The AI Agents That Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos

The AI Agents That Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos">

In August 2025, Peter Steinberger stood before a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous, a gathering of techies swept up by coding tools like Anthropic's paradigm-busting Claude Code. "Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a Claudeholic," he said, addressing the room. Steinberger and fellow addicts had arranged the event to network with like-minded individuals, all united by their passion for these revolutionary tools.

A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, dubbed Opus 4.5. This upgraded model could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain vast amounts of information in its memory, run for hours on end, and manage a team of AI subagents. The impact was immediate: the ranks of Claudeholics exploded.

According to Anthropic, Opus 4.5 "scored higher than any human candidate ever" on the company's notoriously difficult take-home exam for prospective engineering hires. This raises fundamental questions about the future of engineering as a profession. As the holidays approached, countless coders spent their days and nights experimenting with Opus 4.5, building software as if they'd unleashed a hundred clones or unlocked superpowers.

"It feels like becoming Spider-Man," one enthusiast told me. For Steinberger, even this wasn't enough. In November 2025, he launched OpenClaw, a tool that allows users to conjure a personal AI agent, leveraging the advances of Claude Code or other coding tools.

Give it access to your data, apps, and credit card, and it will scour your cloud and venture onto the web to do your bidding. Steinberger's project took off in midwinter, racking up over 100,000 "stars" on Github in less than two weeks. As of early May, the project had garnered a staggering 366,000 stars.

With these two breakthroughs – Claude Code and OpenClaw – the long-awaited age of AI agents has suddenly arrived. At least for those technically proficient and perhaps foolhardy enough to embark on this messy, imperfect, and risky adventure. "AGI is here!" one fanatic told me, paraphrasing William Gibson's famous quote.

"It's just not evenly distributed." The implications are vast, and the excitement is palpable. Thomas Reardon, a former executive at Microsoft and Meta, now heads a startup focused on a different area of AI. "It's hard to explain how much of a sea change this is," he says.

"It's the most underrated, massive release I've experienced in technology." Marc Andreessen, the co-inventor of the browser, shares this enthusiasm. "It's almost inevitable that this is the way people are going to use computers," he declared on a recent podcast. For Boris Cherny, a 34-year-old former Instagram tech lead, the journey began in early 2024.