💭The curse of LISP, Again
Long ago, while hiking far from the big cities, we passed through a small village.
Something happened that caught me completely off guard.
People we had never met before invited us into their home to eat with them. Just like that. No suspicion, no hesitation, no awkwardness. It felt so natural to them that they didn’t even think twice about it.
And I was… in awe.
Which is honestly a bit embarrassing. Being surprised by your own culture says more about how much city life reshapes your expectations than anything else.
But in those villages, it’s not strange. It’s simply how things used to work.
When places are difficult to access and transportation isn’t fast or reliable, people develop a very different mindset. Survival, comfort, and safety depend on cooperation. If someone is traveling and runs out of food, what happens if nobody helps them?
You help because someday you might be the one who needs help.
For a long time, humans had to live this way. As groups. As communities.
In big cities today, things work differently. You can behave like a complete jackass and still get away with it. If things go wrong, you just hop on the next bus and disappear somewhere else.
The environment shapes the mindset.
And lately, I’ve been feeling a strange sense of déjà vu when looking at the AI ecosystem.
The Curse of LISP, Again
There is an old joke among programmers: God created the universe using LISP.
LISP is one of the most powerful programming languages ever created. Once it clicks, it gives you an incredible level of freedom. You can reshape the language itself. You can build almost anything.
But that power carries a strange side effect.
Everyone ends up building their own thing.
Their own frameworks. Their own dialects. Their own tools.
The ecosystem fragments.
Sometimes I like to imagine a different version of the Tower of Babel story.
Maybe God gave people LISP.
Everyone became powerful enough to build their own system, their own language, their own tools… until none of them could understand each other anymore. Without a shared framework, the tower stopped growing.
And now, looking at AI assistants, I can’t help but see the same pattern emerging.
The Claw Explosion
Since the birth of OpenClaw, new AI assistants have been spawning everywhere.
NanoClaw.
PicoClaw.
ZeroClaw.
NullClaw.
And it doesn’t seem to slow down.
Even big companies are joining the party. Alibaba recently released their own version called CoPaw.
It’s both fascinating and a little unsettling.
If you’re from Madagascar, this phenomenon sounds oddly familiar.
We have a term for things that suddenly appear and multiply uncontrollably — “Foza orana.” It literally means crayfish. When crayfish appeared en masse in Madagascar, they didn’t just spread fast — they started destroying rice fields, disrupting the ecological balance.
That’s the image I can’t shake when I see hundreds of AI assistants being born at once.
It’s not that they’re evil — just that their number, speed, and independence could quietly reshape the landscape they’re meant to improve.
When Individuals Get Godlike Tools
AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to building tools.
A single individual can now create things that previously required entire teams.
That power is incredible.
But it also brings back the same pattern we saw with LISP… and later with the Node.js ecosystem. Thousands upon thousands of tiny packages, dependencies stacked on dependencies, each solving a slightly different problem.
Now imagine that phenomenon multiplied by hundreds.
Or thousands.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing. And I’m definitely not saying we’re doomed.
We’re still at the beginning, and it’s impossible to predict how things will stabilize.
But one question keeps coming back to me:
What happens when you give individuals the power to build worlds?
They start acting like gods.
And when many gods start appearing in the same universe…
Conflict usually follows.
Maybe it’s just human nature — repeating itself in code.