There is no spoon.
One of the analogies I keep seeing about the capabilities of LLMs and agents right now is the “I Know Kung Fu” moment from The Matrix. You remember the scene—Neo gets plugged in, his eyes flicker, and suddenly he opens them and says “I know kung fu.”
It does feel like that sometimes. Suddenly I know Python. I know an API I’ve never touched before. I have capabilities at my fingertips that would have taken me weeks or months to develop on my own. And that’s genuinely remarkable.
But I think there’s another scene from The Matrix that offers an even more powerful lesson for where we are right now, particularly when it comes to agents.
Neo goes to visit the Oracle. While he waits, there are children in the waiting room displaying telekinetic abilities. One child is holding a spoon, bending it like liquid. And what the child says to Neo is this: “Instead… only try to realize the truth… There is no spoon.”
So what do I mean? How is this an analogy?
On a recent walk with my very good friend Mark Pesce, we were talking about all things LLMs and agents. Mark had only recently managed to get OpenClaw installed—I’d been using it for a couple of weeks by that point. He kept describing things he wanted to do with these technologies, but there was this problem, or that challenge, or this limitation standing in his way.
And it just occurred to me. No. The capabilities of these agents now are such that there are very few things you might want to achieve that they can’t at least help you get a long way toward. The spoon—the obstacle, the limitation—isn’t really there. Not in the way we think it is.
A significant impediment to getting things done with these technologies is simply believing they can’t do it. Assuming the obstacle exists before you’ve even tried. But when you develop the instinct to start by going to your agent—to OpenClaw in Signal or Telegram, to Claude Co-Work, to OpenAI’s Codex, to Google’s AntiGravity—and just telling it what you want to do, that changes everything.
It’s that instinct which is the hardest thing to develop.
Each time you’re facing a problem, just remember: there is no spoon. We’re constrained by our past selves, selves that had only so much capacity to scale, only so much knowledge and capability built up over 10, 20, 30, 40 years of our lives.
That constraint doesn’t exist anymore.
There is no spoon.
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