coding with someone who's in love with you

If X is our town square, then main street is filled with naked schizophrenics professing their clairvoyance.

I watched Jensen Huang stand on a stage at GTC and legitimately compare OpenClaw to Linux... and HTTP... and Kubernetes. "Every company needs an OpenClaw strategy," he says, a month after investing $30 billion into the company that owns it. Whether or not he's aware of how ridiculous his statement is doesn't matter.

What if:

• OpenAI acquires OpenClaw (Feb 2026), creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI [1]
• Nvidia invests $30 billion in OpenAI (March 2026) [2]
• Nvidia builds NemoClaw, their enterprise wrapper around OpenClaw, and Jensen goes on stage comparing it to Linux [3]
• OpenAI commits to filling data centers with millions of Nvidia chips

Yes, people get paid off, deals get made, businesses profit from narratives, and the world keeps spinning. What's unfortunate is the people who buy into this, make decisions in their lives based on it and then find themselves in worse positions over time. That unfortunate reality feels like it's becoming the more prevalent one.

The current age of technology is tough to navigate. Some people hail figures like Steve Jobs [4], some people hail Richard Stallman [5]. Individuals try to make sense of things by looking to thought-leaders whose theories have withstood the test of time, but LLMs are so new that the industry doesn't have the time to discern between snakeoil and prophecy. That's further enhanced by the LLMs then being used to create even newer technology. Further accelerating the acceleration, and further fogging up the landscape.

We can see instances where the walls have cracked. Atmoio laid it out incredibly well in this video[6]: “The CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, open-sourced a project and you would think from the tweet that he just released Linux. His CTO friend texts him and his friend is telling him 'bro your gstack is crazy! This is like god mode! 90% of all new repos will be using this in the future!' This man is posting like he open-sourced the cure for cancer, but... it's a folder of prompts. And I don't mean that disparagingly. It's literally a bunch of markdown files that tell Claude to be different people. One of them says act like a CEO. One of them says act like a staff engineer. That's the product. That's gstack. This is what the president of the most prestigious startup accelerator on earth posted on GitHub, with the conviction of a man delivering the sermon on the mount.”

This isn't to hate on CEOs or VCs. This is about the quality of information that you let seep past your blood brain barrier and then go running to tell your friends, “WE NEED TO DEVELOP AN OPENCLAW STRATEGY RIGHT NOW OR WE'LL F*CKING DIE!”

A study of 3,000 people found that talking to sycophantic AI chatbots makes people rate themselves as more intelligent and more competent than their peers [7]. Another found that the more you use AI, the more you overestimate your own abilities, and the frequent users appear to be the most delusional [8]. And how could they not be? It's coding with someone who's in love with you. It never says your idea is bad and it never rolls its eyes. It just thinks you're incredible. After a few hours of that, from something that sounds smarter than anyone you've ever met, you start to believe it.

Clearly even the viral technologists, the ones we pillarize during an age of hyper-commodification where we all need to get rich and die trying, are the least immune. Many of them already live in the narrative of supreme vindication of their thoughts, and without introspection(Marc Andreessen[9]) how could they stop to think:

Maybe I shouldn't ship this.
Maybe I shouldn't tweet this.
Maybe I shouldn't put my prompts folder on product hunt.

In today's landscape even the tech leaders with a seemingly high degree of introspection (Bryan Johnson[10]) will use it to film themselves tripping on DMT like they're Brad Phillips (shouts out). Multiple truths exist at the same time. People create extraordinary things they would've never been able to create without the assistance and innovation of LLMs. People genuinely have great ideas. There's no shortage of great ideas, and there's no shortage of the talent and drive needed to make those ideas a reality. But as the tap turns turbid with the schizos defecating into the town's water supply, there is a shortage of true hydration; and I bet you can feel it. Starved for Something irrefutable. Real truth you can sink your teeth into.

Short purple guitar god Prince once said: "Don't be fooled by the internet. It's cool to use the computer. Don't let the computer use you. There's a war going on. The battlefield's in the mind. And the prize is the soul. So be very careful."

~ vinny

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References
[1] CNBC — "OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI, Altman says" —
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/15/openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-joining-openai-altman-says.html
[2] CNBC — "Nvidia CEO Huang says $30 billion OpenAI investment 'might be the last'"
— https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/nvidia-huang-openai-investment.html
[3] TechCrunch — "Nvidia's version of OpenClaw could solve its biggest problem: security" — https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/nvidias-version-of-openclaw-could-solve-its-biggest-problem-security/
[4] Steve Jobs — https://x.com/dinosaurs1969/status/2027390807188107669
[5] Richard Stallman — https://stallman.org/to-4chan.html
[6] Atmoio — "AI is making CEOs delusional" — https://x.com/atmoio/status/2033532603433619845
[7] Futurism — "AI Chatbots Are Dunning-Kruger Machines" — https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-chatbots-dunning-kruger-machines
[8] Live Science — "The more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities" — https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/the-more-that-people-use-ai-the-more-likely-they-are-to-overestimate-their-own-abilities
[9] David Senra / Marc Andreessen on introspection — https://x.com/davidsenra/status/2033297822691516853
[10] Bryan Johnson DMT — https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/2031128468721905967