All the Claw things (News)
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
6min 24sec Feb 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.
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Featuring:
Jerod Santo
What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, February 16th, 2026.
OpenClaw 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 relative obscurity to creating the fastest growing repo in history to being at the frontier of AI research and development in a matter of *months*. We live in absolutely wild times
Ok, let's get into this week's news.
OpenClaw, OpenAI and the future
Peter Steinberger shares details from inside the whirlwind he's been living since OpenClaw's moment:
> 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.
OpenClaw could've become a huge company, but Peter's not interested in that.
> What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
Great news for Peter isn't necessarily good news for the open source community. Here's Peter's vision for the future of OpenClaw:
> The community around OpenClaw 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." OpenClaw's success made ports, copies, and remixes inevitable. In that way, ZeroClaw was also inevitable:
> Zero overhead. Zero compromise. 100% Rust. 100% Agnostic. Runs on $10 hardware with <5MB 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. ZeroClaw's creators provide benchmarks demonstrating the performance comparisons, but OpenClaw's "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 ZeroClaw's "$10 hardware claim", get a load of MimiClaw:
> MimiClaw turns a tiny ESP32-S3 board into a personal AI assistant. Plug it into USB power, connect to WiFi, and talk to it through Telegram — it handles any task you throw at it and evolves over time with local memory — all on a chip the size of a thumb.
No Linux. No Node.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 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 queryable, ingest keeps climbing, long-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 blog link in the newsletter.
The AI Vampire
This Steve Yegge <strike>confessional</strike> article describes why he believes AI is "starting to kill us, Colin Robinson style."
> If you’ll recall from What We Do In The Shadows (worth a watch, yo), Colin Robinson was an Energy Vampire. Being in the same room with him would drain people.
>
> That’s…pretty much what’s happening. Being in the same room with AI is draining people.
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 agentic 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
> On January 14, 2026, global telnet traffic observed by GreyNoise sensors fell off a cliff. A 59% sustained reduction, eighteen ASNs going completely silent, five countries vanishing from our data entirely. Six days later, CVE-2026-24061 dropped. Coincidence is one explanation.
I would love to claim that anyone still running telnet in 2026 doesn't care about security, but that would be naive. People have their reasons, and they're usually more founded than we think they'll be. But after this, you might not be able to run a telnet daemon on the internet anymore, even if you have good reason.
Oh, and to the authors of this post: Nice homage! Don McLean would be proud, if he had any idea what you are talking about 😆
That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the Changelog Newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as:
- We mourn our craft
- Real-time global intelligence dashboard
- Agentic anxiety
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