AI's "centaur phase" consumes Silicon Valley
· Axios
A manic new phase of the AI boom is sweeping through Silicon Valley, powered by autonomous "agents" capable of liquefying weeks of manual labor into minutes.
Why it matters: For now, the frenzy is largely confined to software engineering. But inside that bubble, the shift feels seismic — deepening the gulf between AI builders and bystanders.
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- "I've followed tech for 25 years and I've never felt a larger gap between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity," tweeted James Wang, director of product marketing at Cerebras.
The big picture: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently described the current state of software engineering as the "centaur phase" — a reference to the half-human, half-horse creature of Greek mythology.
- Just as a chess player aided by a computer could once beat any standalone machine, an engineer paired with an AI agent may now be the most powerful unit in tech.
- Amodei argues that this hybrid phase may be "very brief" — perhaps only a few years before AI systems can independently outpace even the best human-led teams.
Zoom in: Major AI labs have spent the past year pitching "agentic workflows" as the industry's next frontier.
- That vision snapped into focus last month with the explosive rise of OpenClaw, an open-source tool that lets developers spin up AI agents to plan, code and ship software end to end.
- Unlike chatbots that live in a browser or an app, OpenClaw gives agents "hands" on a user's local machine — letting them autonomously manage files, run terminal commands and message teammates.
The popularity of the project was supercharged by Moltbook, a viral, AI-only social network where OpenClaw agents "hang out" and post autonomously.
- OpenClaw became the fastest-growing repository in GitHub history, and its founder, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, was poached by OpenAI to lead its "personal agents" division.
- "[Steinberger] is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. "We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings."
Zoom out: An agentic arms race is fully underway, with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI racing to roll out increasingly powerful systems. Inside Silicon Valley, the reaction has been breathless.
- Angel investor Jason Calacanis says his firm "offloaded about 20% of our tasks to OpenClaw in 20 days" — and is pivoting its investment strategy to focus exclusively on OpenClaw-related startups.
- The demand has been so intense that it's triggered a global shortage of high-memory Mac Minis, as developers scramble to build "always-on" agent servers.
What they're saying: "This is the age of CEOs crushing 10 people's work with Claude Code in nights and weekends and I am so here for it," tweeted Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.
- "The fire in your belly that got you here never really goes out and now we are all cooking 20 hours a day."
Reality check: There are major structural hurdles standing in the way of widespread agent adoption, including cybersecurity risks.
- Meta and other tech firms have restricted or banned OpenClaw over fears that giving AI agents access to corporate systems could expose companies to malware, data leaks and manipulation.
- The barrier to entry is also high: deploying and safely managing AI agents still requires technical expertise, computing power and a tolerance for experimentation that many workplaces lack.
Between the lines: Nearly 50% of AI agent activity today is concentrated in software engineering, according to a new Anthropic report. Other fields are only just beginning to experiment.
- "Agents are here. They are useful. They're not necessarily useful for everything yet, but we see them deployed in the wild across a wide range of domains," Anthropic researcher Miles McCain told Axios.
The bottom line: Software was always likely to be the first domino. The people building AI are software engineers themselves — making the industry both the proving ground and the hype machine for agent adoption.