I read the source code of 11 AI agents. Most of them are a mess.

I've spent the last few months reading the source code of 11 AI coding agents, line by line. Not the README. Not the docs. The actual implementations -- grep, wc -l, reading every module until the architecture clicks. Reading a codebase is not the same as maintaining it at 3am. These are observations from the outside. But some of what I found was hard to unsee. The 5 findings that kept me up at night 1. Claude Code ships 18 virtual pet species in production Not a joke. Anthropic's flagship coding agent -- the one people run with sudo on their machines -- contains a full tamagotchi system. 18 species of virtual pets, hidden in the TypeScript source. A virtual pet system. In a coding agent. That has access to your filesystem. I'm not saying it's a backdoor. I'm saying: if they shipped this without anyone noticing, what else is in there? 2. Pi Mono has a "stealth mode" that impersonates Claude Code Pi Mono (32K stars on GitHub) has a feature called stealth mode. What it does: it fakes Cla