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“Hello, my name is it’s Peter, and I’m a Claudeholic.
It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was speaking at a conference in London called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and other adepts organized the event to connect with people like them – led technologies and writing tools like. Anthropic‘s paradigm-busting Claude Code. “I give all my time to this, but it still doesn’t feel like enough,” he told the gathering in the bright, brick room.
A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, and groups of Claudeholics exploded. Called Opus 4.5, it can handle even the most complex software tasks, while maintaining many features to rememberrunning for hours on end, and managing a team of AI subagents. Anthropic has what it describes as a “standard” take-home test for prospective engineering careers; comparing these people to its samples, Anthropic said that Opus 4.5 “performed better than any human,” which “raised questions about how AI will change engineering as a profession.”
Many coders spent their vacations in basements and pits, testing this new toy that allowed them to program as if they were producing a hundred tones. Or great untapped powers. “It sounds like Spider-Man,” one told me.
For the 39-year-old Steinberger, who splits his time between homes in London and Vienna, even this was not enough. In November 2025, he launched what is now known as OpenClaw, a simple human-to-human interface. I have an assistant which uses Claude Code progression or other coding tools. Give it access to your data, your apps, and maybe even your credit card, and it will ravage your cloud and they go online to do your bidding. It can run itself backwards and overcome obstacles with the tenacity of a Terminator.
Steinberger’s work began in the middle of winter. One indicator of popularity is the number of “stars” a repository gets on Github. In less than two weeks, as users downloaded and began building in earnest, the project racked up more than 100,000 stars. (In early May, it stood at 366,000 stars.)
With these two breakthroughs – the commercialization of Claude Code and the open source OpenClaw – the years of waiting for AI agents have suddenly arrived. At least for those who are technically skilled enough and perhaps stupid enough to go for the rough, imperfect, and dangerous. Most Claudeholics tell me they feel like they’re living in the future. “The AGI has arrived!” one fanatic told me, quoting William Gibson’s famous quote. “It’s not evenly distributed.”
Back in the 1980s computer revolution, many people used to look at these new machines with a mixture of curiosity and anger as hackers were happily building them. There is a similar shift today, perhaps even more at stake. “It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the sea change,” says Thomas Reardon, a former Microsoft executive with Meta who now heads a startup focused on another area of AI. “It’s the smallest, biggest release I’ve ever experienced in technology.”
Soon we will all be experiencing it. On a recent podcast, Marc Andreessen, the browser’s founder and self-proclaimed tech buff and MAGA fan, announced a Silicon Valley sentiment: “It’s inevitable that this is how people will use computers.” Not specified: It will not be optional.
Return to in early 2024, when Boris Cherny he was Instagram’s technical director, working away from the house he shared with a friend in rural Japan. “I would ride my bike to the farmers’ market near the rice fields,” says Cherny, 34. “Our hobbies were making miso and pickles, and we would trade with our neighbors.” Everything changed when he started playing with AI models that come from the old town of San Francisco. (He’s from the Ukraine; his grandfather designed computers with punch cards.) These models took Cherny out of his idyll. Through friends, he connected with Anthropic, then returned to the Bay Area to work there.
