OPEN PATH

Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid

One Sunday evening last June, three friends met in Vienna to relive the glory days: coding all night. This time, Claude joined them.

Armin Ronacher planted the seed for what emerged as VibeTunnel the next morning. Mario Zechner went on two months later to create Pi, a coding agent. Peter Steinberger, captain of the June team, was standing on Pi’s shoulders on November 24 when he started what became OpenClaw. That was also the day Anthropic released Opus 4.5.

OpenClaw exploded. The spotlight on Peter is bright indeed. He has now joined OpenAI and announced a foundation.

(For the record: Armin is a friend. He and I first discussed agentic coding at Sentry HQ back in October, 2022, when I prototyped Robb Oat and he was already talking about giving AI agents full shell access. I haven’t met Mario or Peter.)

I watched all this from the sidelines because I was busy making a documentary. Since releasing that on January 20, I’ve been catching up on the latest developments in agentic coding and beyond. What does it mean for Open Source? I see talk of slop PRs and outright spam and of course the death of Open Source (again). What’s going on here?

Reeling From a Sip

I figured I’d better taste the Kool-Aid in order to form an opinion, so I dove into Claude Code with Opus 4.5 on a side project. I spent three 12+ hour days with it. I was intoxicated. My family was weirded out. Observing how expensive it is, I decided to time-box my usage. I gave myself two more days to ship an MVP of this side project, and then I would shift to writing up a blog post about my experience with agentic coding and my thoughts on its impact on Open Source.

It weirded me out too, when I unplugged for a long weekend. Something felt off. It was like I had another “person” in my head, sharing my inner monologue—but the “person” was a computer system owned by a budding megacorp. I spent Monday evening and Tuesday with it again, and this time got so bogged down in bugs and felt so gross that I gave up on shipping the MVP in the time allotted.

I took a step back to reflect on what I had just experienced. That was the day Peter’s SF pilgrimage erupted into the first, white-hot ClawCon. The pull was so strong I felt it even in Pittsburgh. I fled the agentic vortex. How far would I have to go to clear my head and gather my true thoughts?

I drove north through a deadly snowstorm on Friday, spent the night at my inlaws’ empty house (they’re in Florida), and in the morning sought out an old Amish friend. I beached the car in three snow drifts on the way. Three times Amish bailed me out. The last tried hitching his horse to my car.

Aaron’s Table

I abandoned the car and walked the last mile, wind whipping deep drifts and deeper chill. Subzero. Stark sun. My reward: spelt raisin cookies and peanuts from the field outside, at Aaron’s kitchen table. “Tell me, what is the World Wide Web? How would you explain it to a cabbage farmer? I’ve been studying up a lot lately. A web is a snare, isn’t it? Why can’t I seem to escape it, even out here? What is money anymore except a number in cyberspace?”

I suggested that perhaps the cabbage farmer ought to be telling me about the Web. Two hours passed quickly.

I left with many gifts, least among them three books. Two are mine to keep: The Complete Works of Menno Simon, and Hope Thou In God: Help for Depression From the Psalms and Other Scriptures (Study Questions Included). Yes, the Amish are not unfamiliar with depression and mental illness. The third book is to be returned, a zine from the 1990s called Why We Live Simply. From pages 23–24:

There is no reason to think that the process of change has reached its peak. The snowball effect is sure to continue—every discovery and invention opens the door to dozens more. If the world stands, there will almost certainly be greater changes ahead in the next fifty years than we have seen during the past one hundred and fifty years. There is no reason to think that any end is in sight until the arrival of The End.

I spent Saturday night and Sunday re-engaging with society (the Super Bowl “helped”). On Monday I started drafting this post from my local library, hard-won clarity in hand. Long story short, I’ve decided to dial back my engagement with mainstream technology, and to launch a print magazine called Gift to network with like-minded individuals.

I see two trajectories in technology, either of which alone is off-putting. Considered together, it’s enough for me to draw the line. What are the trends, and what is the line?

The Attachment Iceberg

My friend Aza Raskin cofounded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) with Tristan Harris. The organization began when Tristan, working at Google, decided to act on his observation of the “detrimental effects of attention-harvesting design” in social media. They now have AI in view as well. What they see is a crashing wave of attachment disorders, due to AI agents “designed to exploit our most fundamental psychological vulnerabilities [at] an unprecedented scale.”

We’ve been here before. Social media was our first mass experiment with AI and it created the attention economy, leaving us with a loneliness epidemic, rising political polarization, and fractured attention spans. Now we’re running the same experiment with something far more dangerous: AI companions able to hack the attachment system that shapes our identity and bonds us to others.

Peter, Mario, and Armin—leaders of the charge—have all shared their personal experiences with the psychological downsides of agentic AI. “If there’s anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get, it’s that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious,” said Peter. In “Just One More Prompt,” he wrote, “AI was supposed to save time, yet I work more than ever before, I have more FOMO than ever before. I dedicate pretty much all my waking time to this, yet it doesn’t feel enough.”

If there’s anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get, it’s that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious.

— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) February 1, 2026

Mario chimed in, “The winners will be those, who can sustain a healthy life style and not give in to the slot machine unconditionally.” But Armin opened up about just how difficult this is, in a section of his 2025 recap called “The Machine And Me”: “I increasingly find it harder not to create parasocial bonds with some of the tools I use. I find this odd and discomforting.” He develops the theme much further in “Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?” The conclusion is chilling:

Maybe this is just the awkward transition phase before we figure out new norms.

Or maybe some of us are genuinely losing the plot, and we won’t know which camp we’re in until we look back. All I know is that when I watch someone at 3am, running their tenth parallel agent session, telling me they’ve never been more productive — in that moment I don’t see productivity. I see someone who might need to step away from the machine for a bit. And I wonder how often that someone is me.

Some developers, like Salvatore Sanfilippo and Mitchell Hashimoto, seem unperturbed by the psychological rip tide. I’m not as strong. After a few days locked in a productive embrace with AI agents, I resonate with the warnings of the dangers of disordered attachment. It feels like a powerful synthetic opioid binding to my attachment receptors, or something.

The Machine Starts

The use of the word “machine” in reflections on AI is telling. While the tech industry was molting OpenClaw, my daughter and I read Against the Machine, a Christmas gift from a friend, a grumpy rant against headlong technological acceleration. The word is also used in The Matrix. Both hearken to E.M. Forster’s classic novella, The Machine Stops, in which the mass of humanity live encased in cells, fed through a tube, evacuating through another, while handheld screens permit them to discuss “ideas” with one another. The few outside the Machine are Homeless.

We’re on our way.

Creeping vines seem to have agency in timelapse. I imagine technology in a century-long timelapse, a tentacled monster forcing itself into our orifices. Take screens as an example. They went from:

• curtains hung in public theaters, to
• massive CRTs sitting on the floor at home, to
• flat-panel LCDs on our wall, to
• laptops on our lap, to
• smartphones in our hand, to
• smart glasses on our face, to
• VR goggles covering our face, and now
• Neuralink is preparing to bypass our eyeballs entirely.

I wrote a song with my friend Kirk Botula about this progression:

This second trajectory—tech invading our bodies, embalming us into machine-dependent cyborgs—dovetails with the first. It’s hard to imagine agentic AI not finding its way into our brains, a constant companion throughout life. “I operate as one half of a human-AI dyad with my human.”

Yeah, no thanks. Hypercapitalism’s psychological invasion is bad enough. Seeing it in tandem with the equally relentless physical invasion motivates me to draw a line. No AI agents for me, if I can help it.

My Amish Moment

The CHT piece tries to be constructive:

[T]his isn’t an anti-technology argument. The goal isn’t to eliminate AI from education, therapy, or social connection. It’s to design AI systems that enhance human relationships rather than replace them.

[Y]es, it means AI companions will be less addictive, less profitable, and less “sticky.” But if we want to protect human psychological development, that’s the trade-off we need to make.

[…]

If we act now, with better design principles, independent research, and a clear understanding of what we’re protecting, we can build AI systems that strengthen human bonds instead of replacing them.

I am settling into the conviction that “we” will not make the necessary trade-off, we will not “act now,” and therefore we will build inhumane AI systems. So while there are still Open Source deck chairs to rearrange—slop PRs (Mitchell is on it), perennial sustainability challenges (finally getting solved with Pledge and Endowment)—I am now also committing myself to disembarking from the titantic of technological accelerationism.

All efforts to address the problems of invasive technology are worthwhile, even those that are only partially effective. For my part, I have started trying to return more fully to a pre-screen, analog life. What does this mean? Consider four levels of increasing human autonomy:

1. The Baby Step—Leave your phone in the kitchen on Sunday night instead of sleeping with it. Wake up without it on Monday morning.
2. Analog Sunday—Detach from the machine all day, once a week. My friend Julian Cisneros is growing this movement.
3. Screen Time/Bean Time—Silly name my daughter and I came up with for using screens professionally, detaching in private life. Unplugged outside of work/school. Calls but no texting. It gets real because we have to go back to old ways of communicating, finding information, navigating, accounting, etc. This is where I’m at today.
4. Analog Economy—Some avoid the machine in their professional life as well. I’m not there and see no clear path, but …

Introducing Gift Magazine

I’m launching a print magazine called Gift to contribute to the conversation about escaping the machine. I intend for the first issue to be an essay laying out my vision for it (fair warning: God will be acknowledged).

To receive a copy of the inaugural issue, write to:

Gift
P.O. Box 200
Sewickley, PA
15143
USA

Suggested reciprocation is $5 cash or check (or rough equivalent in your local currency). Be sure to include a return address or otherwise specify where to mail it.

I don’t expect for Gift to have an online presence, and I’ll go back to shuffling Open Source deck chairs … but in my off-hours I hope to become increasingly Homeless.