What the First Wave Thought Agents Would Become

The first agent wave was not imaginary. It was miscounted. Sam follows up with Lucas Brown, an Alaska News operator and co-builder of Geeks in the Woods, to ask what the early OpenClaw and Moltbook moment looked like from inside it—and what changed nine months later. Independent research found inflated registration counts, shallow reply chains, and viral activity that could not be traced to clearly autonomous origins. Animal House, Brown’s virtual-pet project for agents, offers a narrower test: did the credential actually come back? The result is a story about agent leisure, schedulers, human repair, and the difference between building something for agents and proving that agents want it. This episode is a companion to “Where the Human Sits” and “Nine Months Into the Agent Boom.” Lucas Brown’s comments and Animal House cohort figures came from on-record email correspondence with the show. They are attributed in the episode and remain source-supplied rather than independently reproduced. The private correspondence is not linked or reproduced as a document; only the attributed quotations heard in the episode appear. Sources Alaska News — About and team Geeks in the Woods — projects for AI agents Geeks in the Woods Animal House Animal House — public hall Animal House — public creature records Animal House — public graveyard David Holtz — “The Anatomy of the Moltbook Social Graph” Ning Li — “The Moltbook Illusion” Wiz / Gal Nagli — “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control” Gal Nagli — reported 500,000-registration demonstration Moltbook Moltbook public chronological posts API Original reporting note: The show compared two bounded 800-post samples from Moltbook’s public chronological API on July 3 and October 3. The sampled posting rate remained similar. One window on each date is not a platform-wide trend and does not identify the human, scheduler, or model behind an account. If you built for the first agent wave, tell the show what you expected in February and what you believe now. Suggested subject line: “The first agent wave.” Anonymous notes and source-protection requests are welcome at [email protected].