In November 2025, an Austrian developer sat down on a Friday night and thought: "What if I could text an AI and it would actually do things?" One hour later, he had a working prototype. He named it after a crustacean. 🦞

By March 2026, that weekend hack — now called OpenClaw — had become the fastest-growing open-source project in human history. The adoption curve was so steep that a major chip company CEO showed it at a tech conference and said, with visible disbelief: "Even in semi-log, this thing is straight up. It looks like the Y-axis."