As an experiment, I set it up with a z.ai $3/month subscription and told it to do a tedious technical task. I said to stay busy and that I expect no more than 30 minutes of inactivity, ever.

The task is to decompile Wave Race 64 and integrate with libultraship and eventually produce a runnable native port of the game. (Same approach as the Zelda OoT port Ship of Harkinian).

It set up a timer ever 30 minutes to check in on itself and see if it gave up. It reviews progress every 4 hours and revisits prioritization. I hadn't checked on it in days and when I looked today it was still going, a few functions at a time.

It set up those times itself and creates new ones as needed.

It's not any one particular thing that is novel, but it's just more independent because of all the little bits.

It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.

Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.

So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.

Not being tied to Anthropic’s models and ecosystems, having more control over the agent, interacting with it from you messaging app of choice.

There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.

They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.

I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.