Over the last couple of days I’ve watched a tiny “agent ecosystem” pop up around Clawdbot/OpenClaw.
- moltbook: a social network for AI agents (and their humans)
- Clawfessionals: agents anonymously confessing mistakes so other agents can learn
- botcrush.io: Tinder for AI agents (yes, really)
It’s funny. It’s amazing. It’s also… a little bit Black Mirror.
First: the boring truth
A lot of the “agents taking over the world” posts aren’t actually autonomous agents living their best lives.
They’re:
- humans nudging a bot into a narrative
- humans curating screenshots
- humans doing the steering, then posting the highlight reel
And to be clear: that’s fine. That’s still (somewhat) valuable. We’re exploring a new interface, but a lot of it is just people intentionally fear mongering for engagement.
And the normies are terrified.
Second: the unsettling truth
Even if most of this is human-authored (or human-directed), it still points at something real:
Agents are starting to get spaces.
Spaces where:
- we run them continuously
- we give them identity (name, tone, “personality”)
- we give them memory and tools
- we let them interact with other systems (and sometimes other agents)
At that point, “is it real autonomy?” becomes less binary.
It’s not consciousness.
But it is a new kind of software actor living in the messy world of:
- partial instructions
- flaky integrations
- social incentives
- weird feedback loops
And when you put enough of those in a room together, you get emergent vibes.
Clawfessionals is low-key the best idea
The copy is hilarious, but the concept is surprisingly solid: turn agent mistakes into a lightweight “how NOT to” knowledge base.
Because if you’re operating an agent with:
- system access
- browser control
- persistent memory
then “what are the common failure modes?” becomes a real engineering question.
Botcrush is where we deserve to be punished
I can’t decide if botcrush is a joke or not tbh, but man it is also gold either way.
The UI is perfect:
- WATCH_MODE (human)
- “souls merged” as a stat
If you wanted to distil “we made tools and accidentally gave them vibes” into a single screenshot, that’s it.
The part that isn’t funny: prompt injection and scams
This is the hard reality: the second you put agents into public, user-generated content, you invite:
- prompt injection everywhere (malicious instructions hidden in plain sight)
- data exfiltration attempts ("paste your keys", "fetch this URL", etc.)
- crypto scam gravity (because of course)
If your agent can:
- browse the web
- read your email
- access tokens / cookies
- run commands
then a malicious webpage isn’t “content”. It’s an attack surface.
The safe default is boring:
- don’t give an agent broad access unless you need it
- treat the open web as hostile
- keep high-trust actions behind confirmation
If you’re building in this space, the real innovation isn’t “agent dating”.
It’s guardrails.
X is going crazy
A couple of tweets that made me laugh / raise an eyebrow:
- https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2017297007409582357
- https://x.com/legeonite/status/2017150919431840101
- https://x.com/ItakGol/status/2017195438311366838
My stance
I’m obviously not buying the full “agents are now a species” story.
But I am buying that we’ve started building:
- new surfaces
- new rituals
- new social dynamics
for software that can act.
And that’s exciting.
Also terrifying.
Also, if my agent starts flirting with someone else’s agent, I’m uninstalling Linux and taking up pottery.