AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened
Key takeaways
- It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was addressing a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous.
- A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, and the ranks of Claudeholics exploded.
- 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.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
ANIMATION: Saratta Chuengsatiansup Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story“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.”