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.

Soon after Cherny joined the company, an engineer named Adam Wolff showed him Anthropic’s work on automated coding. “It was very primitive,” Wolff says. But Cherny used the coding tool to do a pull request, a common activity in software engineering that attempts to merge new code into an existing code base. “It wasn’t a good PR,” says Wolff. But the attempt meant that good pull requests were possible—and that higher-level coding tasks might soon be automated.

Cherny set out to make that a reality. OpenAI and Microsoft had been trumpeting their coding products since 2021, when OpenAI launched its first iteration of Codex. While those tools made programmers more productive, the products were limited and required careful supervision. Cherny envisioned an upgrade where the model understood the architecture of programming and had the wherewithal to solve problems.

What Cherny and his team built became Claude Code. Anthropic released a preview in February 2025 and launched it in May 2025, with updates over the next months. For many people, however, the turning point came in November, when the company released Opus 4.5: It ran longer, was better at problem-solving, and could run whole teams of subagents, each working on a different part of a program.

At first, the Claude Code team saw Opus 4.5 as an incremental improvement. “We’d been daily users for over a year, so it was less night and day for us,” says Cat Wu, Claude Code’s head of product. But Anthropic’s tool had reached the coding equivalent of escape velocity. While far from perfect—only fools deployed its work without vetting for errors—it now rivaled or outperformed what a human might come up with. “Some opinions we had about how to structure code have melted away because it’s easier not to fight Claude,” Wolff says. “If Claude wants to do something a certain way, you just let Claude do it.”

Much like how OpenAI underestimated ChatGPT’s impact, Anthropic didn’t anticipate how the November release would galvanize the techie community. Garry Tan, CEO of the startup incubator Y Combinator, was a convert. “I went all the way to the edge of how you could get the most out of Claude Code,” he says. “I was coding at a rate of about 4 million lines of code a year, which is about 90X my best output as an engineer in 2013—basically a team of 90 Garrys.” (A few weeks after we spoke, he updated his estimate; he now thinks he’s up to 408 Garrys.)

Ryan Petersen, CEO of the shipping and freight logistics company Flexport, found himself spending less time on C-suite activities—or his family—and more time playing with Claude Code. “There’s something about watching the agent just doing the work that is mind-blowing,” he says. As I spoke to Petersen, I got the impression that the global supply-chain crisis in the Strait of Hormuz was less a corporate emergency and more an unwelcome distraction from his sessions with Claude. “It’s sad, because I just want to spend all day building tech and applying AI and partnering with the teams,” he says.

In a twist that Mary Shelley might appreciate, Cherny himself turned into a Claudeholic. “Most nights, I have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of agents running eight and 12 hours at a time,” he told me. “I have some agents that run for many days at a time, and they do things like rewrite the code base or improve the efficiency of code.”

Or as he said to me at another point: “It’s like I have a jet pack. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

In early 2025, Peter Steinberger was lost. Four years earlier, he had sold his shares in his company for a tidy sum and promptly lost his bearings. As he put it in a blog post last year, “I did a lot of stuff, I partied hard, I did plenty of therapy, I did ayahuasca, I moved to another country, I wandered around carrying this emptiness in me and hunting hedonic pleasures.” Then, in April of 2025, he discovered the b