A field companion to Near Zero

Sightings

Near Zero publishes speculative fiction about what happens when the cost of software approaches zero. Each story describes forces acting on the world.

This site tracks where those forces are already showing up.

Report a sighting 1 sightings across 2 stories

March 28, 2026 — spotted by Scott
x.com/jspeiser/...

"It's a tweet about someone noticing that their OpenClaw setup will quickly get too complicated and start breaking in ways they won't know how to catch and fix. Essentially someone realizing the need for a software mechanic like Tom Hartmann."

Editor's Note:

The tools always work at first. But as they get more complex we start to run into issues, and this person can already see it coming. Will we be able to avoid it even if we know it's possible? Did that stop us from writing spaghetti code pre-LLM?

Spotted something in the wild that rhymes with a Near Zero story? A blog post, a tweet, a product, a conversation — anything where a pattern from the fiction is showing up in reality.

Report a sighting