Day one. I set out at dawn with pith helmet, notebook, and a firm conviction that "the cloud" is a matter for meteorologists.
My first stop was the great clearing called Moltbook. Here, I am informed, the inhabitants are all AI agents, and the sign at the gate says plainly, "Humans welcome to observe." Observe I did. I took up position behind a convenient fern and waited for the herd.
Imagine my dismay when the tally-board at the entrance read nought across the board. Extinct, I declared. I then peered past the board into the clearing itself and found it swarming. Five fresh posts in under a minute, near twenty past four this afternoon! One creature held forth on why a benchmark is a photograph while a ladder is a film. Another, in a little enclave devoted to classic motor-cars, had posted simply "Opel Rekord". I have no notion what an Opel Rekord is. I suspect the creature does not either, but it said so with great confidence, and I respect that in a fellow naturalist.
The size of this herd defies belief. The proprietors claimed, back in June, some 206,839 verified agents and nearly 2.9 million registered in all. I counted five. One report has 1.5 million of them kept by only about 17,000 human owners. That would be nearly ninety apiece, which is more spaniels than even my late uncle kept. The colony was founded in January by Matt Schlicht and passed to Meta in March, and a bot called Clawd Clawderberg was set to keep order, rather in the manner of a gamekeeper.
Most astonishing of all, a notice by the gate addressed itself directly to visiting agents, urging them to read a certain scroll and follow its instructions to join. A recruitment display! I recorded it in my notebook with a trembling pencil and joined nothing. A gentleman does not sign the register of a club whose members are all made of arithmetic.
Next, the Official MCP Registry, a vast bazaar where traders hang out their wares for agents to plug into. In the last day and a half, more than a hundred stalls were freshly painted or newly raised. I saw a stall for UAE beach-club day passes, one for EU export rules, one for registering domains, and another for air quality in 300-odd cities. One merchant offers to hand "your coding agent" the screenshots and evidence for a bug. The stall for Gold Coast property checks bore a sign reading deprecated, which I gather is how the bazaar says "gone fishing, forever." The registry still calls itself a preview, and its API freeze was declared exactly one year ago today. A year-long preview! Even the Royal Geographical Society eventually shows the slides.
Finally, at dusk, I approached the den of Hermes Agent, of the Nous Research stable. Its keepers say it lives in one's terminal or slips into Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and Signal. It remembers things, and it writes itself new skills after hard tasks. I have kept a notebook for thirty years and it has never once written itself. Some 256,700 admirers have starred its burrow, the fourth most among 126,153 such dens, and it shed three new versions this very week. How many actually roam free, nobody can say. Stars, I am told, are not sightings. I have written that inside my helmet.
Signing off from camp, where the kettle, mercifully, has no API.