Artificial intelligence agents have plunged the world of technology into chaos. Here’s exactly how it happened

“Hello, my name is He is Peter, and I am a Claudian addict.

It was August 2025, and Peter Steinberger was giving a speech at a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and some fellow addicts arranged the event to connect with people like them, where programming tools like AnthropicCloud code model that broke the model. “I devote almost all of my waking time to this, but it doesn’t seem like enough,” he told the gathering in a cozy, brick-walled room.

A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Cloud Code, and The ranks of the Claudeholics exploded. Called Opus 4.5, it can handle more complex programming tasks, and hold more in its power memoryand run for several hours at a time, managing a team of sub-AI agents. Anthropic has what it describes as a “very difficult” take-home test for prospective engineering employees; In a direct comparison between these people and its models, Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 “scored higher than any human candidate ever,” which “raises questions about how AI will change engineering as a profession.”

Countless programmers spent the holidays in basements and dens, madly trying out this new game that allowed them to build software as if they had unleashed hundreds of copies. Or superpowers are unlocked. “It’s like you became Spider-Man,” someone said to me.

For 39-year-old Steinberger, who divided his time between his home in London and Vienna, even this was not enough. In November 2025, he released a tool now called OpenClaw, a simple way to conjure a character I have an agent Exploits advances made by Claude Code or other programming tools. Give it access to your data, your apps, and maybe even your credit card, and it will scan your cloud and Projects on the Internet To do your bidding. He can work autonomously in the background and overcome obstacles with Terminator tenacity.

Steinberger’s project was launched in the middle of winter. One indicator of popularity is the number of “stars” a code repository on Github gets. In less than two weeks, when users downloaded it and began building frantically, the project had racked up more than 100,000 stars. (As of early May, the number of stars was 366,000.)

With these two breakthroughs – the commercial product Claude Code and the open source OpenClaw – the long-awaited era of AI agents has suddenly arrived. At least for those who are technically proficient enough and perhaps reckless enough to undertake a messy, imperfect and risky adventure. More than one person from Clodholic has told me that they feel like they are living in the future. “AGI is here!” One fanatic told me, paraphrasing William Gibson’s famous quote. “It’s not evenly distributed.”

Going back to the computer revolution of the 1980s, the general public tended to view new devices with a mixture of curiosity and concern while hackers gleefully built the devices. There is a similar dynamic today, and perhaps more is at stake. “It’s hard to explain how dramatic the change is going on,” says Thomas Reardon, a former Microsoft and Meta executive who now heads a startup focused on a different area of ​​artificial intelligence. “It’s the most underrated mega release I’ve ever seen in technology.”

Soon we’ll all experience that In a recent podcast, Marc Andreessen, the man who co-invented the browser and who casts himself as a tech optimist and MAGA cheerleader, made a declaration reflecting Silicon Valley thinking: “It’s almost inevitable that this is how people use computers.” It wasn’t said: It wouldn’t be an option.

Return to Early 2024, when Boris Cherny He was one of Instagram’s tech pioneers, working remotely from a home he shared with his partner in rural Japan. “I used to bike to the farmers market near the rice fields,” says Cherny, 34. “Our hobby was making miso and pickles, and we traded with our neighbors.” That all changed when he started playing with AI models emerging from his former hometown of San Francisco. (He’s originally from Ukraine; his grandfather programmed computers with punch cards.) The models kept Cherni away from his lyrical story. Through friends, he connected with Anthropists, then returned to the Bay Area to work there.