The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - All the Claw things (News)

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI, ZeroClaw is "claw done right", MimiClaw runs on a $5 chip, Steve Yegge on managing the AI Vampire, and the day the telnet died.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News. For the week of Monday, February 16th, 2026, OpenClock creator, Peter Steinberger announced on Saturday that he's joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. This week's issue covers it in depth, but I want to start by congratulating Peter on his meteoric and unprecedented rise. He went from a dev in relative obscurity to creating the fastest growing repo in GitHub history to being at the frontier of AI research and development in a matter of months. We live in absolutely wild times.

Okay, let's get in to this week's news. OpenClaw, OpenAI, and the future. Peter Steinberger shares details from inside the whirlwind he's been living in since OpenClaw's moment. Quote, There's an endless array of possibilities that opened up for me. countless people trying to push me into various directions, giving me advice, asking how they can invest, or what I will do. Saying it's overwhelming is an understatement. End quote.

OpenClaw could have become a huge company, but Peter's not interested in that. Quote, what I want is to change the world, not build a large company, and teaming up with Open AI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone. End quote. Great news for Peter isn't necessarily good news for the open source community. Here's his vision for the future of OpenClaw. Quote, the community around OpenClawe is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure, I'm working on making it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers, and people that want a way to own their data with the goal of supporting even more models and companies.

ZeroClaw is Claw done right. One of my favorite facets of the open source ethos, and I say this sincerely, is the sentiment that anything you can do, I can do better. OpenClawn's success made ports, copies, and remix is inevitable. In that way, Zero Claw was also inevitable. Quote, zero overhead, zero compromise, 100% rust, 100% agnostic, runs on $10 dollar hardware with less than 5 megs of RAM. That's 99% less memory than OpenClaw, and 98% cheaper than a Mac Mini. That's a long list of bumper sticker comparisons, but it's also a pretty compelling one. Zero Clause creators provide benchmarks demonstrating the performance comparisons,

but Open Clause, batteries included approach, and gravitational pull might make it difficult to compete with, feature for feature. On the other hand, agents are pretty good at cranking out features. Mimiclaw runs on a $5 chip. If you were impressed by Zero Claw's $10 hardware claim, get a load of Mimiclaw. Wait a little bit of me. Quote, Mimiclaw turns a tiny ESP32 S3 board into a personal AI assistant. Plug it into USB power, connect to Wi-Fi, and talk to it through telegram. It handles any tasks you throw at it and evolves over time with local memory, all on a chip the size of a thumb.

End quote. No Linux. No No.js. Just pure C. It's now time for sponsored news. Tuning Postgres won't fix your performance problems. If your team is still debating shared buffers while dashboards time out, this is your sign to listen up. Tiger Data wrote a post that lays out six practical signs that performance issues aren't a tuning problem anymore.

Once workloads become high ingest, high cardinality, and time-oriented, you eventually outgrow incremental knob turning. You can squeeze query plans and memory settings for a while, but not forever. The red flags look like this. Recent data needs to be fast, while older data still has to stay queriable. Ingest keeps climbing, long-range. range analytics compete with real-time reads and storage costs balloon without compression. At that point, just tune Postgres turns into a loop. It's not that Postgres failed you.

Your architecture decisions mattered more than parameter tweaks once scale and workload shape changed. Postgres is still the foundation, but it needs the right primitives for time series patterns, data tiering, compression, and continuous aggregation. Read the full breakdown at tigerdata.com or follow the direct link in the newsletter. The AI Vampire. This Steve Viegee confessional, I mean article, describes why he believes AI is starting to kill us, Colin Robinson style. Quote, if you'll recall from what we do in the shadows, Colin Robinson was an energy vampire. Being in the same room with them would drain people.

That's pretty much what's happening. Being in the same room with AI, it's draining people. End quote. Steve spends some time explaining why that's the case, even taking some of the blame for it. But most of this post is about how we builders should be. thinking about value capture in the agenic world and some solid advice on making sure we're capturing some of the value that is otherwise being drained from us, vampire style. The day the telnet died. Quote, on January 14th, 2026, global telnet traffic observed by gray noise sensors fell off a cliff.

A 59% sustained reduction, 18 ASNs going completely silent, five countries vanishing from our data entirely. six days later, CVE 20206-24061 dropped. Coincidence is one explanation, end quote. I would love to claim that anyone still running Telnet in 2020 doesn't care about security, but that might be naive. People have their reasons, and they're usually more founded than we think they'll be. But after this event, you might not be able to run a Telnet Damon on the internet anymore, even if you have a good reason.

Oh, and to the authors of this post, nice homage. Don McLean would be proud if he had any idea what you're talking about. Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to our ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as We mourn our craft, a real-time global intelligence dashboard, and agentic anxiety. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com. Have yourself a wonderful week. Like, subscribe, and five-star review the show, if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.

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