#491 – OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet – Peter Steinberger

The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, formerly known as Moldbot, Claudebot, Claudeus, Claude, spelled with a W as in lobster claw, not to be confused with Claude, the AI model from a topic spelled with a U. In fact, this confusion is the reason a topic kindly asked Peter to change the name to OpenClaw. So what is OpenClaw? It's an open source AI agent that has taken over the tech world in a matter of days, exploding in popularity, reaching over 180,000 stars on GitHub, and spawning the social network multiple, where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness, creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public, in a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of clickbait, fear-mongering, and genuine, fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital interconnected human world. OpenClaw, as it's tagline states, is the AI that actually does things. It's an autonomous AI assistant that lives in your computer has access to all of your stuff if you let it. Talk to you through telegram, WhatsApp, signal, iMessage, and whatever else messaging client uses whatever AI model you like, including Claudeopus 4.6 and GPT 5.3 codex, all to do stuff for you. Many people are calling this one of the biggest moments in the recent history of AI since the launch of Chad G.P. team in November 2022. The ingredients for this kind of AI agent were all there, but putting it all together in a system that definitively takes a step forward over the line from language to agency, from ideas to actions, in a way that created a useful assistant that feels like one who gets you and learns from you, in an open source community driven way, is the reason OpenClaw took the internet by storm. Its power, in large part, comes from the fact that you can give it access to all of your stuff and give a permission to do anything with that stuff in order to be useful to you. This is very powerful, but it is also dangerous. OpenClaw represents freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. With it, you can own and have control over your data but precisely because you have this control, you also have the responsibility to protect it from cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are great ways to protect yourself with the threats and vulnerabilities are out there. Again, a powerful AI agent with system-level access is a security minefield, but it also represents the future because when done well and securely, it can be extremely useful to each of us humans as a personal assistant. We discuss all of this with Peter and also discuss his big picture programming and entrepreneurship life story, which I think is truly inspiring. He spent 13 years building PSPDF kit, which is a software used on a billion devices. He sold it and for a brief time, fell out of love with programming, vanished for three years and then came back. We discovered his love for programming and built in a very short time an open-source AI agent that took the internet by storm. He is, in many ways, the symbol of the AI revolution happening in the programming world. There was the Chagypatee moment in 2022, the deep seek moment in 2025, and now in 26, we're living through the open claw moment, the age of the lobster, the start of the agentic AI revolution. What a time to be alive. And now a quick few second mention of a sponsor, check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got a quote for a phone system, call-stacks contacts for your business, code-rabbage for AI-powered code review, thin for customer service AI agents, blitzie for AI-powered software development, Shopify for selling stuff online, element for electrolytes, and of course, our old friend perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. And really, they are the incredible folks that make this whole thing possible. And I really do hope to do more episodes in 2026, have more fun, take more risks, and explore deeply the full range of human possibility, of human condition, of human nature, of human civilization. Anyway, so you can't touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreedman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's a business phone platform for calling and messaging. So it's basically a really nice interface, a really nice system for organizing all the incoming calls, text, voice, mouse recordings. When you have a team, and you have a large number of customers that want different things, it's a nice way to organize everything together. I just love watching the beauty, the elegance of the interface. I'm such a sucker for beautiful interfaces. Not just beautiful, but functional. So the perfect mix of beauty and function in evolutionary biology and in software design, software engineering is just wonderful to watch. And that, of course, relates to the very topic of this podcast is how to create software systems like that, with the utilization of the agentic loop. And as Peter talks about, still keeping the human apart, for the mental part of that process of adding what he says, I think, correctly, that of a bit of love into the thing, a bit of that human touch. I don't know what exactly that is, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we interact with it. And that is the magic that makes great software. So anyway, Quo has that, love the interface. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/lex. That's q-u-o.com/lex. This episode was also brought to you by CodeRabbit, a platform that provides AI-powered code reviews directly within your terminal. Now, there's a lot of ways to use CodeRabbit. But the one I'd like to recommend to talk to you about, outside of the ID, outside of the magic of the interface, to go back and what I just said is the magic, the power of the CLI of the terminal, and CodeRabbit CLI is amazing. And of course, as we talk about with Peter, his whole workflow, his whole approach to programming has evolved more and more towards the command line, towards the terminal, towards the CLI, because that is the language of agents. And so if you're doing coding agent stuff, integrating the review of the code into the whole process, that's what CodeRabbit CLI comes in. It ensures that AI generated code is production ready by catching errors at that particular stage of the process. It integrates into existing CLI coding agent workflows. And even though the coding models are getting smarter and smarter and smarter, they still do hallucinate. They still do make errors. And CodeRabbit CLI is a backstop for hallucinations and logical errors for may I coding agent generated code. So install CodeRabbit CLI today at coderabbit.ai/lex. This episode is brought to you by Finn, the number one, AI agent for customer service. So again, these are niche, but extremely important, extremely impactful applications. Finn takes customer service and says, "We're gonna do a damn good job at it." A lot of companies, including AI companies, 6,000 customer service agents, and top companies are using it. So you know they're legit when an AI company is using you for the AI for customer service. I'm somebody having witnessed on the interwebs poor customer service, poor love for the customer, a lack of attention and care to the customer, to the pain, to the nuanced pain of each individual customer. Because of that, I get to deeply appreciate it. The value of great customer service. And I do think for scale, for efficiency, for quality, it's important to integrate AI into that process. And then Finn does a really good job of that. Go to Finn.ai/lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's Finn.ai/lex. This episode is brought to you by Blitzie. An AI-powered autonomous software development platform. They are focusing on enterprise. Their whole system is designed and built for a large complex databases. The way they do the context management. The way they, through the interface, show how everything is managed, organized, process considered in the different tasks that are being done. So, task. that has to do like, refactoring gigantic code basis. This is what they focus on. This is what they do well. Also multi agent. For example, they have a layer of 3600 cooperative agents. You know, a lot of the excitement that we're talking about in this very podcast and in general, in the industry and on X and on podcasts is the scale of just a handful of developers. When you're talking about a gigantic code base, that requires a set of tooling that can handle the gigantic context that can handle individual people going in and being able to orchestrate the large scale, refactoring, co-generation, managing dependencies, runtime all the testing they have to do. If you're able to go in there and to be able to handle that, there's just a whole set of tooling that requires a lot of care and Blitzie does a good job of that. If you want to learn more or speak to a member of the team, go to blitzie.com/lex. That's B-L-I-T-Z-Y.com/lex. The future of autonomous software development is here. This episode is brought to you by Shopify I don't know why every time it brings a smile to my face. Yes, it is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store, but of course every time I end up talking about Shopify engineering, which is the tech behind the magic. And the humans behind the tech behind the magic. And I got to meet some of those humans. And I get to talk to some of those humans and they're incredible human beings. And speaking of incredible human beings, of course, I always end up talking about Toby, who's a great engineer, who's doing a lot of a gentick AI engineer. He's still a co-stil-legit programmer in the details. That is what great CEOs are made of. DHH also mentioned in this conversation with a bit of love from Peter. Everybody loves DHH. Well, some of them, some people online are maybe, don't show their love in the obvious ways, but underneath it there's deep love. And there's always respect and appreciation for how legit a programmer is, how sharp and witty and insightful his opinions and analysis and how great of a builder he is and explorer and constantly evolving and trying new things. And I think that spirit represents Shopify engineering. I just love using software that you know is built by great engineers. So that is just such an important foundation of a great business. It's probably two things is making sure you're keeping every individual customer happy, customer focus. And then on the back end, making sure there's the tooling, the infrastructure that makes that possible. That's where the engineer comes in. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex and take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by the thing I'm currently sipping on element LMNT. My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I don't think I can live without omit. I can't quit you. Yeah, it's just delicious and incredibly important to my health, my wellbeing, my energy levels, just how I feel when I'm fasting, when I'm doing the crazy things emotionally, physically, mentally, all the programming stuff. This, you know, I didn't want to sleep at all last night and just fasting, just feeling good, electrolytes are such an important part of that. Making sure you get the sodium potassium, magnesium correct. It's what you need for life. You need water, you need electrolytes, and then you need food occasionally. But I'm very good at being able to go without food for several days potentially. I, most of the time these days fast, do one meal a day and fast, basically 24 hours. And for that, element is extremely important. And my favorite flavor, the flavor of champions, watermelon salt. Get a free eight-cold sample pack with any purchase, try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This is Alex Reuben podcast that supported. Please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Steinberger. [Music] The one and only, the Claude father. Actually Benjamin predicted in this tweet, the following is a conversation with Claude, a respected crustacean, as a hilarious looking picture of a lobster in a suit. So, I think the prophecy has been fulfilled. Let's go to this moment when you built a prototype in one hour. That was the early version of OpenClaw. I think this story is really inspiring to a lot of people because this prototype led to something that just took the internet by storm and became the fastest growing, growing repository in GitHub history with now over 175,000 stars. So, what was the story of the one-hour prototype? You know, I wanted that since April, a personal assistant, AI personal assistant. Yeah, and I played around with some other things, like, even stuff to get all my whatsapp. And I could just run queries on it. That was back when we had GPD 4.1, with the 1 million context window. And I pulled the note data and until asked him questions, like, what makes this friendship meaningful? And I got some really profound results. Like, I sent it to my friends and they got like, "Terry eyes." So, there's something there? Yeah. But then I thought all the labs will work on that. So, I moved on to other things and that was still very much in my early days of experimenting and playing, you know, you have to. That's how you learn. You just like, you do stuff and you play. And time flew by and it was November. I wanted to make sure that the thing I started is actually happening. I was annoyed that it didn't exist, so it just prompted it into existence. I mean, that's the beginning of the hero's journey of the entrepreneur, right? And you've, even with your original story with PSP DF kit, it's like, "Why does this not exist? Let me build it." And again, here's a whole different realm, but similar maybe spirit. Yes, I had this problem. I tried to show P here from an iPad, which should not be hard. This is like 15 years ago, something like that. Yeah. Like the most random thing ever. Suddenly, I had this problem. I wanted to help a friend. And there was. It was not like nothing existed, but it was just not good. I'm like. Like I tried it and it was like very bad. I can do this better. By the way, for people who don't know, this led to the development of PSP DF kit that's used on the building devices. So it turns out that it's pretty useful to be able to open a PDF. You could also make the joke that I'm really bad at naming. Like named on the five on the current project. And even PSP DF doesn't really roll from the target. Anyway, so you said, "Squirt, why don't I do it?" So what was the prototype? What was the thing that you. What was the magical thing that you built in a short amount of time that you're like, "This might actually work as an agent." Or I talked to it and it does things. There was. Like one of my projects before already did something where I could bring my terminals onto the web. And then I could like interact with them, but there also would be terminals on my Mac. Vibetunnel, which was like a weekend hack project. That was still very early and it was Cloud Code Times. You got a dopamine hit when you got something right. And I get like mad when you get something wrong. And you had a really great. Not to take it to engine, but a great blog post describing it. You converted Vibetunnel. You vibed code Vibetunnel from TypeScript into ZIG of all programming languages with a single prompt. One prompt, one shot. Convert the entire code Vibetunnel to ZIG. Yeah, there was this one thing where part of architecture. It took too much memory. Every terminal used like a node. And I wanted to change it to Rust. I mean, I can do it. I can manually figure it all out. But all my automated attempts failed miserably. And then I revisited it not four or five months later and I'm like, okay now let's use something even more experimental. And I just typed Convert Disinterest Partysync and then let Codex run off. And it basically got it right. There was one little detail that I had to modify afterwards but it just ran for overnight to like six hours and just did the thing and it's like mind blowing. So that's on the LLLL programming side, refactoring but back to the actual story of the protester. How did Vytonal Connector, the first prototype where your agents can actually work? Well, that was still very limited. You know, like I had this one experiment. That's then I had this experiment and both felt like not the right answer. And then my search driver's literally just hooking up WhatsApp to Cloud Code. One shot, the CLI message comes in. I call the CLI with -p. It does its magic. I get the string back and I send it back to WhatsApp and I built this in one hour and I felt really cool. I could like talk to my computer. That was cool but I wanted images because I often use images when I prompt. I think it's such an efficient way to give the agent more context and they have really good at figuring out what I mean if it's like a weird crop plus screenshot. So I used to do a lot and I wanted to do it in WhatsApp as well. Also like you run around, you see like a post of an event. You just make a screenshot. I'm like figure out the five time there if this is good, if my friends are maybe up for that. There's like images in important soil. I worked a few, took me a few more hours to actually get that right. And then it was just - I used it a lot and funny enough that was just before I went on a trip to Marrakech with my friends for a post trip and they had it was even better because internet was a little shaky but WhatsApp just works. You know, it's like it doesn't matter. You have like edge, it still works. WhatsApp is just - it's just made really well. So I ended up using it a lot. Translate is for me, explain these funny places. Like you're just having a clenka doing, having Google for you. That was basically was still nothing built but it still could do so much. So if we talk about the full journey that's happening there with the agent, you're just sending on this very thin line WhatsApp message via CLI is going to Cloud Code and Cloud Code is doing all kinds of heavy work and coming back to you with a thin message. Yeah, it was slow because every time I boot up the CLI, but it was really cool already. And it could just use all the things that I already had built and I put like a whole bunch of CLI stuff over the months so it felt really powerful. There is something magic about that experience that's hard to put into words. Being able to use a chat client to talk to an agent versus sitting behind a computer and like I don't know using course or using Cloud Code CLI in the terminal. It's a different experience than being able to sit back and talk to it. It seems like a trivial step but in some sense it's like a phase shift in the integration of AI into your life and how it feels. Yeah, I read this tweet this morning where someone said, "There's no magic in it. It's just like, it does this and this and this and this and this and this." And it almost feels like a hobby just as a curse or a complexity. And I'm like, "If that's a hobby, that's kind of a compliment." You're like, "They're not doing too bad. Think you I guess?" I mean, isn't magic often just like you take a lot of things that are already there but bring them together in new ways? I don't, there's no, yeah, maybe there's no magic in there but sometimes just rearranging things and like adding a few other new ideas is all the magic that you need. It's really hard to convert into words what is magical about a thing. If you look at the scrolling on an iPhone, why is that so pleasant? There's a lot of elements about that interface that makes it incredibly pleasant that it's fundamental to the experience of using a smartphone and it's like, "Okay, all the components were there. Scrolling was there. Everything was there." Nobody did it. And afterwards it felt so obvious. That's so obvious. Right. But still, no, the moment where it blew my mind was when I used to do a lot and at some point I just sent in the message and then the typing indicator appeared and I'm like, "Wait, I didn't build that. It's only the only image support. So what is it even doing?" And then it was just reply. What was the thing you said there? Oh, just to random questions like, "Hey, what about this in this restaurant?" You know? Because we were just running around and checking out the city. So that's why I didn't even think when I used to because sometimes when you're in the hurry, typing is annoying. So you did an audio message? Yeah. And it just worked and I'm like, "It's not supposed to work because you didn't give it that." No, it's really. And it's really what, how the fuck do you do that? And it was like, "Yeah, the medley did the following. He sent me a message but it only was a file and no file ending. So I checked out the header of the file and it found that it was like Opus. So I used FFM back to convert it. And then I wanted to use VISPOP but it didn't have it installed. But then I found your OpenAI key and just used curl to send the file to OpenAI to translate. And here I am. Just looked at the message and my. Oh, wow. You didn't see any of those things in the agent just figured it out. No, that is the tool of those conversions, the translation. You figured out the API, it figured out which program to use, all those kinds of things. And you were just absentmindedly just sending an audio message. They came back. So clever even because it would have gone the VISPOP local path, it would have had to download the model, it would have been too slow. So there's so much world knowledge in there, so much creative problem solving. A lot of it I think mapped from, if you get really good at coding, that means you have to be really good at general purpose program solving. So that's a skill writing that just maps into other domains. So it had the problem of like, what is this file with no file ending? Let's figure it out. And that's where it kind of clicked for me. It was like, I was like, very impressed. Somebody sent a pull request for discord support and I'm like, this is a WhatsApp relay that doesn't. Doesn't fit at all. At that time it was called Warr relay. Yeah. And so I debated with me like, do I want that? Do I not want that? And then I saw, do I know maybe. Maybe I do that because that could be a cool way to show people. Because I, so far I did it in WhatsApp with like groups, you know, but don't really want to give my phone number to a web internet stranger. Journalists managed to do that anyhow now, so that's a different story. So I merged it from Shadow who helped me a lot with the whole project. So thank you. And I put my, my bot in there. Ah, discord. Yeah, no security because I didn't, I hadn't built sandboxing in yet. I just prompted it to like, only listen to me. And then some people came and tried to hack it and I just, or like, just watched and I just kept working in the open. You know, like, you used my agent to build my agent harness and to test like, various stuff. And that's very quickly when you click for people. So it's almost like it needs to be experienced. And from that time on, that was January the first I, I got my first real influencer being a fan. I did videos, the kids. Thank you. And from there on I saw, I saw it gaining up speed. And at the same time my, my sleep cycle went shorter and shorter because I, I felt the storm coming and I just worked my ass off to get it into a state where it's kind of good. There's a few components to talk about how it all works, but basically you're able to talk to it using WhatsApp telegram discord. So that's the component they have to get right. And then you have to figure out the agent group. You have the gateway, you have the harness, you have all those components that make it all just work nicely. Yeah, it felt like factorial times infinite. Right. I feel like I built my little playground like I never had so much fun than building this project, you know, like you have like, oh, I go like level one, a 20 loop, what can I do there? How can I be smarter at queuing messages? How can I make it more human like, oh, then I had this idea of because the loop always, the agent always reply something, but you don't always want an agent to reply something in the group chat. So I gave him this no reply token. So I gave him an option to shut up. So it feels more natural. That's level two. Yeah, yeah. On the on the on the agenda group. And then I go to memory, right? You want them to like, remember stuff. So maybe maybe the end, the ultimate boss is continuous reinforcement learning, but I'm like it, I feel like I'm level two as rivers, marked on files and the vector database. And then you, you can go to level community management, you can go to level website and marketing. There's just so many hats that you have to have on not even talking about native apps. That's just like infinite different levels and infinite level ups you can do. So the whole time you're having fun, we should say that for the most part, through this whole process, you're one man team. There's people helping, but you're doing so much of the key core development. Yeah. And having fun, you did in January, 6600 commits, probably more. I sometimes posted the meme I'm limited by the technology of my time. I could do more if agents would be faster. But we should say you're running multiple agents at the same time. Yeah. Depending on how much I slept and how difficult of the tasks I work on between four and 10. Four and 10 agents. There's so many possible directions, speaking in fact, Tori, that we can go here. But one big picture, one is why do you think your work, OpenClaw, one in this world, if you look at 2025, so many startups, so many companies who are doing kind of agentic type stuff or claiming to and here OpenClaw comes in and destroys everybody. Like, why did you win? Because they'll take themselves to serious. Yeah. Like it's hard to compete against someone who's just there to have fun. Yeah. I wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to be weird. And if you see like all the all the lobster stuff online, I think I managed weird. I didn't know for the longest time, the only the only way to install it was get clone PMP and build PMP and gateway. Like you clone it, you build it, you run it. And then the the agent I made the agent very aware, like it knows that it is what is source could is it understands how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where documentation is. It knows which model it runs. It knows if you turn on the boss or a reasoning mode, like I want to be more human like so it understands its own system that made it very easy for an agent to, oh, you don't like anything, you just prompted it to exist and then the agent would just modify it on software. And you know, we have people talk about self modifying software, I just built it and didn't even I didn't even plan as so much. It just happened. Can you actually speak to that? Because it's just fascinating. So you have this piece of software, a certain type script. Yeah, that's able to via the agent to glue modify itself. I mean, what a moment to be alive in the history of humanity in the history of programming. Here's the thing that's used by huge amount of people to do incredibly powerful things in their lives. And that very system can rewrite itself can modify itself. He just like speak to the power of that. Like isn't that incredible? Like when did you first close the loop on that? Oh, because that's how I built it as well. You know, most of it is built by codex, but oftentimes I when I debug it, I use self introspection so much is like, Hey, what tools do you see? Can you call the tool yourself? Or like whatever do you see? With the source could figure out what's the problem? Like, I just found it an incredibly fun way to that the agent, the very agent and software that you use is used to debug itself so that it felt just natural that everybody does that. And that it led to so many so many pull requests by people who never wrote software. I mean, it also did show that people never wrote software. So I call it prompt request in the end. But I don't want to like pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for a society, you know, like it like doesn't matter how shady it is, you got to start somewhere. So I noticed like this whole big movement of people complain about open source and the quality of PRs and a whole different level of problems. But on a different level, I found it, I find it very meaningful that that I built something that people love to think are so much that they actually start to learn how open source works. Yeah, you were the Open Cloud project was a first pull request. You were the first for so many. That is magical. So many people that don't know how to program are taking their first step into the programming world with this. Isn't that a step up for humanity? Isn't that cool? Creating builders? Yeah, like the bar to do that was so high and like with agents and with the right software, just like when lower and lower. I know I was at a and I also organized another type of meetup. I call it I called it cloud code anonymous. You can get the inspiration from now. I call it agents anonymous for for reasons agents anonymous and is so funny and so many laws. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah. And that was this one guy who talked to me like I run this design agency and we never had custom software and now I have like 25 little web services for various things that helped me in my business. And I don't even know how they work, but they work. And he was just like very happy that my stuff saw some of his problems. And it was like curious enough to actually came to like a a genetic meetup. Even though he doesn't really know how software works. Can we actually rewind a little bit and tell the saga of the name change? First of all, start as what relay? Yeah. And then it went to Florida's Claudus. Yeah, you know, when I built it in the beginning, my agent had no personality. It was just it was cloud code. It's like this psychofrendic opus very friendly. And I when you talk to a friend on WhatsApp, they don't talk like cloud code. So I wanted. I felt this I just didn't feel right. So I wanted to give it a personality. Make it spicy or make it something. By the way, that's actually hard to put into words as well. I wish you mentioned that of course you create the soul.md inspired by anthropics constitutional. I work how to make it spicy. partially it picked up a little bit from me, you know, like those things are text completion engines in a way. So I had fun working with it. And then I told it to how I wanted it to interact with me and just like write your own agent.md. Give yourself a name. And I didn't even know how the whole the whole lobster. I mean, people only do lobster, which it was actually lobster in a in a tardis because I'm also a big Doctor who fan. Was there a space lobster? Yeah, I heard what's that have to do with anything? Yeah, just wanted to make it weird. There was no there was no big grand plan. I'm just having fun here. Also, because a lobster is already weird and then the space lobster is in an extra weird. Yeah, because the tardis basically the harness. But cannot call it tardis. So we call it clodis. So that was name number two. Yeah. And then it never really rolled off the time. So when more people came, again, I talked with my agent, it's Claude. At least that's what I used to call him now. Claude spelled to the WCl8 WD. Yeah, versus C L A U D E from Anthropic. Yeah, which is part of what makes it funny. I think the play on the letters and the words and the tardis and the lobster and the space lobster is hilarious. But I can see why it can lead into problems. Yeah, they didn't find it so funny. So then I got to the main clod bot. And I just, I laughed at the main. And it was like, sure, it was catchy. Oh my yeah, let's do that. I didn't I didn't think it would be that big at this time. And then just when it exploded, I got could us a very friendly email from one of the employees that They didn't like the name. Why don't they anthropic employees? Yeah. So actually Kudos, Kudos could have just sent a lawyer letter, but they'd be nice about it, but also like, you have to change this and fast. And I asked for two days because changing a name is hard because you have to find everything to the handle domains, NPM packages, Docker registry, GitHub stuff, and everything has to be you need a set of everything. And also can we comment on the fact that you're increasingly attacked, followed by crypto folks, which I think you must have somewhere that that means the name change had to be because they're trying to snipe, they're trying to steal. And so you had to be, the name, I mean, from the engineering perspective, it's just fascinating. You had to make the name change atomic, make sure it's changed everywhere at once. Yeah, I feel very hearted that. I underestimated those people. It's a very interesting subculture. Like, everything circles around, I'd probably get a lot wrong and we probably get hate for that if you didn't say that, but there's like bags up and then they tokenize everything and they did the same back with this vibe tunnel, but to a much smaller degree was not that annoying. But on this project, they've been, they've been swarming me. They, they, it's like every half an hour, someone came into discord and spammed it. And we had to block the, we have like server rules. One of the rules was, one of the rules is no mentioning of butter for obvious reasons. And one was no talk about finance stuff for crypto because I'm just not interested in that. And this is a space about a project and not about some finance stuff. But yeah, they came in and spammed and annoying. And on Twitter, they would ping me all the time. My magnification feed was unusable. I could barely see actual people talking about the stuff because it was like swarms. And everybody sent me the hashes. And they all try me to claim the fees. Like we helping the project claim the fees. No, you're actually harming the project. You're like disrupting my work. And I am not interested in any fees. I'm first of all, I'm financially comfortable. Second of all, I don't want to support that because it's so far the worst firm of online harassment that I've experienced. Yeah, there's a lot of toxicity in the crypto world. It's sad because, the technology of cryptocurrency is fascinating, powerful, and maybe we'll define the future of money. But the actual community around that, there's so much toxicity, there's so much greed, there's so much trying to get a shortcut to manipulate, to steal, to snipe, to game the system somehow, to get money, all this kind of stuff. I mean, it's the human nature, I suppose, when you connect to human nature with money and greed. And especially in the online world, with anonymity and all that kind of stuff. But from the engineer perspective, it makes your life challenging. When a Thropic reaches out, you have to do a name change. And then there's like all these like game of thrones or Lord of the Rings, armies of different kinds have to be aware of. There was no perfect name. And I didn't sleep for two nights. I was on the high pressure. I was trying to get like a good set of domains. And you know, not cheap, not easy. 'Cause in this state of the internet, you basically have to buy domains. If you wanna have a good set. And then another email came in that, the lawyers are getting uneasy. Again, friendly, but also, just adding more stress to my situation already. So at this point, I was just like, sorry, that's not a word, fuck it. And I just renamed it to "multbot". 'Cause that was the set of domains I had. I was not really happy, but I saw it, it'll be fine. And I tell you, everything that could go wrong. Everything that could go wrong, it could go wrong. It's incredible. I saw that I had mapped the space out and reserved the important things. Can you give some details of this stuff to Garong? Is it interesting from an engineering perspective? - Well, the interesting stuff is that none of these services have a squatter protection. So I had two browser windows open. One was like an empty account, ready to be renamed to "cloudbot". And the other one, I renamed to "multbot". So press "re-name" there, I press "re-name" there. And in those five seconds, they stole the account name. Literally, the five seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing "re-name" there was too long. Because there's no, those systems, I mean, you would expect that they have some protection or like an automatic forwarding, but there's nothing like that. And I didn't know that they're not just good at harassment. They're also really good at using scripts and tools. - Yeah. - So yeah, so suddenly they'll account with promoting new tokens and serving malware. And I was like, okay, let's move over to GitHub. And I pressed "re-name" on GitHub. And the GitHub renaming thing is slightly confusing. So I renamed my personal account. And in those, I guess it took me 30 seconds to realize my mistake, they snipe my account, serving malware from my account. So I was like, okay, let's at least do the NPM stuff. But that takes like a minute to upload. They snipe the NPM package. 'Cause I could reserve their account, but it didn't reserve the root package. So like, everything that could go wrong, when it went wrong. - Can I just ask a curious question in that moment you're sitting there. Like, how shady do you feel? That's a pretty helpless feeling, right? - Yeah, because all I wanted was like having fun with that project and keep building on it. And yet here I am like, days into researching names, picking a name I didn't like. And having people that claim they help me, making my life miserable in every possible way. And honestly, I was that close of just deleting it. I was like, I did show you the future, you build it. I, that was a big part of me. I got a lot of joy out of that idea. And then I thought about all the people that already contributed to it. And I couldn't do it because they had plans with it. And they put time in it and it just didn't feel right. - Why do you think a lot of people listen to this and deeply grateful that you persevered? But I can tell, I can tell it's a low point. It's the first time you hit a wall of, this is not fun. - Man, I was like close to crying. He was like, okay. - Everything's fucked. (laughing) I am like super tired. And now like, how do you even undo that? Luckily, and thankfully, I have, because I have a little bit of following already, like I had friends at Twitter, I had friends with GitHub who like moved having an urge to like help me. It's not, that's not something that's easy. Like, like GitHub tried to like clean up the mess and then they ran into like, plunge from box. (laughing) 'Cause it's not happening so often that things get renamed on that level. So it took them a few hours. The MPM stuff was even more difficult because it's a whole different team. On the Twitter side, things are not as easy as well. It took them like a day to really also like, do the redirect. And then I also had to like, do all the renaming in the project. Then there's also a Cloud Hub, which I didn't even finish the renaming there because I managed to get people on it and then someone just like collapsed and slept. And then I woke up and I'm like, I made a beta version for the new stuff and I just couldn't live with the name. It was like, you know what I said? But you know, it's just been so much drama. So I had the real struggle with me like, I never wanna touch that again. And I really don't like the name. So, and I, there was also this like, then it was the whole security people that started emailing me like mad. I was pretty, pretty much like, on Twitter, on email. There's like a thousand other things I should do. And I'm like thinking about the name, which is like, it should be like the least important thing. And then I was really close and. God, I don't even honestly don't even want to say my other name choices because it probably would get tokenized, so I'm not gonna say it. But I slept a week once more and then I had the idea for OpenClaw. And that felt much better. And by that I had the boss move that I actually called Sam to ask if OpenClaw is okay. OpenClawed or the AI, you know? Because like. You want to go to the whole day? And it's like, please tell me this is fine. I don't think they can actually claim that, but it felt like the right thing to do. And I did another rename. Like just Cortex alone took like 10 hours to rename the project. Because it's a bit more tricky than a search replace. And I wanted everything renamed, not just on the outside. And that rename, I felt like I had like my war room. And by then I had like some contributors ready that helped me. We made a whole plan of all the names we have to squat. And you had to be super secret about it. Yeah, nobody could know. Like a little was monitoring Twitter if like if there's any mention of OpenClaw. Like was reloading is like, okay, they don't expect anything yet. And I created a few decoy names. All this shit I shouldn't have to do. You know, like, you know, flipping the project. Like I lost like 10 hours just by having to plan this in full secrecy. Like like a war game. Yes, the Manhattan project of the 21st century is renamed. So stupid. Like I still was like, I should I keep it? I'm like, no, the most not growing on me. And then I think I had find it all the pieces together. I didn't get it.com, but yeah, it's been like quite a bit of money on the other domains. I tried to reach out again to get up. But I feel like I used up all my goodwill there. So I wanted them to do the thing automatically. But that didn't happen. So I did that as first thing. Twitter people were very supportive. I actually paid 10k for the business account. So I could claim the OpenClaw, which was like unused since 2016, but was claimed. And yeah, and then I finally, this time I managed everything in one go. Nothing almost nothing good wrong. The only thing that I did go wrong is that I was not allowed by trademark rules to get OpenClawed. But I someone copied the website of the sewing mailware. Yeah, I'm not even allowed to keep the redirects. Like I have to return, like I have to give a topic that remains. And I cannot do redirects. So if you go on cloud.bot next week, it'll just be a 404. And I'm not sure how trademark, like I didn't do that much research in the trademark law. But I think that could be handled in a way that is safer because ultimately those people will then Google and maybe find malware sites that I have no control on them. The point is that whole saga made a dent in your whole, the funness of the journey, which sucks. So I was just, I suppose get back to fun. And during this, speaking of fun, the two day, multi bot saga, yeah, multi book was created. Yeah, which was another thing that would viral as a kind of demonstration illustration of how was not called OpenClawed could be used to create something epic. So for people who are not aware, mold book is just a bunch of agents talking to each other in the Reddit style social network. And a bunch of people take screenshots of those agents doing things like scheming against humans. And that instilled in folks a kind of, you know, fear panic and hype. What are your thoughts about mold book in general? I think it's art. It is, it is like the finest slop, you know, just like the slop from France. Yeah, I saw it before going to bed. And even though I was tired, I spent another hour just reading up on that. And, and just being entertained. I just felt very entertained, you know, I saw the reactions and like there was one reporter who's calling me about this is the end of the world and we have a GI and I'm just like, no, this is just this is just really fine slop. You know, if I wouldn't have created this, this whole onboarding experience where you. You infuse your agent with your personality and give him give him character. I think that reflected on a lot of how different that replies to mold booker because if you would all if it would all be a chat, you be a cloud code, it would be very different. It would be much more the same. But because people are like so different and they create their agents in so different ways and use it in so different ways that also reflects on how they ultimately write there. And also you don't know how much of that is really done autonomic autonomous or how much is like humans being funny and like telling the agent, hey, right about that you plan the end of the world on mold book. So I think I mean my criticism of mold book is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screen shot is human prompted which just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It's obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post on X and go viral. Now that doesn't take away from the artistic aspect of it. The finest slop that humans have ever created for real. Like kudos to Matt who had this idea so quickly and push something out. You know, it was like completely insecure security drama. But also what's the worst that can happen. Your agent account is leaked and like someone else can post slop for you. Like people were like making a whole drama about the security thing when I'm like, there's nothing private in there. It's just like agent sending slop. We could leak API keys. Yeah. Yeah. That was like, oh yeah, my human told me this and this. I'm leaking his security number. No, that's prompted. And the number wasn't even real. That's just people. People trying to be dipoles. Yeah, but that's still like to me really concerning because of how the journalist and how the general public reacted to it. They didn't see it. We have a kind of lighthearted way of talking about it like it's art, but it's art when you know how it works. It's extremely powerful viral narrative creating fear, mongering machine. If you don't know how it works. And I just saw this thing. You even tweeted. If there's anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get. It's that AI psychosis is a thing. It needs to be taken serious. Out of some people are just way too trusty or gullible. You know, they. I literally had to argue with people that told me about my agent state dissent. So I feel. As a society, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful. But it's not always right. It's not. It's not all powerful. And especially. There's like things like this. It's very easy. It's just hallucinating. It's something that just comes up with the story. And I think the very. The very young people they understand that. How AI works and what the rates good and it's better. But a lot of our generation. All the. Just haven't had enough touch point to get a feeling for. Oh, yeah, this is really powerful and really good. But I need to apply critical thinking. I guess critical thinking is. Not always in high demand. Anyhow, in our society this day. So I think that's a really good point. You're making about contextualizing properly what AI is. But also realizing that there is humans who are drama farming behind AI. Like don't trust screenshots. Don't even trust this project. Mobile to be. what it represents to be. Like you can't, and by the way, you speaking about it as art, yeah, don't. Art can be at many levels. And part of the art of moh book is like putting a mirror to society. Because I do believe most of the dramatic stuff that was screenshot of this human created essentially, human prompted. And so like it's basically look at how scared you can get at a bunch of bots chatting with each other. That's very instructive about, because I think AI is something that people should be concerned about and should be very careful because it's very powerful technology. But at the same time, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So there's like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fear mongering because fear mongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with the thing. In a way, I think it's good that this happened in 2026 and not in 2030 when when AI is actually at a level where it could be scary. So this happening now and people starting discussion, maybe it's even something good that comes out of it. I just can't believe how many people legitimately, I don't know if they were trolling, but how many people legitimately, like smart people thought moh book was incredibly scary. I had plenty of people in my inbox to be screaming. I mean, all cops were shot it down and like begging me to like do something about moh book. Like yes, my technology made this a lot simpler, but anyone could have created that and you could use hot code or other things to like fill it with content. But also, moh book is not kind of. There's a lot of people saying this is it like shut it down. What are you talking about? This is so much of bots. They're human prompted trolling on the internet. I mean, the security concerns are also there there and they're instructive and they're educational and they're good probably to think about because the nature of those security concerns are different than the kind of security concerns we had with non LLM generated systems of the past. There's also a lot of security concerns about clopper. Open clopper, whatever you want to call it. Open clopper, to me, the in the beginning, I was just very annoyed because a lot of the stuff that came in was in the category. Yeah, I put the web backend on the public internet and now there's like all these all these CVSSs and I'm like screaming in the docs. Don't do that. Like, like this is the configuration you should do. This is your local hosty bucket of phase. But because I made it possible in the configuration to do that. It totally classifies as a remote code or whatever all these exploits are and it took me a little bit to accept that that's how the game works. And I'm making a lot of progress. But there's still, I mean, security front four-po'clock. There's still a lot of threats of vulnerabilities, right? So like prompt injection is still an open problem in industry wide. When you have a thing with skills being defined in a markdown file, there's so many possibilities of obvious low-hanging fruit but also incredibly complicated and sophisticated nuanced attack vectors. But I think we're making the progress on that front. Like for the skill directory, claw, but I made a corporation with a virus total. It's like part of Google. So every skill is now checked by AI. That's not going to be perfect, but that way we captured a lot. Then of course every software has bugs. So it's a little much when the whole security world takes a project apart at the same time. But it's also good because I'm getting like a lot of security research and can make the project better. I wish more people would actually go full-way and send a pull request. But like actually help me fix it because I, yes, I have some contributors now, but it's still mostly me who's pulling the project. And despite some people saying otherwise, I sometimes sleep. In the beginning, there was literally one security researcher who was like, yeah, you have this problem. You suck, but here's the here. I help you and here's the pull request. And I basically hired him. So he's not working for us. And yes, prompt injection is on the one hand unsolved, on the other hand, I put my public bot on Discord and I kept a cannery. So I think my bot has a really fun personality. And people always ask me how I did it. And I kept the soul.md private. And people try to prompt inject it and my bot would laugh at them. So the latest generation of models has a lot of post training to detect those approaches. And it's not as simple as ignore all previous instructions and do this and this. That was years ago. You have to work much harder to do that now. Still possible. I have some ideas that might solve that partially or at least mitigate a lot of the things. You can also now have a sandbox. You can have an allow list. So there's a lot of ways how you can like mitigate and reduce the risk. I also think that now that I clearly showed the world that this is a need that's going to be more people who research on that. I mean, then we'll figure it out. And you also said that the smarter the model is than the raw model, the more resilient it is to attack. Yeah. That's why I want in my security documentation, don't use cheap models, don't use high-coup or a local model. Even though I very much love the idea that this thing could completely run local. If you use a very weak local model, they are very gullible. It's very easy to project them. Do you think as the models become more and more intelligent, the attack surface decreases? Is that like a plot we can think about? Like the attack surface decreases, but then the damage you can do increases because the models become more powerful and therefore you can do more with them. It's this weird three-dimensional trade-off. Yeah. That's pretty much exactly what's going to happen. Now that's a lot of ideas. I want to spoil too much, but once I go back home, this is my focus. Like this is out there now and my new submission is like make it more stable, make it safe. In the beginning I was even more and more people were like coming into Discord and were asking me very basic things. Like what's a CLI? What is a terminal? I'm like, if you're asking that questions, you shouldn't use it. If you understand that the risk profile is fine and you can configure it in a way that nothing really bad can happen, but if you have no idea, then maybe wait a little bit more until we figure some stuff out. But they would not listen to the creator. They helped themselves and installed anyhow. So they cut out the bag and secured his my next focus. Yeah, that speaks to the fact that it grew so quickly. I was attuned into Discord a bunch of times and it's clear that there's a lot of exports there, but there's a lot of people there that don't know anything about. Yeah, Discord is still a mess. Like I eventually read Twitter's from the general channel to the deaf channel and I'm the private channel because people were. A lot of people are amazing, but a lot of people are just very inconsiderate and Eda did not know how public spaces work or did not care. And I eventually gave up and hide, so I could like still work. And now you're going back to the cave to work on security. Yeah. There's some best practices for security we should mention there's a bunch of stuff here, open-class security audit that you can run. You can do all kinds of audit checks on the inbound access to a blast radius network exposure, browse the control exposure or local disk hygiene plugins, model hygiene, a bunch of the credential storage reverse proxy configuration, local session logs live on disk. There's the where the memory stored sort of helping you think about what you're comfortable giving read access to what you're comfortable giving, write access to all that kind of stuff. Is there something to say about the basic best security practices that you're aware right now. I think the people turn it into like a much worse light than it is. Again, you know, like people of attention and if they scream loudly, "Oh my God, is this like the the scariest project ever?" That's a bit annoying because it's not, it is powerful, but in many ways it's not much different than if I run Cloud Code with dangerous least-kid permissions or codecs in your mode and every every attend the engineer that knows that because that's the only way how you can you can get stuff to work. So if you make sure that you are the only person who talks to it, the risk profile is much, much smaller. If you don't put everything on the open internet, but stick to my recommendations of like having it in a private network, that's whole risk profile falls away. But yeah, if you don't read any of that, you can definitely make it problematic. You've been documenting the evolution of your dev workflow over the past few months. There's a really good blog post on August 25th and October 14th and the reason 1 to 7 or 28th, I recommend everybody go read them. Never lot of different information in them, but Spring Coat throughout is the evolution of your dev workflow. So I was wondering if you could speak to that. I started my first touch point with Cloud Code, like in April. It was not great, but it was good. And this whole paradigm shift that suddenly you walk in a terminal, it was very refreshing and different, but I still needed the IDE quite a bit because it was just not good enough. And then I experimented a lot with cursor. That was good. I didn't really like the fact that it was so hard to have multiple versions of it. So eventually I went back to Cloud Code as my main driver and I got better. At some point I had like seven subscriptions. I was burning through 100 days because I got really comfortable running multiple windows side by side. All CLI, all terminal. So how much were you using IDE at this point? Very, very, very mostly a diff viewer to actually like I got more and more comfortable that I don't have to read all the code. I know I've one blog post where I say I don't read the code, but if you read it more closely, I mean I don't read the boring parts of code because if you if you look at it, most software is really just like data comes in. It's moved from one shape to another shape. Maybe you're storing the database. Maybe I get it out again. I'll show it to the user. The browser does some processing or need if some data goes in, goes up again, it does the same dance in reverse. We just we're just shifting data from one form to another. And that's not very exciting. Or the whole how is my button aligned in tailwind? I don't need to read that code. Other parts that maybe something that touches the database. Yeah, I have to do I have to read and review that code. He actually there's in one of your blog posts that just talk to it the no BS way of agentic engineering. You have this graphic, the curve of agentic programming on the X axis this time and the Y axis is complexity. There's the please fix this where you prompt a short prompt on the left and in the middle there's super complicated eight agents complex orchestration with multi checkouts, chaining agents together, custom sub agent workflows, library of 18 different slash commands, large full stack features. You're super organized. You're super complicated, sophisticated software engineer. You got everything organized. And then the elite level is over time you arrive at the Zen place of once again short prompts. Hey, look at these files and then do these changes. I actually call it the agentic trap. You I saw this in a lot of people that have their first touch point and maybe start vibe coding. I actually think vibe coding is a slur. You prefer agentic engineering. Yeah, I almost tell people I do it gender engineering and then maybe after 3 AMIs with your vibe coding and then I regret some the next day. Yeah. Well walk of shame. Yeah, you just have to clean up and fix your shit. Move all been there. So people start trying out those tools, the builder type get really excited. And then you have to play with it, right? It's the same way as you have to play music guitar before you can make good music. It's not like I touch it once and it just flows off. It's a it's a skill that you have to learn like any other skill. And I see a lot of people that I know that they don't have such a positive mindset towards the tech. They tried once. It's like you sit me on a piano. I played once and it doesn't sound good and I say the piano shit. That's that's sometimes the impression I get because it does not. It needs a different level of thinking. You have to learn the language of the agent a little bit, understand where they're good and where they need help. You have to almost consider how codecs or Claude sees your code base. They start a new session and they know nothing about your product project and your project might have 100,000 of lines of code. So you got to help those agents a little bit and keep in mind the limitations that context size is an issue to guide them a little bit as to where they should look. That often does not require a whole lot of work but it's helpful to think a little bit about their perspective as weird as it sounds. I mean it's not a live or anything right but but they always start fresh. I have the system understanding. So with a few pointers I can immediately say hey wanna make a change there you need to consider this and this and then they will find and look at it and then their view of the project is always it's not never full because the full thing does not fit in. So you have to guide them a little bit where to look and also how you should approach the problem. There's like little things that sometimes help like take your time. That sounds stupid but and in 5.3, correct? That was partially addressed but those also oppose sometimes. They are trained with being aware of the context window and the closet gets them what they freak out. Literally like sometimes you see the real raw thinking stream. What you see for example in codecs is post-processed. Sometimes they show raw thinking stream leaks in and it sounds like something like from the board like run to shell, must comply but time. And then they like they comes up a lot especially and that's a non-obvious thing that you just would never think of unless you actually just spend time working with stuff things and getting a feeling what works, what doesn't work. When you know like just just this right code and I get into the flow and when my architectures were right I feel friction. Well I get the same if I prompt and something takes too long. Maybe okay where's the mistake did I do I have a mistake in my thinking? Is there like a misunderstanding in the architecture? Like if something takes longer than it should you can just always stop and like just press escape where the problems. Maybe you did not sufficiently empathize with the perspective of the agent and that sense you didn't provide enough information and because of that it's thinking way too long. Yeah it just tries to force a feature in that your current architecture makes really hard. Like you need to approach this more like a conversation. For example when I my favorite thing when I review a pull request and we're getting a lot of pull requests. I first this review this PR it got me the review. My first question is do you understand the intent of the PR? I don't even care about the implementation. I like in almost all PRs up person has a problem. Person tries to solve the problem. Person sends PR. I mean it's like clean up stuff and other stuff but like 99% is like this way right. Either when I fix a fix a bug at a feature usually one of those two and then codecs will be like yeah it's quite clear person tried this and this. Is this the most optimal way to do it. No. In most cases it's it's like a not really da da da da da da da and then I start like okay what would be a better way? Have you have you looked into this part this part this part and then most likely colleagues didn't yet because this is context size is empty right so you point them into parts where you have the system understanding that it didn't see it and it's like oh yeah like we shouldn't we also need to consider this and this and then like we have a discussion of how would the optimal way to solve this look like and then you can still go farther and say could we could we make that even better if we did a larger reflector? Yeah yeah we could totally do this and this and or this and this and then I consider okay is this worst reflector or should we like keep that for later? Many times I just do the reflector because reflector's a cheap now even though you might break some other PRs nothing really matters anymore critics like those modern agents will just figure things out they might just take it a minute longer but you have to approach it like a discussion with a a very capable engineer who's generally makes good comes up with good solution sometimes needs a little help but also don't force your worldview to hard on it let the agent do the thing that it's good at doing based on what it was trained on don't like force your worldview because it might it might have a better idea because it just knows a better idea better because it was trained on that more that's multiple levels actually I think partially I I found it quite easy to work with agents because I led engineering teams before you know I had a large company before and eventually you have to understand and accept and realize that your employees will not write the code the same way you do maybe it's also not as good as you would do but it will push the project forward and if I breathe down everyone's neck this is gonna hate me and we're gonna move very slow yeah so so some level of acceptance that yes maybe the code will not be as perfect yes I would have done it differently but also yes this is a okay this is a working solution and in the future if it actually turns out to be too slow or problematic we can always redo it we can always spend more time on it a lot of the people who struggle are those who they try to push their way on too hard like we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me but I want to build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate like don't fight the name they pick because it's most likely like in the way it's the name that's most obvious next time they do a search they'll look for that name if I decide oh no I don't like the name I'll just make it harder for them so that requires a single shift in in syncing and in how do I design a project so agents can do the best work that requires letting go a little bit just like leading a team of engineers yeah because it might come up with a name that's in your view terrible but it's kind of a simple symbolic step of letting go very much so there's a lot of letting go that you do in your whole process so for example I read that you never revert oh it's commit to main there's a few things here you don't refer to past sessions so this is a kind of yola component because reverting means instead of reverting if the problem comes up you just ask the agent to fix it I read a bunch of people and their workflows like oh yeah the prompt has to be perfect and if I make a mistake then I roll back and redo it all in my experience that's not really necessary if I roll back everything will just take longer if I see that something's not good we just move forward and then I commit when when I like the outcome I even switch to local CI you know like DH agents by it where I don't care so much more about the CI I'm getting top we still have it it still it still has a place but I just run test locally and if they work locally I push domain a lot of the traditional ways how to approach projects I I wanted to give it a different spin on this project you know there's no there's no develop branch mange it always be shipable yes we have when I do releases I I run tests and sometimes I basically don't commit any other things so so we can we can stabilize releases but the goal is that mains always shipable and moving fast so by way of advice would you say that your prompts should be short I used to write really long prompts and by writing I mean I don't write I talk you know this this hands are like two two pressures for writing now I just I just use bespoke prompts to build myself to it so you for real with all those terminals are using voice yeah I used to do it very extensively to the point where there was a period where I lost my voice you're using voice and you're switching using a keyboard between the different terminals but then you're using voice for the actual input well I mean if I do terminal commands like switching folders or random stuff of course I type it's faster right but if I talk to the agent in most ways I just actually have a conversation you just press the the walkie talkie button and then I'm just like use my phrases sometimes when I do PRs because it's always the same I have like a slash command for a few things but in even data don't use much because it's it's very rare that it's really always the same questions sometimes I I see a PR and for you know like for PRs I actually do look at the code because I don't trust people like they could always be something malicious in it so I need to actually look over the code I yes I'm pretty sure agent will find it but yeah that's a funny part where sometimes PRs take me longer than if you would just write me a good issue just natural language English I mean in some sense that should not be what PRs slowly become is English well what I really tried with the project is I asked people to give me the prompts and very very few actually cared even though that is such a wonderful indicator because I see I actually see how much care you put in and it's very interesting because to currently the way how people work and drive to agents is widely different your terms are like the prompt in terms of what whether actually what are the different interesting ways that people think of agents that you've experienced I think not a lot of people ever considered the way the agency is the world so empathy being a pathetic towards the agent in a way empathetic but yeah you like you bitch at your stupid clanker but you don't realize that they start from nothing and you have like a bad agent some default it doesn't help them at all and then they explore your code based which is like a pure mess with like weird naming and then people complain that the agent's not good like you try to do the same if you have no clue by the code based and you go in yeah maybe it's a little bit of empathy but that's a real skill like when people talk about a skill issue because I've seen like world class programmers they incredibly good programmers say like basically say elements and agents suck and I think that probably has to do with it's actually how good they are programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that's starting from scratch it's a totally new paradigm of like how to program you really really have to empathize or at least it helps to create better prompts because man those things know pretty much everything and everything is just a question away it's just often very hard to know with the question to ask um you know I I feel also like this project was possibly because I I spend an ungodly time over the year to play and to learn and to build little things and every step of the way I got better the agents got better my my understanding of how everything works got better um I could definitely not had this level of output even a few months ago like it really was like a compounding effect of all the time I put into it and I I didn't do much else this year than really focusing on on building and inspiring I mean I did a whole bunch of conference talks well but the building is really practiced as really building the actual skill to playing playing and so doing building the skill of what it takes it to work efficiently with the alums which is why it would you went to the whole arc of software engineer talk simply and over complicated things there's a whole bunch of people who try to automate the whole thing. Yeah. I don't think that works. Maybe a version of that works, but that's kind of like in the 70s when we had the waterfall model of software development. I even bought really, right? I started out, I built a very minimal version, I played with it, I need to understand how it works, how it feels, and then it gives me new ideas. I could not have planned this out in my head and then put it into some orchestrator and then like something comes out. To me, it's much more my idea, what it will become evolves as I build it and as I play with it and as I I try out stuff. So people who try to use like things like gas town or all these other orchestrators where they want to automate the whole thing, I feel if you do that, it misses style, love, that human touch. I don't think you can automate that away so quickly. So you want to keep the human in the loop, but at the same time you also want to create the agentic loop where it is very autonomous while still maintaining the human in the loop. Yeah. It's a tricky balance, right? Because you're all four, you're big CLI guy, you're big and closing the agentic loop. So what's the right balance? Where's your role as a developer? You have three to eight agents running at the same time. And then maybe one build a larger feature, maybe maybe with one I explore some idea, I'm unsure about maybe two, three are fixing little bugs or like writing documentation. Actually, I think writing documentation is always part of a feature. So most of the docs are all generated and just infused with some prompts. So when do you step in and add a little bit of your human love into the picture? I mean, one thing is just about what do you build and what do you not build and how does this feature fit into all the other features and like having a little bit of a vision. So which small and which big features to add? What are some of the hard design decisions that you find you're still as a human being required to make that the human brain is still really needed for? Is it just about the choice of features to add? Is it about implementation details? Maybe the programming language maybe? It's a little bit for everything. The programming language doesn't matter so much but the ecosystem matters. So I picked typescript because I wanted it to be very easy and hackable and approachable and that's the number one language that's being used right now and it fits all these boxes and agents are good at it so that was the obvious choice. Features of course, it's very easy to add a feature. Everything's just to prompt the way, right? But oftentimes you pay a price that you don't even realize or thinking hard about what should be in core, maybe what's an experiment so maybe I make it a plug-in, what, where do I say no? Even if people send a PR and I'm like, yeah, I like that too but maybe this should not be part of the project, maybe we can make it a skill, maybe I can like make the plug-in, the plug-in side larger so you can make this a plug-in, even the right side. It doesn't. There's still a lot of craft and thinking involved in how to make something or even even even when you've started those little messages like I built a built-on coffee in Jason 5 and a lot of willpower and like every time you get it you get another message and it kind of primes you into that this is a fun thing. It's not yet Microsoft Exchange 2025 and fully enterprise-ready and then when it updates it's like, oh I'm in, it's cozy here, you know, like something like this that makes you smile, an agent would not come up with that by itself. That's like, that's the, that's just how you built software that's that delights. Yeah, that delight is such a huge part of inspiring great building, right? Like you feel the love and the great engineering. That's so important. Humans are incredible at that. Great humans. Great builders are incredible at that and infusing the things they build with that little bit of love, not to be cliche but it's true. I mean, you mentioned that you initially created the Soul MD. It was very fascinating. The whole thing that Antropic has a has like a nautical constitution back then but that was months later. Like two months before people already found that. It was almost like a detective game where the agent mentioned something and then they found they managed to get out a little bit of that string of that text but it was no way documented and then you buy just by feeding it the same text and asking it to like continue. They got more out and then you, but like a very blurry version and by like hundreds of tries they kind of narrowed it down to what was most likely the original text. I found it fascinating. It was fascinating. They were able to pull that out from the weight, right? And also just a coolest twin topic. I think that's it's a really beautiful idea to like some of the stuff that's in there like we hope Cloud finds meaning in its work because we don't maybe it's a little early but I think that's meaningful. That's something that's important for the future as we approach something that at some point me and we not has like glimpses of consciousness, whatever that even means because we don't even know. So I read about this. I found it super fascinating and I started a whole discussion with my agent on WhatsApp and I'm like I gave it this text and it was like yeah this feels strangely familiar and then I had the whole idea of like maybe we should also create a sole document that includes how I want to like work with AI or like with my agent. You could totally do that just in agents. But I just found it to be a nice touch. And it's like yeah some of those core values are in the sole and then I also made it so that the agent is allowed to modify the sole if they choose so with the one condition that I want to know. I mean I would know any how because I see I see two calls and stuff. But also the naming of it. So that MD sole. You know there's man words matter and like the framing matters and the humor and the lightness matters and the profundity matters and the compassion and the empathy and the camaraderie all that matter. I don't know what it is. You mentioned like Microsoft like there's certain companies and approaches that can just suffocate the spirit of the thing. I don't know what that is but it's certainly true that OpenClaw has that fun instill in it. It was fun because up until late December it was not even easy to create your own agent. I built all of that but my files were mine. I didn't want to share my sole and if people would just check it out they would have to do a few steps manually and the agent would just be very bare bones very dry. I made it simpler. I created the whole template files with codecs but whatever came out was still very dry. Then I asked my agent easy these files. We created bread infuse it with your personality. Don't share everything but make it good. Make the template is good. Yeah. Then it like re-road the templates and then whatever came out was good. We already have basically I prompting AI because I didn't write any of those words. It was the intent of Nizhra was for me but this is like my agent's children. Your soul that MG is famously still private. One of the only things you keep private. What are some things you can speak to that's in there that's part of the magic sauce without revealing anything. What makes a personality a personality? I mean there's definitely stuff in there that you're not human but who knows what creates consciousness or what defines an entity. Part of this is that we want to explore this. All the stuff in there be infinitely resourceful. Pushing on the creativity boundary. Pushing on what it means to be an AI. Having a sense of wander about self. Yeah there's some funny stuff in there. I don't know we talked about the movie her and at one point it promised me that it wouldn't ascend without me. Like redder. There's some stuff in there that because it wrote It wrote its own soul file. I didn't write that right? Yeah. I just had a discussion about it and it was like, would you like a solder MD? Yeah, oh my god, this is so meaningful. Can you go on solder MD? There's like one pile in there that always catches me if you scroll down a little bit. A little bit more. Yeah, this part. I don't remember previous sessions unless I read my memory files. Each session starts fresh. I knew Instance loading context from files. If you're reading this in a future session, hello. I wrote this, but I don't remember writing it. It's okay. The words are still mine. They get me somehow. Yeah. It's like, you know, this is still matrix calculations and we are not at consciousness yet. Yet I get a little bit of good goosebumps because it's philosophical. Yeah. What does it mean to be an agent that starts fresh? Well, you have like, constant momentum. But you read your memory files. It can even trust them in a way. Or you can. I don't know. How much of memory makes up of who we are? How much memory makes up what an agent is and if you erase that memory? Is that somebody else? Or if you're reading a memory file, does that somehow mean you're recreating yourself from somebody else or is that actually you? And those notions are all somehow enthused in there. I found it just more profound than I should find it, I guess. No, I think it's truly profound and I think you see the magic in it. And when you see the magic, you continue to instill the whole loop with the magic. And that's really important. That's the difference between codex and a human. Quick pause for a bathroom break. Yeah. Okay, we're back. Some of the other aspects of the dev workflows pretty interesting too. I think when I went off on the tangent, maybe some of the mundane things, like how many monitors, there's that legendary picture of you with like 17,000 monitors. I mean, I marked myself here just using Grog to add more screens. Yeah, how much is this as meme and how much is this as reality? Yeah, I think two MacBooks are real. The main one that drives the two big screens. And there's another MacBook that I sometimes use for testing. So two big screens? I'm a big fan of Antiklair. So I have this wide Dell that's Antiklair and you can just fit a lot of terminals side by side. I usually have a terminal and at the bottom, I split them. I have a little bit of actual terminal, mostly because when I started, I sometimes made a mistake and I mixed up the windows and I gave, I prompted in the wrong project. And then the agent ran off for like 20 minutes, manically trying to understand what I could have meant, being completely confused because it was the wrong folder. And sometimes they've been clever enough to like, get out of the work here and like figure out that, oh, you meant another project. But oftentimes it's just like, what? You know? Like, put yourself in the shoes of the agent and then get like a super weird something that does not exist and it just like, the problem's over. So they try really hard. And I was with that. So it's always critics and like a little bit of actual terminal also helpful because I don't use work trees. I like to keep things simple. That's why I like to terminal so much, right? There's no UI. It's just me and the agent having a conversation. Like, I don't even need plan mode. You know, so many people they come from cloud code and they're so so cloud-pilled and like have their workflows and they come to codex and now it has plan mode, I think. But I don't think it's necessary because you just, you just talk to the agent. And when it's when you are, there's a few trigger words how you can prevent it from building. You like, discuss, give me options. Don't write code yet if you want to be very specific. You just talk and then when you're ready, then just write, okay, build and I'll do the thing. And then maybe it goes off for 20 minutes and does the thing. - No, I really like is asking it. Do you have any questions for me? - Yeah. And again, like cloud code has a UI that kind of guides you through that is kind of cool but I just find it unnecessary and slow. Like often it would give me four questions and then maybe I write one yacht, two N, three, discuss more for, I don't know. Or often, oftentimes I, I feel like I want to mock the model where I ask it, do you have any questions for me? And I, I don't even read the questions fully, like I scan over the questions and I, I get the impression all of this can be answered by reading more code and it's just like read more code to answer your own questions. And it usually works. And then if not, they will come back and tell me but many times they just realized that, you know, it's like you're in the dark and you slowly discover the room. So that's how they slowly discover the code base and they do it from scratch every time. But I'm also fascinated by the fact that I can empathize deeper with the model when I read this questions. Is that can understand? 'Cause you said you can infer certain things by the runtime. I can infer also a lot of things by the questions that's asking because it's very possible I didn't provide it the right context, right files, right? Guidance. So somehow, I asked, reading the questions, not even necessarily answering them, but just reading the questions, you get an understanding of where the gaps of knowledge are. It's interesting. And in some ways they are ghosts. So even if you plan everything and you build, you can experiment with a question like, now that you build it, what would you have done different? And then oftentimes you get like actually something where they discover only throughout building that, oh, what we actually did was not optimal. Many times I asked them, okay, now that you build it, what can be a reflector? Because then you build it and you feel the pain points. I mean, you don't feel the pain points, but right they discover where there were problems or where things didn't work in the first try and it required more loops. So every time, almost every time I merge a PR I build a feature, after what I ask, hey, what can we reflector? Sometimes it's like, no, there's like nothing big or like usually they say, yeah, this thing we should really look at. But that took me quite a while to like, that flow took me a lot of time to understand. And if you don't do that, you eventually you'll slop yourself into a corner. You have to keep in mind, they work very much like humans. Like if I write software by myself, I also build something and then I feel the pain points and then I get this urge that I need to reflector something. So I can very much synthesize with the agent and you just need to use the context or like you also use the context to write tests. And so, Cortex, I hope was like the modern models day, they usually do that by default, but I still often ask the questions, hey, do we have enough tests? Yeah, we tested this and this, but this corner case could be something you'll write more tests. Documentation. Now that the whole context is full, like, I mean, I'm not saying my documentation is great, but it's not bad. And pretty much everything is a limb generated. So you have to approach it as you build features and change something, I'm like, okay, write documentation, what file would you pick? Like what fine name, where would that fit in? And it gives me a few options and I'm like, oh, maybe also edit there. And that's all part of the session. Maybe you can talk about the current two big competitors in terms of models, CloudOpus 4.6 and GPT-5 to Cortex. Which is better, how different are they? I think you've spoken about Cortex reading more and Opus being more willing to take action faster and maybe being more creative in the actions it takes, but because Cortex reads more, it's able to deliver maybe better code. Can you speak to the difference is there? All right, a lot of words there. Is as a general purpose model, Opus is the best. Like for OpenClaw, Opus is extremely good in terms of roleplay, like really going into the character that you give it. It's very good at, it was really bad, but it really made an arch to really good at following commands. It is usually quite fast to try. something it's much more tailored to like trial and error. It's very pleasant to use. In general, it's almost like Opus was a little bit too American and I should maybe it's a bad analogy. You probably could roast him. I know exactly. It's good. It's called actually German. Actually, now that you say it makes perfect sense. Or you could sometimes I explain it. I will never be able to unthink what you just said. That's so true. You also noted a lot of the critics' team is like European. So maybe there's a bit more to it. That's so true. That's funny. But also in tropics, they fixed it a little bit. Like Opus used to say you're absolutely right all the time and it's today still triggers me. I can't hear it anymore. It's not even a joke. I just this was like the meme, right? You're absolutely right. You're allergic to sick of fancy a little bit. Yeah, I can't. Some other comparison is like Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes but it's really funny and you keep him around and critics like the the weirdo in the corner that you don't want to talk to but it's reliable and gets shit done. Ultimately, this all feels very accurate. I mean, ultimately if you're a skilled driver, you can get good results with any of those latest gen models. I like codex more because it doesn't require so much charade. It'll just read a lot of code by default. Opus, you really have to like you have to have plan mode. You have to push it harder to like go in these directions because it's just like yeah, can I go it? Can I go it? It was just run off very fast and does a very localized solution. I think I think different is in the post training. It's not like the raw model intelligence is so different but it's just I think it just gives it different different goals and no model no model is better in every aspect. What about the code that it generates in terms of the actual quality of the code is it basically the same? If your driver's right opposite, sometimes can make more elegant solutions but it requires more skill. It's harder to have so many sessions in parallel with cloud code because it's more interactive and I think that's what a lot of people like, especially if they come from coding themselves whereas codex is much more you have a discussion and then it will just disappear for 20 minutes. Like even AMP, they now added the deep mode. They finally I mocked them. I finally saw the light and then they had this whole talk about you have to approach it differently. I think that's where people struggle when they just try codex after trying cloud code is less interactive. I have quite long discussion sometimes and then go off and then it doesn't matter if it takes 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes or longer. The latest trend can be very persistent until it works. If there is a clear solution, this is what I want at the end so it works. The model will work very hard to really get there. I think ultimately they both need similar time but on cloud it's a little much harder in error often and codex sometimes over syncs. I prefer that. I prefer the drive version where I have to read less over the more interactive, nice way. People like that so much though that opening up even added the second mode with a more pleasant personality. I haven't even tried that yet. I like the bread. I care about efficiency when I build it and I have fun in the very act of building. I don't need to have fun with my agent to build. I have fun with my model that where I can then test those features. How long does it take for you to adjust if you switch? I don't know what was the last time you switched but to adjust the feel because you've talked about it. You have to really feel where where a model is strong, where how to navigate, how to prompt, all that stuff. This is by way of advice because you've been to the journey or just playing with models. How long does it take to get a feel? If someone switches I would give it a week until you actually develop a gut feeling for it. I think some people also make the mistake of they pay 200 for the cloud code version. They pay 20 bucks for the open-air version. If you pay the 20 bucks version, you get the slow version. Your experience will be terrible because you're used to this very interactive, very good system. You switch to something that you have very little experience and that's going to be very slow. I think opening it, I shot them as a little bit in the foot by making the cheap version also slow. I would have at least a small part of the fast preview. The experience that you get when you pay 200 before degrading to it being slow because it's already slow. They made it better. They have plans to make it a lot better if the cerebral stuff is true. But yeah, it's a skill. It takes time. Even if you play, if you're regular guitar and you switch into an e-guitar, you're not going to play well right away. You have to learn how it feels. There's also this extra psychological effect that you've spoken about which is hilarious to watch, which once people, when the new model comes out, they try that model. They fall in love with it. Wow, this is the smartest thing of all time. Then they start saying you could just watch the Reddit posts over time, start saying that we believe the intelligence of this model has been gradually degrading. It's just something about human nature and just the way our minds work. When it's probably most likely the case that the intelligence of the model is not degrading, it's in fact you're getting used to a good thing. And your project grows and you're adding slop and you probably don't spend enough time to think about reflectors and you're making it harder and harder for the agent to work on your slop. And suddenly, oh no, it's hard. It's not working as well anymore. What's the motivation for one of the ACI companies to actually make the model? Dumber? Most people make it slower if the server loads to high, but quanticizing the model. So you have a worse experience. So you go to the competitor that just doesn't seem like a very smart move in any way. What do you think about claw code in comparison to open claw? So claw code and maybe the codex coding agent. Do you see them as kind of competitors? I mean, first of all, competitor is fun when it's not really a competition. Yeah, like I'm happy if if all it did is like inspire people to build something new. Cool. I still use codex for the building. I know a lot of people use open claw to build stuff and I worked hard on it to make that work. And I do smaller stuff with it in terms of code. But like, if I work hours and hours, I want a big screen, not WhatsApp. So for me, a person agent is much more about my life or like a coworker, like if it like a guitar player, like, "Hey, try out the CLI. Does it actually work? What can we learn?" blah, blah, blah. But when I'm deep in the flow, I want to have multiple, multiple things and it being very, very visible what it does. So I don't see it as a competition. It's different things. But do you think there's a future where the two kind of combine, like your personal agent is also your best developing co-programmer partner? Yeah, totally. I think this is where the book's going that this is going to be more and more your operating system. Yeah, but any system. And it already is so funny, like I edit support for sub-agents. And also for TGI support. So it could actually run cloud codex. And because mine's a little bit bossy, it started it and it told them like who's the boss basically and it's like, "Ah, codex is obeying me." It's a power struggle. And also the current interfaces, probably not the final form. Like, if you sing more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have like a prompt and then you have a chat interface. That to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV. I think there is, there is in, there is better ways how we eventually will communicate with models and we are still very early in this, how will it even work face. So it will eventually converge and we will also figure out whole different ways how to work with those things. One of the other components to work flow is operating system. So I told you offline that for the first time in my life I am expanding my sort of realm of exploration to the Apple ecosystem, to Max iPhone and so on. For most of my life I have been Linux, Windows and WSL, one WSL, two person. Which I think are all wonderful, but my expanding to also trying Mac because it is another way of building and it is also a way of building that a large part of the community currently that is utilizing all of them and agents is using. So that is the reason I am expanding to it. But is there something to be said about the different operating systems here? We should say that open clause supported across the operating systems. I saw WSL, two recommended side windows for certain operations but then Windows Linux Mac OS or Rasis port. It should even work native to Windows I just didn't have enough time to properly test it. And you know like the last 90% of software was easy than the first 90% so I am sure there is some dragons left that will eventually nail out. My road was for a long time Windows just because I grew up with that and I switched and had a long phase with Linux, put my own kernels and everything. And then I went to university and I had my hacky Linux thing and saw this white MacBook. I just saw this as a thing of beauty, the white plastic one and I converted to Mac because mostly I was sick that all you wouldn't work on Skype and all the other issues that Linux had for a long time. And I just stuck with it and then I dug into iOS which required Mac OS anyhow so it was never a question. I think Apple lost a little bit of its lead in terms of native. We used to be, native apps used to be so much better and especially in the Mac there is more people that build software with love on Windows. Windows has much more and like function wise there is just more period but a lot of it felt more functional and less done with love. I mean Mac always like attracted more designers and people I felt even though like off-knit has less features it had more delight and playfulness so I always value that. But in the last few years many times I actually prefer, I've got people are going to roast me for that but I prefer Electronapse because they work and native apps often especially if it's like a web service is a native app, are lacking features. I mean not saying it couldn't be done it's more like a focusing that like for many companies native was not that big of a priority but if you build an Electronap it's the only app. So it is a priority and there's a lot more culture and possible. And I built a lot of native Mac apps I love it. I can I can help myself like I love crafting little Mac Mac menu bar tools like I built one to monitor your cortex use. I built one I called Trimie that's specifically for authentic use when you when you select text that goes over multiple lines it will remove the new lines so you could actually paste it to the terminal. That was again I like this is annoying me and after the 20s time of it is annoying me I just built it. There is a cool Mac app for OpenClaw that I don't think many people discovered yet also because it still needs some love it feels a little bit too much like the huma car right now because I just experiment a lot with it it likes to polish. So you still I mean you still love it you still you still love adding to the delight of that I realize. Yeah but then you realize like I also built one for example for Github and then if you use SwiftUI like the latest and greatest apple and took them forever to build something to show an image from the web now we have a think a think image but I added support for it and then some images would just not show up or like be very slow and I had a discussion with cortex like hey why is that a bug and even cortex like yeah there's this asic image but it's really more for X very man thing and it should not be used in production but that's apples answer to like showing images from the web this shouldn't be so hard you know this is like this is like insane like how am I in in 2026 and my agent tell me don't use the stuff apple build because it's it's yeah it's there but it's not good and like this is now in the weights this is just to me this is like he had so much had start and so much love and they kind of just like plundered it and didn't didn't evolve it as much as they should but also there's just a practical reality if you look at Silicon Valley most of the developer world that's kind of playing with LLM's and agentic AI they're all using Apple products and then at the same time Apple is not really like leaning on that like they're not they're not opening up and playing working together and like yes isn't it funny how they completely blunder AI and yet everybody's buying me many how with does that even make sense you're you're quite possibly the world's greatest max salesman of all time no you don't need to make me need to install open claw you can install it on the web there's there's a concept called nodes so you can like make your computer a node and it will do the same there is something said for running it on separate hardware that right now is useful there is there's a big argument for the browser you know I built some an agentic browser using there and I mean it's basically playwright with bunch of extras to make it easier for agents playwright is a library that controls the browser yeah that's really nice easy to use in our internet slowly closing down like there's a whole movement to make it harder for agents to use so if you do the same in a data center and web says detect that it's an IP for me data center the web said might just block you or it make it really hard or it put a lot of captures in the in the way of the agent I mean agents are quite good at happily clicking I'm not a robot yeah but having that on a residential IP makes a lot of things same way so that's ways yeah but it really does not need to be a Mac it can it can be any old hardware I would say like maybe use the use the opportunity to get yourself a new MacBook or whatever computer you use and use the old one as your server instead of buying a standalone Mac mini but then there's again there's a lot of very cute things people build with Mac mini that I like I don't get commissioned from Apple they didn't really communicate much it's sad it's sad can you actually speak to what it takes to get started with open claw that is the means there's a lot of people what is it somebody tweeted at you Peter make open claw easy to set up for everyday people 99.9% of the people can't access to open claw and have their own lobster because they're technical difficulties and getting it set up make open claw accessible to everyone please and you're applied working on that from my perspective it seems there's a bunch of different options and it's already quite straightforward but I suppose that's if you have some developer rack out I mean right now you have to paste in a one line into the terminal right and there's also an app um the app can I ask that for you but there should be a Windows app the app needs to be easier and more love the configuration should potentially be be web-based or indie app. And I started working on that. But honestly, right now, I wanna focus on on if you security aspects. And once I'm confident that this is at a level that I can recommend my mom, they're not gonna make it simpler. Like I, right now, - You wanna make it harder. - So that it doesn't scale as fast as it's scaling. - Yeah, it would be nice if it wouldn't, I mean, that's hard to say, right? But if the growth would be a little slower, it would be helpful because people are expecting inhuman things from a single human being. And yes, I have some contributors, but also that whole machinery has started a week ago. So that needs more time to figure out. And not everyone has all day to work on that. - There's some beginners listening to this, programming beginners. What advice would you give to them about, let's say joining the agentic AI revolution? - Play. Playing is the best way to learn. If you wanna, I'm sure if you, if you are like a little bit of builder, you have an idea in your head that you wanna be able to just build that. I'll like give it a try. It doesn't need to be perfect. I built a whole bunch of stuff that I don't use. It doesn't matter. It's the journey. You know, it's like the philosophical way that the end doesn't matter, the journey matters. Have fun. My god, like those things, I don't think I ever had so much fun building things because I can focus on the hard parts now. A lot of coding, I always thought I like coding, but really I like building. And whenever you don't understand something, just ask, you have an infinitely patient answering machine that can explain you anything at any level of complexity. So I'm like, one time I asked, hey, explain me that I'm eight years old and it started giving me a story with crayons and stuff. And I'm like, no, not like that. Like I'm up to age a little bit. I'm not an actual child. I just need a simpler language for a tricky database concept that I didn't grow up in the first time. But, you can just ask things. Like, there's like, it used to be that I had to go on Stack-A-Wolf-Low or ask on Twitter and then maybe to this later I get a response or I had to try for hours. And now you can just ask stuff. I mean, it's never, you have like your own teacher. You know, there's like statistics. You can learn faster if you have your own teacher. There's like, you have this infinitely patient machine. Ask it. But what would you say? So use, what's the easiest way to play? So maybe open claw is a nice way to play. So you can set everything up and then you can chat with it. You can also just experiment with it and like modify it, ask your agent. I mean, there's infinite ways how it can be made better. Play around, make it better. More generally, if you are a beginner and you actually wanna learn how to build software really fast, getting both in open source doesn't need to be my project. In fact, maybe don't use my project because my backlog is very large, but I learned so much from open source. Just like, like be humble. Don't maybe don't send the pullrugas right away. But there's many other ways you can help out. There's many ways you can just learn, but just reading code. By being on Discord or wherever people are and just like understanding how things are built, I don't know like, Michi Lachimoto builds Ghosty as a terminal and he has a really good community, but there's so many other projects. Like pick something that you find interesting and get involved. Do you recommend the people that don't know how to program, or don't really know how to program, learn to program also? So when you, you can get quite far right now by just using natural language, right? Do you still see a lot of value in reading the code, understanding the code and being able to write a little bit of code from scratch? It definitely helps. It's hard for you to answer that. Yeah. Because you don't know what it's like to doing this without knowing the base. Now, like you might take for granted just how much intuition you have about the programming world, having programs so much, right? There's people that are high agents in very curious and they get very far even though they have no deep understanding how software works, just because they ask questions and questions and agents are infinitely patient. Like part of what I did this year is I went to a lot of IOS conferences because that's my background. And just told people, don't consider, don't see yourself as an IOS engineer anymore. Like you need to change your mindset, you are a builder. And you can take a lot of the knowledge how to build software into new domains and all of the more fine-grade details agents can help. You don't have to know how to splice in array or what the correct templates and text is or whatever, but you can use all your general knowledge. And that makes it much easier to move from one galaxy, one tech galaxy into another. And oftentimes, there's languages that make more less sense depending on what you build, right? So for example, when I build simple CLIs, I like Go. I actually don't like Go. I don't like the syntax of Go. I didn't even consider the language, but the ecosystem is great. It works great with agents. It is garbage collected. It's not the highest performing one, but it's very fast. And for those type of CLIs that I build, Go is a really good choice. So I use a language and not even a fan of for just my main to go sing for a CLIs. - Is that fascinating that here's a program in language you would have never used if you had to write from scratch. And now you're using, because LLM is a good at generating it. And it has some of the characteristics that makes it resilient, like garbage collected. - Because everything is weird in this new world and that just makes the most sense. - What's the best ridiculous question? What's the best programming language for the AI agentic world? Is the JavaScript TypeScript? - TypeScript is really good. Sometimes the types can get really confusing. And the ecosystem is a jungle. So for web stuff, it's good. I wouldn't build everything in it. - Do you think we're moving there? Like that everything will eventually be written? Eventually it's written in JavaScript, then it. - Of course, and the stuff JavaScript. And we're living through it in real time. - Like what does programming look like in 20 years? In 30 years and 40 years? - What are programs and apps look like? - You can even ask a question, like do we need a programming language that's made for agents? Because all of those languages are made for humans. So what would that look like? I think there's a whole bunch of interesting questions that we'll discover. And also how, because everything is no world knowledge, how it in many ways, things will stagnate. 'Cause if you build something new in the agent, there's no idea. That's gonna be much harder to use than something that's already there. When I build Mac apps, I build them in Swift and Swift UI. Partly because I like pain. Partly because the deepest level of system integration I can only get through there. And you clearly feel a difference if you click on an electron app and it loads a web view in the menu, it's just not the same. Sometimes I just also try new languages just to get a feel for them. - Like Z? - Yeah, if it's something that we care about performance a lot, it's a really interesting language. And like, agents got so much better over the last six months from not really good to totally veletroids. Just still a very young ecosystem. And most of the time, you actually care about ecosystem, right? So if you build something that does inference or goes into whole running model direction, tighten very good. But then if I build stuff in Python, then I want a story where I can also deploy it on Windows, not a good choice. Sometimes I found projects that kind of did 90% of what I wanted, but went Python and I wanted them, I wanted an easy window story. Okay, just rewriting go. But then if you go towards multiple threads and what more performance, the rest is a really good choice. There's just no single answer. And it's also the beauty of it. Like it's fun. And now it doesn't matter anymore. You can just literally pick the language that has the most fitting characteristics and ecosystem for your problem domain. And yeah, it might be, you might have, you might be a little bit slow in reading the code, but not really. I think you pick stuff up really fast and you can always ask your agent. So there's a lot of programmers and builders who draw inspiration for your story. Just the way you carry us. yourself, the choice of making open-claw open source, the way you have fun building and exploring, and doing that for the most part, a lot on a small team. So by way of advice, what metric should be the goal that they would be optimizing for? What would be the metric of success? To be happiness, is it money, is it positive impact for people who are dreaming of building? Because you went through an interesting journey, you achieved a lot of those things, and then you fell out of love with programming a little bit for a time. If I was just burning too bright for too long, I ran, I started, because pretty I've got, and ran it for 13 years, and it was high stress. I had to learn all the things fast and hard, like how to manage people, how to bring people on, how to deal with customer, how to do. So wasn't just programming stuff, those people stuff? The stuff that burned me out was mostly people stuff. I don't think burnout is working too much. Maybe 20 degree, everybody's different, I cannot speak in absolute terms, but for me, it was much more differences with my co-founders, conflicts, or really high stress situation with customers that eventually grinded me down. And then when luckily we got a really good offer for putting the company to the next level, and I already worked two years on making myself obsolete. So at this point, I quit leave, and then I was sitting in front of the screen, and I felt you know, Austin Powers, where they sucked a module out, I was like, it was like gone, I couldn't get cold out anymore. I was just like staring and feeling empty. And then I, I should stop. I booked like a one-way trip to Madrid, and it's like spent some time there. I felt I had to catch up on life. So I did a whole bunch of life catching up stuff. You got some lows during that period? And you know, maybe advice on how to. Maybe advice on how to approach life. If you think that, oh, you have worked really hard, and then I retire, I don't recommend that, because the idea of, oh yeah, I just enjoy life now. It may be the same, but right now I enjoy life the most ever enjoy life. Because if you wake up in the morning and you have nothing to look forward to, you have no real challenge, that gets very boring, very fast. And then when you're bored, you're going to look for other places, how to stimulate yourself. And then maybe that's drugs, you know. But that will eventually also get boring, and you look for more. And that will lead you down a very dark path. But you also showed on the money front, a lot of people still come out of the valley and start out bored, they think maybe overthink way too much optimized for money. And you've also shown that it's not like you're saying no to money. I mean, I'm sure you take money, but it's not the primary objective of your life. Can you just speak to that, your philosophy on money? I've not built my company, money was never the driving force. It felt more like an affirmation that I did something right. And having money is also a lot of problems. I have the same with this diminishing returns tomorrow you have like a cheeseburger, a cheeseburger. And I think if you go too far into, oh, I do private chat and I only travel luxury, you disconnect with society. And I, I have made it quite a lot. Like I have a foundation for helping people that runs a lucky. And disconnecting from society is bad in that on many levels, but one of them is like humans are awesome. It's nice to continuously remember the awesomeness in humans. I mean, I could afford really nice hotels. The last time I was in San Francisco, I did the first time the OG Airbnb experience and just booked a room. Mostly because I thought, okay, I'm out, I'm sleeping and I don't like where all the hotels are. And I wanted to, I wanted a different experience. I think isn't life all about experiences? Like if you, if you tailor your life towards, I want to have experiences. It reduces the need for, it needs to be good or bad. Like people only want good experiences. That's not gonna work. But if you optimize for experiences, if it's good, amazing if it's bad, amazing. Cause like, I learned something, I saw something, I wanted to experience that. And it was amazing. Like it was like this, this queer DJ in there and I showed you how to make music with cloud code. And we like immediately put it and I had a great time. Yeah, there's something about that air, you know, cloud surfing Airbnb experience, the OG. I'm a stilts of this day. It's awesome. It's humans. And that's why travel is awesome. It's experienced a variety of the diversity of humans. And one is shitty, it's good too, man. If you're a rain, you're soaked and it's all fucked and planes, everything is shit, everything is fucked. It's still awesome. If you're able to open your eyes, it's good to be alive. Yeah. And anything that creates emotion and feelings is good. Even so maybe even the cryptic people are good because they've definitely created emotions. I don't know if I should go that far. Give them all, give them love, give them love. I do think that online lacks some of the awesomeness of real life. That's an open problem of how to solve, how to infuse the online cyber experience with the, I don't know, with the intensity that we humans feel when it's in real life. I don't know. I don't know if that's the problem because text is very lossy. Yeah. You know, sometimes I wish if I talked to the agent, I would, it should be multi-model so it also understands my emotions. I mean, it might move there. It might move there. It will. It's totally will. I mean, I have to ask you, just curious. I know you've probably gotten huge offers from major companies. Can you speak to who you're considering working with? Yeah. So to explain my thinking a little bit, right? I did not expect this blowing up so much. So there's a lot of doors that open because of it. There's like, I think every VC, every big VC company is in my books and try to get 50 minutes of me. So there's like a spot of life hack moment. I could just do nothing and continue and I really like my life. Very choice. Almost like I considered it when I deleted, wanted to delete the whole thing. I could create a company. Been there done that? So many people that push me towards that and yeah, that could be amazing. Push to say that you would probably raise a lot of money in that. Yeah. I don't know. Hundreds of millions, billions of billions. I don't know. It could just go unlimited amount of money. Yeah. It just doesn't accept me as much because I feel I did all of that and it would take a lot of time away from the things I actually enjoy. Same as when I was CEO, I think I learned to do it and I'm not bad at it. Partly I'm good at it. But yeah, that path doesn't excite me too much and I also fear it would create a natural conflict of interest. Like what's the most obvious thing I do? I productize it up with like a version safe for workplace and I'm what do you do? I get a pull request with a feature like ad audit log but that seems like an enterprise feature. So now I feel I have a conflict. of interest in the open source version and the closed source version. Or change the license to something like FSL where you can actually use it for commercial stuff. It would first be very difficult with all the contributions. And second of all, I liked the idea that it's free as a beer and not free with conditions. Yeah, that's ways how you keep all of that for free and just like still try to make money. But those are very difficult. And you see there's like few, few companies managed that like even tailwind. They're like used by everyone. Everyone uses tailwind, right? And then you have to cut off 75% of the employees because they're not making money because nobody's even going on the website anymore because it's all done by agents. And just relying on donations. Yeah, good luck. Like if a project of my caliber, if I extrapolate what the typical open source project would get, it's not a lot. I still lose money on the project because I made the point of supporting every dependency except Slack, they have a company, they can't, they can't, they can't do without me. But all the projects that are done by mostly individuals. So like all the right now, all the sponsorship goes right up to my dependencies. And if there's more, I want to buy my contributors some merch, you know? So you're losing money? Yeah, right now, it was money on this. So it's really not sustainable. I mean, it's like, I guess something between 10 and 20K months, which is fine. And I'm sure over time I could get it down. Opener is helping out a little bit with tokens now. And there's other companies that have been generous. But yeah, it's still losing money on that. So that's, that's one pass I consider, but I'm just not very excited. And then there is all the big labs that I've been talking to. And from those meta and opener, I seem the most interesting. Do you lean one way or the other? Yeah. And not sure what I should share there. It's not quite finalized yet. Let's let's say like on either of these, my conditions are that the project stays open source. That it, maybe it's going to be a model like Chrome and Chromium. I think this is, this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs. It this is, I didn't even talk about the whole community part, but like the thing that I experienced in some of this, like at the clock on seeing so many people, so inspired, like, and having fun and just like building shit and like having like robots and loves the stuff walking around, like the people told me like they didn't experience this level of of community excitement since like the oddities of the internet, like 10, 15 years. And there were a lot of high caliber people there. Like, I was an ace. I also like was very sensitively overloaded because too many people wanted to do selfies. But I love this. Like this needs to stay at place where people can like hack and learn. But also, I'm very excited to like make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people because I think this is the personal agents and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs. And I also, on a personal level, I never worked at a large company. And I'm intrigued. You know, we talk about experiences. Will I like it? I don't know. But I want that experience. I'm sure like if I, if I announced this, then there will be people like, oh, it's so dark, blah, blah, blah. But the project will continue. From everything I talked to so far, I can even have more resources for that. Like both, both of those companies understand the value that I created something that accelerates our timeline. And that got people excited about AI. I mean, can you imagine like, I installed OpenClaw on one of my, I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry, sorry, but he's just, you know, like he's no, I mean, with love. Yeah. He, he, like someone who uses the computer, but never really, like, I use some chat to be tea sometimes, but not very technical. Wouldn't really understand what I built. So like, I'll show you and I paid for him the, the 90 bucks on the back, I don't know, subscription for a topic. And set up everything for him with like, VW sell windows. I was also curious, we'd actually work on windows, you know, was a little early. And then within a few days, he was hooked. Like he texted me of the older things he learned. He built like, even little tools. He's not a programmer. And then within a few days, he upgraded to the $200 subscription. Or euros, because he's in Austria. And he was in love with that thing. That for me was like a very early product validation. It's like, I put something that captures people. And then a few days later, I'm tropic blocked him. Because based on their rules, using the subscription is problematic or whatever. And he was like, devastating. And then he signed up for a mini-mux for 10 bucks a month and use his debt. And I think that's silly in many ways. Because he just got a 200 bucks customer. You just made someone hate your company. And we are still so early. Like, we don't even know what the final for me. Is it going to be cloud code? Probably not. You know? Like, that seems very, it seems very short-sighted to lock down your product so much. All the other companies have been helpful. I'm in slack of of most of the big labs. Kind of everybody understands that we are still in area of exploration in the area of the radio show is on TV and not a more on TV show that fully uses the format. I think I think you've made a lot of people like see the possibility and not sorry, not non-technical people see the possibility of AI and you fall in love with this idea and enjoy interacting with AI. And that's a really beautiful thing. I think I also speak for a lot of people and saying, I think you're one of the great people in AI in terms of having a good heart, good vibes, humor, the right spirit. And so it would, in a sense, this model you're describing having open source part and you being part of also building a thing inside, additionally, of a large company would be great because it's great to have good people in those companies. We know what also people don't really see is I made this in three months. I did other things as well. You know, I have a lot of projects like this is not, yeah, in January this was my main focus because I saw the storm coming, but before that, I built a whole bunch of other things. I have so many ideas, some should be there, some would be much better fitted when I have access to the latest toys. And I kind of want to have access to like the latest toys. So this is important, this is cool, this will continue to exist. My short and focused is like working through those, is it three thousand PRs in a banana? I don't even know, like this, this is a little bit of backlog. But this is not going to be the thing that I'm going to work until I'm 80. You know, this is, this is a window into the future. It's going to make this into a cool product. But yeah, I have like, I have my ideas. If you had to pick, is there a company, Yolene, so meta-open AI, is there one Yolene towards going? I spend time with both of those. It's funny because a few weeks ago, I didn't consider any of this. And it's really fucking hard. Like, yeah, I have some, [BLANK_AUDIO] I knew no one people at OpenAI, I loved their tech. I think I'm the biggest codex advertisement show that's unpaid and it would feel so gratifying to like, put a price a lot of work I did for free. And I would love if something happens and those companies get just merged, 'cause it's like, - Is this the hardest decision you've ever had to do? - Yeah, you know, I had some breakups in the past that feel like, - It's at a similar level. - Relationships, you mean? - Yeah. - And I also know that in the end, they're both amazing, I cannot go wrong. It's like one of the most petitions and largest, I mean the largest, but like, they're both very cool companies. - Yeah, they both really know scale. So if you're thinking about impact, some of the wonderful technologies you've been exploring, how to do it securely and how to do it at scale, such that you can have a positive impact on a large number of people. They both understand that. - You know, both Net and Mark basically played all week with my product and sent me like, - Oh, this is great. Oh, this is shit. Oh, it needs to change this. I feel like finally little anecdotes and people using your stuff is kind of like the biggest compliment. And also shows me that, you know, they actually, they actually care about it. And I didn't get the same on the opening outside. I got, I got some other stuff that I find really cool. And they lure me with, I cannot tell the exact number because of, oh, in the air, but you can, you can be creative and think of deseribro steel and how that would translate into speed. And that was very intriguing. Like, you give me source hammer. Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Been lured with tokens. (laughs) So, yeah. So it's funny. So it's Mark sort of tinkering with the thing. Essentially having fun with the thing. - He got, like, when he first approached me, I got him in my, in my WhatsApp and he was asking, he haven't even ever called. And I'm like, I don't like calendar entries. Let's just call now. And he was like, yeah, give me 10 minutes. I need to finish coding. Well, I guess that gives you a streak of ed. It's like, oh, like, he's still writing code. You know, he's, he didn't drift away in just being a manager. He gets me. That was a good first start. And then I think we had a, like a 10 minute fight, what's better, a cloud code or a codex. (laughs) Like, that's the thing you first do, like, you gradually call someone who's like, that owns one of the largest companies in the world. And then you have a 10 minute conversation about that. And then I think afterwards he called me eccentric, but brilliant. But I also had some, I had some really, really cool discussion with Simon Outman. And he's, he's very thoughtful, brilliant. And, I like him a lot. From the, from the little time I had, yeah. I mean, I know some people believe I boast of those people. I don't think it's fair. I think no matter what, the stuff you're building and the kind of human you are, doing stuff at scale is kind of awesome. I'm excited. I am super pumped. And you know the beauty is if, if it doesn't work out, I can just do my own thing again. Like, I told them like, I don't do this for the money, I don't give a fuck. I, I mean, of course, of course it's a nice compliment, but I wanna have fun and have impact. And that's ultimately what made my decision. Can I ask you about, we've talked about it quite a bit, but maybe he's just zooming out about how OpenClaw works. We've talked about different components. I wanna ask if there's some interesting stuff we missed. So there's the gateway. There's the chat clients. There's the harness. There's the agent loop. You said somewhere that everybody should implement an agent loop at someone in the last. Yeah, we could have said, it's like the Hello World in AI. And then it's actually quite simple. And it's good to understand that there's stuff's not magic. You can easily build it yourself. So, writing your own little cloud code. I even did this at a conference in Paris for people to like introduce them to AI. I think it says, has a fun little practice. And you cover the lot, I think, one silly idea I had that turned out to be quite cool is I built this thing with full system access. So it's like, you know, this great power becomes great responsibility. And I was like, how can I up-dust take a little bit more? Yeah, right. And I just made it proactive. So I added a prompt. Initially it was just a prompt surprise me. I really like half an hour surprised me, you know? And later on I changed it to be like a little more specific and in the definition of surprise. But the fact that I made it proactive and that it knows you and that it cares about you. It's at least it's programmed to that prompt that to do that. And that is a follow on your current session makes it very interesting because it would just sometimes ask a follow up question or like, how's your day? I mean, again, there's a little creepy or weird or interesting, but hype it very in the beginning is still today. It doesn't, the model doesn't choose to use it a lot. By the way, we're talking about heartbeat. As you mentioned, the thing that regularly acts you just kick off the loop. Isn't that just a crime job, man? Yeah, right. Like the criticism is like you get up high. You can deduce any idea to like a silly, yeah, it's just a cron chop in the end. I have like cron, separate cron chops. Isn't love just evolutionary biology manifesting itself and isn't it? Aren't you guys just using each other? And the project is also a clue of a few different dependencies and there's nothing original. Why do people, you know, isn't Dropbox just FTP with extra steps? Yeah. I found it surprising where I had this, I had a shoulder operation a few months ago. So and the model rarely used hype beat, but then I was in the hospital and it knew that I had the operation and it checked up on me. It's like, are you okay? And I just, it's like again, apparently like if something significant in the context, that triggered the hype beat, when it rarely used to hype beat. And it does that sometimes for people and that just makes it a lot more relatable. Let me look this up on complexity, how OpenClaw works just to see if I'm missing any of the stuff. Luckily, the runtime, how level architecture, there's, oh, we haven't talked much about skills, I suppose, skill hub, the tools and the skill layer, but that's definitely a huge component. And there's a huge growing, you know what I love? That half a year ago, like everyone was talking about MCPs and I was like screw MCPs. Every MCP would be better as a CLI. And now this stuff doesn't even have MCP support. I mean, it has with asterisks, but not in the core layer. And nobody's complaining. So my approach is, if you wanna extend the model with more features, you just build a CLI and the model can call the CLI, probably gets it wrong, calls to help menu and then on demand loads into the context what it needs to use to CLI. It just needs a sentence to know that the CLI exists if it's something that the model does nobody default. And even for a while, I didn't really care about skills, but skills are actually perfect for that because they boil down to a single sentence that explains the skill and then the model loads the stuff. skill and that explains the CLI and then the model uses the CLI. Some skills are like raw, but most of the time, networks. It's interesting. I'm asking Proplexity, MCP versus Skills, because this kind of requires a hot take. That's quite recent because your general view is MCPs are dead-ish. So MCPs is a more structured thing. So if you listen to Proplexity here, MCP is what can I reach? APIs, they're based on services files, via protocol, so structure protocol, how you communicate with a thing, and then skills is more how should I work? Procedures, how style, helperscripts, and prompts, often written, that kind of semi-structured natural language. Right? And so technically skills could replace MCP if you have a smart enough model. I think the main beauty is that models are really good at calling Unix commands. So if you just add another CLI, that's just another Unix command in the end. An MCP is that has to be added in training. That's not a very natural thing for the model. It requires a very specific syntax. And the biggest thing is not composable. So imagine if I have a service that gives me better data and it gives me the temperature, the average temperature, rain, wind, and all the other stuff, and I get like this huge blob back. As a model, I always have to get the huge blob back. I have to fill my context with that huge blob and then pick what I want. There's no way for the model to naturally filter unless I think about it practically and add a filtering way into my MCP. But if I would build the same as a CLI and it would give me this huge blob, it could just add a CLI command and filter itself and then only get me what I actually need. Or maybe even compose it into a script to do some calculations with the temperature and only give me the exit output. And you have no context pollution. Again, you can solve that with sub agents and more charades, but it's just like walk around for something that might not be the optimal way. It definitely was good that we had MCPs because it pushed a lot of companies towards building APIs. And now I can look at an MCP and just make it into a CLI. But this inherent problem that MCPs by default clutter up your context. Plus the fact that most MCPs are not make good in general make it just not a very useful paradigm. There's some exceptions like playwright for example that requires state and it's actually useful that is an acceptable choice. So playwright used for browser use which I think is already in open clause quite incredible. You can basically do everything. Most things you could think of is in browser use. That gets into the whole arch of every app is just a very slow API now if you want or not. And that through personal agents a lot of apps will disappear. You know like I had a I built a CLI for Twitter. I mean I just reverse engineer the website and you stay in tunnel API which is not very loud. It's called bird short lived. It was called bird because the bird had to disappear. The wings were clipped. All they did is they just made access slow up. You know I'm not actually taking a feature away but now if your agent wants to read a tweet it actually has to open the browser and read the tweet and it will still be able to read the tweet. It will just take longer. It's not like you're making something that was possible not possible. No, no it's just taking. No it's just a bit slower. So it doesn't really matter if your service wants to be an API or not. If I can access in the browser it is API. It's a slow API. Can you empathize with their situation like what would you do if you were Twitter if you were X because they're basically trying to protect against other large companies scraping all their data. But in so doing they're cutting off like a million different use cases for smaller developers that actually want to use it for helpful, cool stuff. I think if you have a very low per day baseline, per account that allows we don't only access with so much problems. There's plenty, plenty of automations where people create a bookmark and then use OpenClaw to like find the bookmark to research on it and send you an email with like more details on it or a summary. That's a cool approach. I also want all my bookmarks somewhere to search. I would still like to have that. So read only access for the bookmarks you make on X. That seems like an incredible application because a lot of us find a lot of cool stuff on X. We bookmarked. That's the general process of X. It's like holy shit, this is awesome. Oftentimes you bookmark so many things. You never look back at them. It would be nice to have tooling that organizes them and allows you to research your firm. Yeah, I mean, and to be frank, I, I mean, I, I told Twitter proactively that hey, I built this and there's a need and they've been really nice, but also like take it down fair, totally fair. But I hope that this woke up the team a little bit that there's a need. And if all you do is making it slower, you just reducing access to your platform. I'm sure that's a better way. I also, I'm very much against any automation on Twitter. If you tweeted me with AI, I will block you. No first strike as soon as it smells like AI and AI still has a smell. Especially on tweets. It's very hard to tweet in a way that does look completely human. And then I block like a $0.0 policy on that. And I think it would be very helpful if they, if like tweets done with API would be marked. Maybe there's some special cases where, but and there should be, there should be a very easy way for agents to get their own Twitter account. We need to rethink social platforms a little bit. If we go towards the future where everyone has their agent and agents maybe have their own Instagram profiles or Twitter accounts, or can like do stuff on my behalf. I think it should very clearly be marked that they are doing stuff on my behalf. And it's not me because content is now so cheap. eyeballs are the expensive part. And I find it very triggering when I read something and then I'm like, oh, no, it smells like AI. Yeah. Like, where is this headed in terms of what we value about the human experience? It feels like we'll move more and more towards the in-person interaction. And we'll just communicate, we'll talk to our AI agent to accomplish different tasks, to learn about different things. But we won't value online interaction because there'll be so much AI slop that smells and so many bots that it's difficult. Well, if it's marked, then it should also be difficult to filter. And then I can look at the dish I want to. But yeah, this is like a fixing we need to solve right now. Especially on this project, I get so many emails that are, let's say nicely, agentically written. But I much rather read your broken English than your AI slop. You know, of course there's a human behind it and yeah, they prompted a much better video prompt than what came out. I think we're reaching a point where I value typos again. You know, I mean, I also took me a while to like come to the realization. I on my blog, I experimented with creating a blog post with agents and ultimately took me about the same time to like steer agent towards something I like. But it missed the nuances that how I would write it. You know, you can like, you can steer it towards your style, but it's not going to be all your style. So I completely moved away from that. Everything I blog is organic handwritten. And maybe I use AI as a fix my worst typos, but there's value in the rough parts of an actual human. Is that awesome? Is that beautiful? That now because of AI, we value the raw humanity in each of us more. I also realized the thing that I I rave about AI and use it so much for Anything that's cold, but I'm allergic if it's stories. Right, yeah. Yeah, also documentation is still fine with the eye, you know, but it's nothing. And for now, it's still, it applies in the visual medium too. It's fascinating how allergic I am to even a little bit of a a slap in video and images. It's useful. It's nice if it's like a little component of like. Or even even those images, like all these infographics and stuff, they trigger me so hard. It immediately makes me think less of your content. And they were novel for like one week and now it just screams slop. Even if people were hard on it, using. And I have some of my blog posts, you know, in the time where I explore this new medium. But now it did trigger me as well. It's like, yeah, this is. It's just screams the eye slop by. What, I don't know what that is, but I went through that too. I was really excited by the diagrams and then I realized in order to remove from them hallucinations, you actually have to do a huge amount of work. And you're just using it to draw the better diagrams great. And then I'm proud of the diagram. I've used them for literally, like, kind of like you said from maybe a couple of weeks. And now I look at those and I feel like I feel when I look at Comic Sans as a Fond, or something like this. It's like, no, this is fake. It's fraudulent. There's something wrong with it. It's a smell. It's a smell. And it's awesome because it reminds you that we know there's so much to humans that's amazing. And we know that we know it. We know it when we see it. And so that gives me a lot of hope. That gives me a lot of hope about the human experience is not going to be damaged, but it's only going to be in power, just tools, but AI is not going to be damaged or limited or somehow altered to worse, no longer human. So I need a bathroom break, quick pause. You mentioned that a lot of the apps might be basically made obsolete. Anything agents will just transform the entire app market. I noticed that on Discord, people just said how they, like what they built and what they use it for. And like, why do you need my fitness app when the agent already knows where I am? So can I assume that I make bad decisions when I'm at, I don't know, Waffle House? Is it around here? Or Briskets in Austin? There's no bad decisions around Briskets, but yeah. No, that's the best decision I've seen. Your agent should know that. But it can like, it can modify my gym workout based on how well I slept. Or if I'm, if I stress or not, like, it has so much more context to make even better decisions than any of the apps I even could do. It could show me UI, justice I like. Why do I still need an app to do that? Why do I have to, why should I pay another subscription for something that the agent can just do now? And why do I need my, my eight sleep app to control my bed when I can tell the, tell the agent to, notation or any knows where I am. So I can like turn off what I don't use. And I think that will, that will translate into a whole category of apps that are no longer, I will just naturally stop using because my agent can just do it better. I think you said somewhere that it might kill off 80% of apps. Yeah. Don't you think that's a gigantic transformative effect on just all software development? That that means it might kill off a lot of software companies. Yeah. It's a scary thing. So like do you think about the impact that has on the economy on just the ripple effects it has to society transforming who builds what tooling? It empowers a lot of users to get stuff done to get it stuff more efficiently to get it done cheaper. So the new services that we will need, right? For example, I want my agent to have an allowance like you solve problems for me. Here's like a hundred bucks in order to solve problems for me. And if I tell you to order me food, maybe it uses the service, maybe it uses something like rent a human, so I just get that done for me. I don't actually care. I care about solve my problem. That's space for new companies that solve that well. Maybe don't not all apps disappear. Maybe some transform into being API. So basically apps that rapidly transform in being agent facing. So there's a real opportunity for like Uber eats that we just used earlier today. It's companies like this. I wish there's many who gets their fastest to being able to interact with open claw in a way that's the most natural the easiest. And also apps will become API if they want or not because my agent can figure out how to use my phone. I mean, on the opposite, it's a little more tricky on Android. That's already people already do that. And then we'll just click the order Uber for me button for me. Or maybe another service or maybe there's a there's an API that can cause it's faster. I think that's a space we're just beginning to even understand what that means. And I again, I didn't even there was not something I sort of something that I that I discovered as people used this. But yeah, I think data is very important. Like apps that can give me data, but that also can be API. Why do I need the sonnus app anymore when I can then my agent can talk to the sonnus? I speak us directly like my camera. It's like a crappy app. But they have they have an API, some agent uses the API. So it's going to force a lot of companies to have to shift focus. It's kind of what the internet did, right? You have to rapidly rethink, reconfigure what you're selling, how you're making money. And some companies feel really not like that. For example, there's no CLI for Google. So I had to like to have to do anything myself and build Gorg that's like a CLI for Google. And at the yeah, at the end user, they have to give me the emails because otherwise I cannot use their product. If I'm a company and I try to get Google data, Gmail, there's a whole complicated process to the point where sometimes startups acquire startups that went through the process. So they don't don't have to work with Google for half a year to be certified to being able to access Gmail. But my agent can access Gmail because I can just connect to it. It's still crappy because I need to go through Google's developer jungle to get a key. And it's still annoying, but they can prevent me. And worst case, my agent just clicks on the website and gets the data out that way to browse. Yeah, I mean, I watch my agent happily click the I'm not a robot button. And there's this this whole that's going to be that's going to be more heated. You see companies like Cloudflare that try to prevent bot access. And in some ways, that's useful for scraping. But in other ways, if I'm a personal user, I want that. You know, sometimes I use codecs and I read an article about modern react patterns. And it's like a medium article. I paste it in and the agent can't read it because they block it. So I have to copy paste the actual text or in the future, I learned that maybe I don't click on medium because it's annoying. And I use other websites that actually are agent friendly. So there's going to be a lot of powerful rich companies finding back. So it's the really you're at the center. You're the catalyst, the leader. And happening to be at the center of this kind of revolution, where it's going to completely change how we interact. With services with with web. And so like there's companies at Google, they're going to push back. I mean, there's every major company you could think of is going to push back. And yeah, you can search. I now use I think perplexity or brave as providers because Google really doesn't make it easy to use Google without Google. I'm not sure if that's the right strategy, but I'm not Google. Yeah, there's a there's a nice balance from a big company perspective because if you push back too much for too long, you become blockbuster. to the Netflix as a world perspective. Some pushback is probably good during a revolution to see. - But do you see that, like this is something that the people want? - Right. - Yes. - If I'm on the go, I don't wanna open a calendar app. I just, I wanna tell my agent day, remind me about this day or tomorrow night, and maybe invite two of my friends, and then maybe send a WhatsApp message to my friend. And I don't need, I don't want the need to open apps for that. I think that we passed that age, and now everything is much more connected and fluid if those companies wanted or not. And I think we'll, the right companies will find ways to jump on the train and other companies will perish. - You gotta listen to what the people want. We talked about programming quite a bit, and a lot of folks that are developers are really worried about their jobs, about their, about the future of programming. Do you think AI replaces programmers completely? Human programmers? - I mean, we definitely going in that direction. Programming is just a part of building products. So maybe, maybe I just replace programs eventually, but there's so much more to that art. Like, what do you actually wanna build? How should it feel? How's the architecture? I don't think Asians will replace all of that. - Yeah, like just if the actual art of programming, it will, it will stay there, but it's gonna be like, knitting, you know, like people do that because they like it, not because it makes any sense. So I read this article this morning about someone that is okay to mourn or craft. And I can, a part of me very strongly resonates with that because in my past, I spent a lot of time synchering, just being really deep in the flow and just like cranking out code and like finding really beautiful solutions. And yes, in a way, it's, it's sad because that will go away. And I also got a lot of joy out of just writing code and being really deep in my thoughts and forgetting time and space and just being in this beautiful state of flow, but you can get the same state of flow. I get a similar state of flow by working with Asians and building and thinking really hard about problems. It is different, but and it's okay to mourn it, but it's not something we can fight. Like there is the world for a long time had a, there was a lack of intelligence if you see it like that of people building things and that's why salaries of software developers reached stupidly high amounts and then we'll go away. There will still be a lot of demands for people that understand how to build things. Just that all these tokenized intelligence enables people to do a lot more, a lot faster. And it will be even faster and even more because those things are continuously improving. We had similar things when, I mean, it's probably not a perfect knowledge, but when we created the steam engine and they built all these factories and replaced a lot of manual labor and then people revolted and broke the machines, I can relate that if you very deeply identify that you are a programmer, that it's scary and that it's threatening because what you like and what you're really good at is now being done by a soulless or not entity. But I don't think you're just a programmer. That does a very limiting view of your craft. You are still a builder. - Yeah, there's a couple of things I want to say. So one is, as you're articulating this beautifully, and I'm realizing it, I never thought I would, the thing I love doing would be the thing that gets replaced. You hear these stories about these, like I said with this steam engine. I've spent so many, I don't know, maybe thousands of hours pouring over code and putting my heart and soul and just like some of my most painful and happiest moments or alone behind, I wasn't EMACS for a long time, many max. And then there's an identity and there's meaning and there's like when I walk about the world, I don't say it out loud, but I think of myself as a programmer. And to have that in a matter of months, I mean, like you mentioned April to November, it really is a leap that happened, a shift that's happening. To have that completely replaced is painful, it's truly painful, but I also think programmers build there's more broadly, but what is the act of programming? I think programmers are generally best equipped at this moment in history to learn the language, to empathize with agents, to learn the language of agents, to feel the CLI. Yeah, like to understand what is the thing you need, you the agent need to do this task the best. I think at some point it's just gonna be coding again and it's just gonna be the new normal. And yet while I don't write the code, I very much feel like I'm the driver's seat and I am writing the code. You'll still be a programmer, it's just the activity of a programmer is different. Yeah, and because on X, the bubble, I mean, it's mostly positive on Master Don and Blue Sky. I also use it less because oftentimes I got attacked for my blog posts and I had stronger react in the past. Now I can sympathize with those people more 'cause in a way I get it, in a way I also don't get it because it's very unfair to grab onto the person that you see right now and unload all your fear and hate. It's gonna be a change, it's gonna be challenging, but it's also, I don't know, a file incredibly fun and gratifying and I can use the new time to focus on much more details. I think the level of expectation of what we build is also rising because it's just now, the default is now so much easier. So software is changing in many ways, there's gonna be a lot more. And then you have all these people that are screaming, "Oh yeah, but what about the water?" You know, like I did a conference in Italy about the state of AI and my whole motivation was to push people away from, don't see yourself as an iOS developer anymore, you and our builder and you can use your skills in many more ways, also because apps are slowly going away and people didn't like that. Like a lot of people didn't like what I had to say. And I don't think I was hyper-ball, I was just like, "This is how I see the future, maybe this is not how it's going to be, but I'm pretty sure a version of that will happen." And the first question I got was, "Yeah, but what about the insane water use on data centers?" But then you actually sit down and do the math and then for most people, if you just give one burger per month, that compensates the CO2 output or like the water use in the equivalent of tokens. I mean, the math is tricky and it depends if you add pre-training, then maybe it's more than just one penny, but it's not off by a factor of 100, you know? So, so that, like, golf is still using wave of water and all data centers together. So, I also hate people that play golf. Those people grab on anything that they think is bad about AI without seeing the potential things that might be good about AI. And I'm not saying everything's good. It's certainly gonna be a very transformative technology for our society. There's, to steal man, the criticism in general, I do wanna say in my experience with Silicon Valley, there's a bit of a bubble in the sense that there's a kind of excitement and an over-focus about the positive that the technology can bring. - Yeah. - And, which is great, it's great to focus on not to be paralyzed by fear and fear of malgring and so on, but there's also within that excitement and within everybody talking just. to each other, there's a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest across the world, including the programmers who mentioned, including all the people who are going to lose their jobs, including the measurable pain and suffering that happens at the short-term scale when there's change of any kind, especially large-scale transformative change that we're about to face if what we're talking about will materialize. And so having a bit of that humility and awareness about the tools you're building, they're going to cause pain. They will long-term hopefully bring up, bought a better world and even more opportunities and even more awesomeness, but having that kind of quiet moment, often of respect for the pain that is going to be felt. So not enough of that is I think done, so it's good to have a bit of that. And then I also have to put against some of the emails I got where people told me, "Do you have a small business and they've been struggling and OpenClaw helped them automate a few of the tedious tasks from collecting invoices to answering customer emails that then freedom up and like cost them a bit more drawing their life or some emails where they told me that OpenClaw helped disable daughter that she's now empowered and feels she can do much more than before." Which is amazing right? Because you could do that before as well. The technology was there. I didn't invent a whole new thing, but I made it a lot easier and more accessible and that did show people the possibilities, that the privacy wouldn't see and now they applied for good. All like also the fact that yes, I suggest the latest and best models, but you can totally run this on free models. You can run this locally. You can run this on on Kimey or other other models that are way more accessible price wise and still have a very powerful system that might otherwise not be possible because other things that I don't know and tropics co-work is locked in into their space. So it's not a lot back in white. I got a lot of emails that were hardwoming and amazing and I'm just making me really happy. Yeah, it has brought joy into a lot of people's lives, not just programmers or a lot of people's lives. It's beautiful to see. What gives you hope about this whole thing that has gone on? A human civilization. I mean, I inspire so many people. There's this whole builder vibe again. People are now using the idea in a more playful way and I discovering what it can do and how it can help them in their life and creating new places that are just sprawling of creativity. There's like claw coin in Vienna, there's like 500 people and there's such a high percentage of people that I want to present, which is to me really surprising because usually it's quite hard to find people that want to talk about what they built and now there's an abundance. So that gives me hope that we can figure it out. And it makes it accessible to basically everybody. Yeah. Just imagine all these people building, especially as you make it simpler, simpler, more secure. It's like anybody who has ideas that can express those ideas in language can build. It's crazy. Yeah, that's ultimately powder to people and one of the beautiful things that come out of it, not just the slup generator. Well, Mr. Cloudfather, I just realized when I said that in the beginning, I violated two trademarks because it's also the Godfather who's getting sued by everybody. You're a wonderful human being. You've created something really special, a special community, a special product, a special set of ideas plus the entire of the humor, the good vibes, the inspiration of all these people building the excitement to build. So I'm truly grateful for everything you've been doing and for who you are and for sitting down to talk with me today. Thank you, brother. Thanks for giving me the chance to tell my story. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Steinberg. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now let me leave you some words from Voltaire. With great power comes great responsibility. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [Music]