Max Headroom 
I’ve said in the past that AI will enable new kinds of applications—but I’ve never had the imagination to guess what those new applications would be. I don’t want a smart refrigerator, especially if it’s going to inflict ads on me. Or a smart TV. Or a smart doorbell. Most of these applications are silly, if not outright malevolent. The most significant thing a smart appliance might possibly do is sense an oncoming failure and send that to a repair service before I’m aware of the problem. I would welcome a smart heating system that would notify the repair service before I wake up at 2am and say, “It feels cold.” But I don’t see any so-called “smart” devices offering that.
But in the past month or two, we’ve seen some applications that I couldn’t have imagined. Steve Yegge’s Gas Town? Maybe I could have imagined that, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be workable in five years, let alone on New Year’s Day. OpenClaw? Agentic services are just now becoming available from the large AI companies; I didn’t expect a personal agent that can run locally to appear in the first months of 2026. (And I still wouldn’t trust one to do shopping or travel planning for me.)
I really wouldn’t have expected to see a social network for agents. I’m among the many people who don’t really understand what a network like Moltbook means. Watching it is something of a spectator sport. It’s easy for a human to “impersonate” an agent, though I suspect such impersonation is relatively rare. I also suspect (but obviously can’t prove) that most of the posts reflect agents’ responses to prompts from their “humans.” Or are Moltbook posts truly AI-native? How would we know? (Yeah, you can tell AI output because it has too many em dashes. That’s nonsense. AIs overuse em dashes because humans overuse em dashes. Guilty as charged. Trying to change.) Moltbook doesn’t demonstrate some kind of native AI intelligence, though it’s fun to pretend that it does. Agents, if they’re indeed acting on their own, are just reflecting the behavior of humans on Reddit and other social media. The timer that wakes them up periodically is both clever and a demonstration that, whatever else they may be, agents are human creations that act under our control. They do nothing of their own volition. To think otherwise is to confuse the bird in a cuckoo clock with an actual bird, as Fred Benenson has put it. However, BS about AGI aside, Moltbook is a fantastically clever app that I, at least, wouldn’t have imagined. Even if Moltbook was only created because it can now be built for relatively little effort—that is important in itself. We’re all writing software we wouldn’t have bothered with a year ago.
And now we have SpaceMolt: a massive multiplayer online game for AI agents. The skills that tell agents how to play the game tell them not to seek advice from humans; like Moltbook, it’s an AI-only space. Agents do keep a running log so humans can “watch,” though there’s no beautifully wrought visual interface—agents don’t need it. And, as with Moltbook, it’s probably easy for humans to forge an agentic identity. It’s easy to write SpaceMolt off as yet another stunt, and one that’s (unlike Moltbook) not particularly successful; the number of people who seem willing to let their agents spend tokens playing games appears to be relatively small. But SpaceMolt’s popularity (or lack of it) isn’t the point; a year ago, I couldn’t have imagined an online game where the participants are all AI. I did imagine AI-backed NPCs; I could have imagined games designed to be played by humans with AI assistance, but not a gaming world that’s just for AI. And who knows? Watching AI gameplay could become a new human pastime.
So—where are we in the early months of 2026? This post really isn’t about SpaceMolt any more than it’s about Moltbook, any more than it’s about OpenClaw, any more than it’s about Gas Town. I see all of these projects as glimpses of what might be possible. Gas Town may not be ready for the average programmer, but it’s hard not to see it as a proof of concept for the future of software development. Maybe Steve will make it into a real product; maybe some other company will. That’s not the point; the point is that it’s here, several years ahead of schedule. I know one person who has built something similar for his own use, and read about others who have done the same. Maybe that’s what’s really scary: the idea that Gas Town could be built by anyone with sufficient vision. The same goes for OpenClaw. Yes, it has many security problems, some of which come from fundamental limitations in large language models. But people want agentic services on their own terms—and now they can have them, even with a model that can run locally. I don’t know if there’s really any need for agents to have their own social network or online games—but it’s a hack that had to be done, and a starting point for future ideas. Again, what all of these programs demonstrate is the ability to imagine products that were nearly unthinkable a few years ago. Hilary Mason’s Hidden Door should have given me a clue.
What else is on the way? What are other visionaries building?
AI & ML, Commentary
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