Claude Code and OpenClaw usher in the age of AI agents, reshaping how developers build software

Anthropic released Opus 4.5 in November 2025, an upgraded version of Claude Code that could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain more in memory, run for many hours on end, and manage a team of AI subagents. Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 'scored higher than any human candidate ever' on its prospective engineering hire exam.

Peter Steinberger launched OpenClaw in November 2025, an open-source tool that lets users create a personal AI agent (an autonomous software system that performs tasks without constant human direction) by giving it access to data, apps, and web access. The project accumulated more than 100,000 stars on Github in less than two weeks; as of early May, it stood at 366,000 stars.

Developers reported extraordinary productivity gains. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said he was 'coding at a rate of about 4 million lines of code a year, which is about 90X [his] best output as an engineer in 2013,' and later updated his estimate to 408× his prior output. Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, spent significantly more time working with Claude Code and less time on executive and family activities.