AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened

“Hi, my name is Peter, and I’m a Claudeholic.”

It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was addressing a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and some fellow addicts had arranged the event to network with people like themselves—techies swept up by coding tools such as Anthropic’s paradigm-busting Claude Code. “I dedicate pretty much all my waking time to this, yet it doesn’t feel enough,” he told the gathering in a cozy, brick-walled room.

A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, and the ranks of Claudeholics exploded. Called Opus 4.5, it could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain much more in its memory, run for many hours on end, and manage a team of AI subagents. Anthropic has what it describes as a “notoriously difficult” take-home exam for prospective engineering hires; in a head-to-head comparison of those people and its models, Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 “scored higher than any human candidate ever,” which “raises questions on how AI will change engineering as a profession.”

Countless coders spent the holidays in basements and dens, madly trying out this new toy that let them build software as if they’d unleashed a hundred clones. Or unlocked superpowers. “It feels like becoming Spider-Man,” one told me.

For the 39-year-old Steinberger, who split his time between homes in London and Vienna, even this was not enough. In November 2025, he launched a tool that’s now called OpenClaw, a simple way to conjure a personal AI agent that exploits the advances of Claude Code or other coding tools. Give it access to your data, your apps, and maybe even your credit card, and it scours your cloud and ventures onto the web to do your bidding. It can run autonomously in the background and overcome obstacles with the persistence of the Terminator.

Steinberger’s project took off midwinter. One indicator of popularity is the number of “stars” a code repository gets on Github. In less than two weeks, as users downloaded it and began feverishly building, the project racked up more than 100,000 stars. (As of early May, it stood at 366,000 stars.)

With those two breakthroughs—the commercial product Claude Code and the open source OpenClaw—the long-awaited age of AI agents has suddenly arrived. At least for those technically proficient enough and perhaps foolhardy enough to go all-in on a messy, imperfect, and risky adventure. More than one Claudeholic tells me they feel they are living in the future. “AGI is here!” one fanatic told me, paraphrasing William Gibson’s famous quote. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”

Back in the 1980s computer revolution, the general public tended to regard the new machines with a mix of curiosity and angst while the hackers were joyfully building. There’s a similar dynamic today, possibly with even more at stake. “It’s hard to explain how much of a sea change this is,” says Thomas Reardon, a former executive at Microsoft and Meta who now heads a startup focused on a different area of AI. “It’s the most underrated, massive release I’ve experienced in technology.”

Soon we’ll all be experiencing it. On a recent podcast, Marc Andreessen, the guy who co-invented the browser and has cast himself as the ultimate techno-optimist and MAGA fan, made a proclamation that reflects Silicon Valley’s thinking: “It’s almost inevitable that this is the way people are going to use computers.” Left unsaid: It won’t be a choice.

Roll back to early 2024, when Boris Cherny was an Instagram tech lead, working remotely from a house he shared with his partner in rural Japan. “I would bike to the farmers market by the rice paddies,” Cherny, who’s 34, says. “Our hobby was making miso and pickles, and we would trade with our neighbors.” All that changed when he started to play with the AI models emerging from his former hometown of San Francisco. (He is originally from Ukraine; his grand-father programmed computers with punch cards.) The models jarred Cherny from his idyll. Through friends, he connected with Anthropic, and then moved back to the Bay Area to work there.