Error: wean.sh not found at ${WEAN}" >&2; exit 1; }
    [[ -x "${WRAP}" ]] || { echo "Error: wrapped binary not found at ${WRAP}" >&2; exit 1; }

3. Rinse and repeat for any other binaries you want to wrap.

Isn't this trivial to bypass?

Yep. However, it's probably easier to just run it than trying to circumvent it. The idea is to provide enough friction to make you think twice before reaching for agentic AI tools and, hopefully, building a habit of re-engaging with your own work.