My first ever fork bomb was in the 90s, running Microsoft own example code for OLE (or was it COM?).

That was a great early lesson to never trust code you read online. Even if it is from Microsoft’s own developer portal.

What was the purpose of having Claude Code spin up two more instances of Claude Code though? What was the intended outcome there?

Congratulations! Mine was intentional, back in college, where all PCs had open telnet in order to facilitate cooperation. We discovered it was easy to seize someone's computer for a while, and then watch them look around for the culprit, which we thought was hilarious. Boy were we annoying.

The realization that even badly running code is still faster than the average human is rather terrifying. Lucky you that it hogs so much RAM.