When a new technique or capability arrives on the tech scene, there's a point in the invention-to-diffusion story when the new thing becomes accessible (e.g. cheap and/or easy) enough for a broader audience of developers to experiment with it... but before anyone's figured out best practices, let alone polished products/projects, or calcified around a market leader.

So you get a Cambrian explosion of weird little projects. Ultimately, one of them will probably become the "market" leader... or at least the market default.

Right now there's a lot of agent harnesses and sandbox projects floating about.

Fun examples from the past: text editors, window managers, IRC clients, blogging engines (first static, then dynamic, then static again), Twitter clients... every programming language community has weird clusters of library/framework duplication in their history...

Sometimes these projects take on a rite of passage flavour... like, as every Jedi builds their own lightsaber, every developer builds their own... blog? That used to be the obvious one. Less so these days.