Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid ❧ Open Path by Chad Whitacre

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Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid

By Chad Whitacre ❧ Published on February 19, 2026

tl;dr Tasting the future of invasive AI agents roused me to pursue a different direction.

Disclosure / advertisement: I worked for<br>Sentry when I wrote this.

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

(l. to r.) Peter, Armin, Mario, Claude(s).

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

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

CodeCrafters is #1 by stars. Linux is #14. OpenClaw is #17 ... today.

(For the record: Armin is a<br>friend. He and I first<br>discussed agentic coding at Sentry HQ back in October, 2022, when I prototyped<br>Robb Oat and he was already talking about<br>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<br>documentary. Since releasing that<br>on January 20, I’ve been catching up on the latest developments in agentic<br>coding and beyond. What does it mean for Open Source? I see talk of slop<br>PRs and outright<br>spam and of<br>course the death of Open Source<br>(again).<br>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<br>into Claude Code with Opus 4.5 on a side project. I spent three 12+ hour days<br>with it. I was intoxicated. My family was weirded out.<br>Observing how<br>expensive it is, I<br>decided to time-box my usage. I gave myself two more days to ship an MVP of<br>this side project, and then I would shift to writing up a blog post about my<br>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.<br>It was like I had another “person” in my head, sharing my inner monologue—but<br>the “person” was a computer system owned by a budding megacorp. I spent Monday<br>evening and Tuesday with it again, and this time got so bogged down in bugs and<br>felt so gross that I gave up on shipping the MVP in the time allotted.

Nothing left but the sprites, courtesy of Nano Banana.

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

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

Aaron’s Table

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

Also pictured: Issue 1 of The Analog Times.

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

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

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

Remember libraries?

I see two trajectories in technology, either of which alone is...