My Name Is Nobody

The Senior, the Junior and the Mediocre ended on a question and then stopped, without a conclusion or a link to part 2. You had momentum, and the post went quiet.

That was on purpose. I took you to the peak and walked away, and you got a preview of what using software is going to feel like. You start depending on something, and one day nobody answers, because the person who made it went to play with a new toy. Lately the toy is a model.

Nobody Is Killing Me¶

The title is a 1973 western, based on an idea by Sergio Leone, that took its name from the Odyssey. Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is Nobody. When the blinded Cyclops screams for help, he shouts that Nobody is killing him, and the other Cyclopes leave him to it.

Part 1 ended on a question about code nobody reads. That code’s owner has a name.

Issue #1¶

Anthropic’s own description of its C compiler project says it plainly: “We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler, and then (mostly) walked away.”

They meant the agents ran without supervision. The repository took it literally. The last commit landed on February 5, 2026 at 17:07 UTC: “Add steps to reproduce kernel defconfig build.” Issue #1, the hello world failure from part 1, arrived three hours later. Nothing has been pushed since.

Issue #1 now has 337 comments and 2,540 reactions. None of the 335 comments I could retrieve comes from a member of the repository. People did call for help: the thread mentions @claude 34 times. That handle belongs to a GitHub user named Claude who signed up in 2009 and has no public repositories. The account never replied. Others tried @grok and @oai-codex.

That’s the Cyclops, shouting a name into the thread while the neighbors walk away.

The Swap¶

The swap already has a face. Brandon Thomas hit “the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times” and had Opus 5.5 rebuild seven Adobe apps in Rust. Thomas claims to have “one-shotted Photoshop.” PhotoCraft, the Photoshop one, is ten days old and has 39,649 stars. Its own README calls it “early alpha”.

It deserves credit that part 1’s outsiders don’t. It tests against Photoshop’s own output and publishes the score: “116 of 116 shape layers in our PSD corpus match Photoshop’s pixels.”

The pitch is that you cancel Adobe and bring your PSDs. Photoshop shipped in 1990. PhotoCraft can match its output, and like tsc-rs it has none of the history behind it. Right now that doesn’t matter, because the commits keep coming. Ask again after the next model.

The Rug¶

Walking away is one way software leaves you. Changing hands is the other.

Gemini CLI was open source under Apache-2.0, with 107,274 stars and 6,765 merged pull requests. In May, Google announced: “On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro and Ultra, as well as those using it free of charge.” Those users were moved to Antigravity CLI, which is closed source. The open repository is still there, for people who pay.

pi was sold. In April its author posted “I’ve sold out” and pi went to Earendil. The license stayed MIT, as promised. The npm package you installed now says “please use @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent instead going forward,” and for eleven days in May a bot closed incoming issues: “All issues will be closed until 2026-05-17 because the project is undergoing a large refactor.”

Others just went dark. Void, at 28,762 stars, is “deprecated and no longer accepting contributions.” Flowise, at 55,490, was archived in August.

The New Toy¶

The mediocre leave projects the way kids leave toys: something newer came out. To be fair to Anthropic, Carlini had the agents write it “to stress test” agent teams, and nobody promised to maintain it. It still shows the cycle. In February the toy was Opus 4.6. By October it’s Opus 5.5, and that compiler belongs to the past.

The project you switched to gets its author’s attention until a newer model lands. After that it gets the attention of whoever is left, and for a project nobody understands, that’s Nobody.

I’ve felt it from the other side. On September 28 I sent a pull request to the Campfire Rust port from part 1, the sane one with an owner. It’s still open with zero comments, and 351 commits have landed in the repository since.

Before You Switch¶

Open the issue tracker and read issue #1. Then look at who answered it.

The last comment on the compiler’s issue #1 was posted on May 12. Nobody answered it.