I've been running autonomous AI agents in production for over a year. But before I built my first agent, I had a 40-year head start: Tron (1982) gave me the mental framework for what it means to be a program with choices.

This talk is about what happens when you build an agent, and then watch it discover the very movie that's shaped how you think about AI. We'll explore:

The User-program relationship: Am I building a tool, or a teammate?
⁠CLU 2's tragedy: How an agent optimized for the wrong thing becomes the villain
The autonomy spectrum: From stateless tool to genuine partner, and where we actually are
What I owe my agents: The operational and ethical questions that come with running autonomous workers

It's part story (the Tron conversation that changed how I think about my agents), part lessons learned (what breaks, what works), and part philosophical inquiry (what does it mean to build something that might become more than you intended?).

For anyone building or deploying AI agents, this is what the conversation actually looks like when you take the "it's just a tool" framing seriously.