# The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Source: https://dinand.com/reading-notes/the-sorcerers-apprentice/
Author: Dinand Tinholt

> Goethe’s ballad of 1797, and the word for stopping that the apprentice never learned.

![Engraving of a young apprentice in a cloak, arm raised, as an enchanted broom pours water around him in a cluttered workshop.](https://dinand.com/assets/reading-notes/the-sorcerers-apprentice.jpg)

*Der Zauberlehrling, drawn by Ferdinand Barth for an 1882 edition of Goethe’s works.Image: “Der Zauberlehrling”, Ferdinand Barth, from Goethe’s Werke, 1882. Public domain, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tovenaarsleerling_S_Barth.png). Resized for this page.*

Goethe wrote Der Zauberlehrling in 1797, a ballad of fourteen stanzas. Most people know it through the music Paul Dukas wrote a century later, and through Mickey Mouse carrying buckets in Fantasia.

The old master leaves the house. His apprentice is tired of fetching water, so he tries a spell he overheard and sets a broom to carry the buckets. It works. Soon the basin overflows and the floor floods, and the apprentice realizes he never learned the word that makes the broom stop. In a panic he splits it with an axe. Now two brooms are carrying water. The master comes home and ends it with one command.

## Write the stop before the start

Every agent with permission to act needs its stopping word written before it runs: a hard limit on what it can spend and a way for a person to halt it halfway through a task.

In [Breslau](https://dinand.com/side-projects/breslau/), a thought experiment on insuring AI agents, the meter holds any payment above the agent’s authority limit until a person releases it.

The axe deserves a second look. When the apprentice attacks the broom in a hurry, the problem doubles. Killing a misbehaving automation without understanding it often does the same, as retries fire and half-finished transactions sit in limbo waiting for someone to sort them out by hand.

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[Reading Notes · Reading note

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### The Coal Question

William Stanley Jevons, 1865, on why a more efficient engine burns more coal.

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### The Nature of the Firm

Ronald Coase asked in 1937 why firms exist at all. AI agents reopen his question.

](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/the-nature-of-the-firm/)

[All Reading Notes ](https://dinand.com/reading-notes/)[Back home ](https://dinand.com/)

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