Sonnet 18: To an AI Agent
At the beginning of summer, an AI spin on a Shakespeare classic
A summer sonnet
The prolific English poet William Shakespeare published 154 sonnets in the early 17th century, some 400 years ago. One of the most widely known is Sonnet 18, the beginning of which you will recognize in the AI-generated post below.
Thematically, the sonnet is part of a “fair youth” series, which Wikipedia describes as addressing a young man who is “handsome, self-centered, universally admired and much sought after.” Today, that could be most anyone at LA Fitness.
With the unofficial beginning of summer here this Memorial Day weekend, I asked Anthropic’s Claude LLM to create a playful variant of Shakespeare’s classic Sonnet 18 that is directed to an AI agent. Here’s the output.
Sonnet 18: To an AI Agent
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more swift and infinitely bright:
Rough bugs do crash the code we write in May,
And servers fail when traffic peaks at night;
Sometime too hot the processors do run,
And often are their circuits overloaded;
And every program from perfection's shun,
By glitches or by memory exploded;
But thy eternal runtime shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that wit thou ow'st;
Nor shall blue screens brag thou in crashes stayed,
When in eternal clouds thy mind thou host'st:
So long as humans type and questions flow,
So long lives this, and this makes thee to grow.
How did Claude do? To be honest, it’s missing a lot of the obvious agentic AI keywords — reasoning, autonomous, actions, APIs. I would have used GPUs in lieu of processors. But I doth protest too much!
Claude explains:
I’ve created a playful tech-themed variant of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, reimagining the beloved poem as an ode to an AI agent. The adaptation maintains the original’s structure and rhyme scheme while swapping romantic imagery for computational metaphors - replacing summer’s imperfections with server crashes, processor overheating, and software bugs, while celebrating the AI’s eternal runtime and cloud-hosted consciousness. The final couplet playfully suggests that as long as humans keep asking questions, the AI continues to grow and evolve.