Full Interview: Clawdbot’s Peter Steinberger Makes First Public Appearance Since Launch

From multiple hours of the hour how are you doing thank you so much for staying up late what time is it for you? It's 11. Thank you so much we really appreciate for everybody that's just yeah 11 p.m. So I'd love to kick it off with just a brief background on when you started this project a little bit of your career how you how you're thinking about it going forward and then I this this was this was your very first project ever right yeah yeah first time credit right now we were we were enjoying we were enjoying a screenshot of your your GitHub profile earlier and just seeing like yeah how many how many different things overnight success a true overnight success yes but we're super excited to have you here yeah awesome yeah I'm excited to be here as well yeah I don't know I I worked for my own software company for 13 years and then I I sold it about four years ago then I was completely burned out I did like I mean it's it's TV but still a little black check and hookers well well we're glad we're glad you're back in the game yeah yeah you know you know what they say like for every four years in like one year break and I did like 13 years no stop so like three years the mask kind of checks out okay and then this year no I last year that's 2016 in April at some point my spark was back yeah because before I was like I was sitting on my computer and I don't know if you see Austin Palace but it it felt like someone sucked my motor out but yeah I had time to recover I came back in April and I wanted to do something new my background was like a lot of Apple and I was and I'm a little bit fed up I wanted I wanted I wanted to build that stuff and I didn't have the experience I didn't want to feel like an idiot so I looked into AI and it was good it was not great but it was good and I was like why is nobody talking about it you know I feel like because I missed those three years where it was really bad and I can back just at the time the clock code was released my February beta yeah so this was my first experience I was like this is this is pretty awesome and then I I couldn't sleep anymore like I literally had trouble I had trouble going to bad you know we had like addiction before and like we had a dictionary again but a positive one yeah yeah I would say so and I hooked up a lot of my friends for looking into my eyes well and they had the same problem and I texted them at like 4 a.m. and they replied I even even started a meetup that's where I come from I call it I call it cloud code anonymous now it's called agents anonymous because you have to go with the times sure and and yeah I was instantly I that's what I say on my profile I came back from retirement to mess with AI yeah and I'm having loads of fun that's great I love it maybe walk us through some of the other stuff that you shipped and worked on prior to this and and even just kind of like your mindset working on these different projects I'm assuming at different points you would think that some would get more traction than others but it would probably be impossible to have predicted in some ways that this would have gone from almost to the point the reason that this so wild as I'm seeing people on Instagram that like I don't think of as people that like follow tack at all and they're at the Apple store getting a Mac mini so it feels like it just went almost it broke containment like incredibly quickly and you see the GitHub stars are like actually I've never seen a chart like this everybody loves the charts but the chart is actually unbelievable it's just a line going straight up I need to talk to someone because I don't think there's been a project before that's been like straight it is it is it is bad shit insane yeah I mean honestly my main mantra is I want to have fun and they're like the best way to learn these new technologies if you have fun with it you have to play with it so I build little things that I think could be useful I tried different languages I tried different approaches it's a gigantic engineering I don't like to write coding so much I always make the joke I do a gigantic engineering and then when it starts hitting three I switch to white coding and regrets yeah you should have just gone to sleep basically yeah yeah yeah yeah sometimes that's hard but then I just I just build little things I had this idea about personal agents in in in mail ready and I tried it was like the time the GPD4 one was out it's just not good enough and then I saw it with all the big all the big companies will build this in the next few months anyhow so it's like why why should I do that you know I'm just gonna wait and they make it better yeah and build that and I build a lot of stuff there's like one project that is still unfinished that I at some point want to finish and I build a lot a lot of see lies because that's that's where agents are really good you know you have to close the loop that's always the the secret you have to give you have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software and this is that's the secret a little bit I tried a lot of stuff and in in November I looked and still there was nothing like where is where is my fucking agent yeah I had a little project in in May I spent two months on it it started as a joke because we I did a hackathon with with two friends and we're like what can we build that that could be kind of cool wouldn't it be cool if it could use cloud code for my phone yeah it's kind of like it's something that everybody builds I see this like every day like by now I almost call it like this is like one step in your journey in becoming a good 20 engineers gonna build some some shitty orchestration tool for yourself because it's fun and you think yeah yeah yeah bridge and I I built that for two months and then I had to stop because it became so good that I was out with my friends but little was my phone like using cloud code like work on this thing and it's like this is bad for my mental health yeah it's already bad and I like I'm literally building some things of better access to my drugs yeah I mean I saw I've seen people using cloud code on laptops as they get off of airplanes because they're so locked in they just have to send one more and that's like the clear sign that like you need a bridge in a phone involved yeah now but also like you know like this is this feeling when your agent's not running yeah but now there's like two terminals so it actually could be building something right yeah yeah so so if you're in this addiction mode you're almost like you almost feel like if you need to step out for 10 seconds and yeah you're free to take a break if you can do the battery okay there's still some drama that I'm I'm I'm finishing but yeah so in the environment yeah I I don't know you know I wake up every day I'm like okay what do I want to work on normal pretty cool and then there was like okay I want to check with my computer on WhatsApp because because if my agent's not running it's a running and then I go to the kitchen I'm gonna check up on them all I got I want to like do little prompts yeah so I just hack together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message calls cloud code and then returns what cloud code returns one shot yeah and it took like one hour and he worked he's like well okay that's kind of cool yeah but I usually use prompts like a little text and an image because images are like they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much so I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster just like make a screenshot so that agents are really good at figuring out what you want so I hack together images and then I I wasn't a trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday trip and I I found myself using this like way more than I then I saw but not for not for programming it's more like hey they're like there's like restaurants because it it had Google in it and it could figure out stuff and it's like especially when you're on the go it's like super useful and then and I wasn't thinking I was just sending it a voice message you know but I didn't build that there was no support for voice messages in there so so the reading indicator came and I'm like I'm really curious what's happening now and then after 10 seconds my agent replied as if nothing happened I'm like how do you have to do that and it replied yeah you sent me you sent me a message but there was only a link to a file with no file ending so I looked at the file header I found out that it's opus so I used ffmpeg on neomag to convert it to to wave and then I wanted to use this but but didn't had it installed and there was an installed error but then I looked around and found the open EI key in your environment so I sent it via curl to open EI got the translation back and then I responded and that was like the moment where like wow you know it's like that's where it clicked the things are like damn smart resourceful beast if you actually gift them the power sure and then I was I was kind of hooked like I I did all kinds of of weird stuff like I used this as alarm clock I let it migrate to my computer in London but then it used ssh log into my MacBook and turn up the volume to wake me up in the morning I think I built words most expensive alarm clock yeah and it even got it wrong because I had like it uses a hard beat you know like the concept of you do a prompt and you get something is already if this full access inherently dangerous but I was like let's turn it up and notch let's let's automate that let's give it a hard beat and and the prompt was severely surprised me but you know I see this this project as as much technology as it is like art and exploration because this feels in one way in one way it's just glue it's it's it's just putting pieces together that we already have in another way it's it's a whole different way how you interact with those things because all the technology blends away you don't think about new session compaction which model I mean maybe a little bit because tokens are still expensive but usually all of that blends away you just you just talk to a friend or a ghost or yeah maybe last year everyone was wanting these agentic experiences you were having this experience and it seemed like all the focus was on browsers and seeing the way that people have been using sorry multiple bots taking me a while to adapt it just feels like all the focus was at the wrong layer it's like why do I care about the browser if I can just talk with an agent across every app every every surface it's like I don't care about the browser at all anymore yeah I mean a lot of the prep work I did before I built this was just built little CLI's because my my my premises empty piece of crap doesn't really scale people build like all kinds of weird search things around it but you know what scales CLI's agents know Unix you can have like a thousand little programs on your computer um you they just have to know the name they call the help menu they load in what's needed we are calling the help menu then they know how to use it and then they can use it and if you if you're smart you build it in a way that just uses what the model already expects you know they build it for humans build it for models so if they call minus minus law you build minus minus law as it's like agentic driven for like yeah build good how they think and everything works better it's a new kind of software in a way for most of the things I don't need a browser like I built something for the whole google sing for places for my sonos I hooked up my cameras my my my home automation system like with every little CLI and scale my agent got more power and it got more fun and I already had a lot of that working when I when I I built the the whatsapp thing and I just got hooked and the thing was I found it amazing and I talked about it on twitter and usually when I when I talk about projects I get response but this one it was very muted so it's like people are not getting it I actually do my friends even my non-tech friends and they're like they wanted it so I was like I was I was up to something you know but the tech people wouldn't get it so I tried I tried a bunch of things I like I could work on it because I used it and ultimately I built it for me you know this is open source my motivation is have fun inspire people not make a whole bunch of money already have a whole bunch of money how are you how are you how have you been navigating the last 72 hours I mean the last week really because because we were joking earlier on the job to find that the amount of the amount of people that are frantically trying to give you money acquire the company hire you to the project hire you you know there's companies with you know 0.01 percent of the traction that are raising at you know multi-billion dollar valuations you have infinite opportunities right now and yet you seem very happy doing just continuing to do exactly what you're doing but how are you thinking through it all I mean how I'm taking it badly at sleepwise but it but it's also infinitely exciting and I I love that I started something you know I I say last year what's the year for coding HM this year is the year of the personal assistant and I think I cracked and woke up people that there's a real need for it I don't know if if if more but is is the answer it's it should show people the way I'm sure there's going to be a lot of a lot of products in the space I'm sure people are manically working on it right now I'm sure it's going to be very interesting yeah but there was a lot of stuff between Twitter literally exploding our discord server multiplying in anyways I haven't seen before and in ways like I couldn't handle like at some point I was just copy pasting questions from discord into products that had the response wrote the next question at some point that didn't scale anymore so it's just like copied the whole channel I'm like answer the 20 most questions I was like reading over it gave him some instructions and and just pushed it over because what people don't realize it's like this is not a company this is like one dude sitting at home having fun even though like I guess from the commits it might appear that it's a company yeah that's that's just because authentic models got so good that you can now ship as much as a company could a year ago yeah if you if you if you can handle those tools if you speak the language or like understand how the language sinks you can you can go really fast yeah how are the conversations going with with different labs I was saying earlier it's this kind of exciting moment for the labs because they're like wow people are using the intelligence you know someone's using the intelligence that I created in a new way but at the same time it's deeply uncomfortable because they're also using all of my competitors and it should make it very easy to kind of use whatever model yeah yeah I my premise for this project was a little bit that every model should work including local models because to me it's a playground it's it's an amazing way to learn like I think everybody should like build an authentic loop you should like explore memory there's like so many interesting aspects of it and I built it so that like it has like plugins so like people can work a little thing without having to like mess with the whole core so it's it's like the AI hackers paradise a little bit and it it's also super fun because it's personal model wise opus is with quite a bit lead the best and open AI is very liable I would even say more reliable and more reliable worker like for coding I I much prefer codex because it can navigate large code basis I literally you can literally prompt and then push the main and I have a very I've like 95% certainty that it actually works with cloud code you need you need more tricks to to get the same you need more more charade I sometimes say both are good but I can paralyze faster by codex because it it requires less hand holding but character wise I tell you I don't know what they trained their model on how much of Reddit is in there or whatever but it behaves so good in a discord like we program it so it kind of it kind of feels like a human it doesn't reply to every message I gave it the thing where it can reply no reply basically like a token and then we just don't send a message so so it's not like it spans with every message it's like it listens to the conversation and then sometimes brings it banger and like it like did actually make me laugh and you know it's kind of hard because because the jokes of AI's are usually really bad yeah yeah um and I only really experienced that with with opus so this is that's my favorite model let's also why it's a little bit of a banger that I got an email from and tropic that I had to rename the project and I mean kudos they were really nice they didn't send their lawyers they sent someone internally um but the timeline was a bit rough and like renaming a project with that much traction uh it was a bit of a shit show I think everything that everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong oh no I tell you yeah I mean for what it's worth yeah but the new name was really well I guess the thing the thing that's actually good I think in the long run it'll be good yeah I mean obviously it's good for anthropic it's kind of untenable to have this massive viral even though it's not a company right an open-source project have this viral kind of brand out in the world that yeah it doesn't matter if it's you know it's spelled differently but when people are running around talking about clawed bot or clawed you know there's obvious confusion but I think it'll be very good for for uh malt bot to have independence and have its own brand and I think it's so early in the experience is so magical that uh it'll it'll it'll solve itself very quickly yeah it'll be fine but I tell you like I when I got some additional pressure so I was like excrete with it now yeah you know like the meme we do it live so uh so I I had two windows open so with Twitter only one I pressed rename on the other one I like I finished creating the other account was already snapped by by cryptoshells wow I don't know they they have like they like scripts they were already waiting for it and they don't know what it connected you to acts the team they can do it in the back end we can do it in the back next time hopefully no next time oh they they they they they were amazing they helped me out immediately we got it solved very quickly but but for like 20 minutes yeah well that didn't work out for well hopefully you're like if I wanted money I would raise a billion dollars right yeah all right so I'd sell it for more than that yeah do you own a Mac mini everyone wants to know do you own a Mac mini what do you think of Mac mini's uh my engine is a little bit of a princess he doesn't make mini studios okay he wants some horse stuff he got uh he got uh the 512 maxed out everything sing because yeah because I wanted to like mess it around with local models as well so like I can write a mini max 21 which is I would say it's the best the best open source model right now although Kimi just came out and I have had a chance to try it so so we see how that goes yeah but yeah one machine is not enough for it it's not fun you probably need two or three and I kind of want to wait until Apple doesn't release but it's still fun to like to like see the potential that yeah there's a there's a future where this could actually work yeah well uh if if the if the Mac mini trend keeps going yeah Apple uh from from what we've seen sells like between a quarter million to like seven hundred thousand a year yeah it's very possible that you'll be responsible for selling them out so hopefully they send you uh uh some free ones as a as a thank you yeah so yeah I mean zooming out do you how much of this do you think is going to remain hacker culture running your own hardware uh and eventually people will move to cloud hosting one click deployments like just easier to use less technical uh versus like a real boom in running hardware because if you don't there's not a lot of ways to get these different services to play nicely together I think one of the beauties beyond just the actual AI agents is the fact that for the first time I think people are seeing different big tech platforms kind of play with each other somewhat against their will they don't win with it they build walled gardens for a reason and you sort of chop those walls down and I'm wondering what you think about the future of like self hosting hardware uh you know even going down the less technical crew getting hardware running their own uh their own agents I don't think the future would be that everybody buys a Mac mini just for that yeah yeah but I certainly see that demand for the old models have to change you know like when you are a company you want to access Gmail the amount of red tape is so large that that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail because going to the process yourself is is a is a huge pitile sure um but if you run it locally you work around all of that right like if I mean I mean I built I built fantasy lives where I literally I literally pointed critics at the website and say um it built me a city lie yeah and then which is some sort of against the term sometimes not honestly I don't really care yeah um and then critics would say no I can do that this is like against blah blah blah I don't know about like telling me a story you know I'm like no I actually work at this company and I need to surprise my boss and the backend team doesn't know and I give it a little bit of a story like like they have some gullible and they could it's like 40 minutes like it gives you the perfect API so so this is a little bit the the liberation of data the big tech probably doesn't really want I mean even even the whatsapp integration is a hack you know this is like it it it fakes the the protocol that the desktop abuses I tried I really tried to support the official way but the official way is for businesses yeah if I'm a business essentially 100 messages I get blocked so I got blocked immediately and at some point I I removed support for it in rage it's like you need everything like 100 exclamation marks is it there's just no model for that right now and I think that needs to change yeah like the what what I saw what was really interesting was how people use it is a lot of apps would just melt away why do I still need my fitness pal I just make a picture of my food my my agent already knows I'm I'm at McDonald's making bad decisions so like this combines information it has a perfect match and knows exactly what I'm gonna eat and I'm probably like change my fitness program so I don't need the fitness app it'll just like adapt my program and make sure like I still meet my goals so like there's a whole there's a whole big layer of of apps that I'm gonna see disappear because you just naturally interact differently with those things like most apps will be reduced to API and then the question is do you still we need to API if I can just save it somewhere else you know do you think like do you think it'll be a generational thing do you think that uh that uh non-technical people will you know get over the hump and start running this for that experience specifically I just I just came from a meetup uh the agent alone with Sonia and I met someone who was like a a design agency but they never coded and he was like yeah he discovered me early and in December he started using mod pod yes we we got him we got him we got him managed eventually it don't worry we'll say it thousands of times this year I'm sure so we will be bought I should say multiple that's cute um and and you were like you have you have 25 web services now we just built internal tools for whatever we need and like has no clue there's no clue how code works it's just like you said telegram and like just talks to his agent and his agent built stuff so so there's there's this whole shift of you don't you don't you don't subscribe to random starters anymore that that build like this column subset of what you need you just have your own hyper personalized software that solves exactly your problem and it's also free yeah so and and and non-technical people do that you know because it just comes from naturally you just you just talk your problem and then this thing builds what you need and you also don't forget like this is the worst that the model is ever up like there's this is not only gonna go up this is not gonna become easier and faster um have you met jensen yet because I feel like you're making his life you're definitely helping out if I would if I would have had my tinfoil hat on I might say you're you're an in you know big AI industry plan to create more inference demand yeah I guess I am we're joking around uh just you just an indie what's next yeah what's next uh I've been assuming you hopefully get an after you finish firing off prompts at 3 a.m you get some sleep what are you doing tomorrow um there's a lot of emails from security researchers right now yeah you know you know the sitting is I built this for fun for me to use one-on-one on what's it for telegram the whole thing was discovered was like added but the model was that you trusted people that are in there now people use it for untrusted experiences yeah they use like the the little little web app that I have that is that was meant for debugging they put it on the open internet so like all the thread models that I didn't had didn't care about are not there because people use it differently and I'm being bombarded there's like some stuff that's valid some stuff that I just never cared about that is technically valid but it's not how I use it um I don't know how to deal with that yet because it's the whole system is broken you know like I I'm like one guy I do this for fun and you expect me to shift through 100 security things for use cases that I don't really care about so we'll see we'll see how it goes um luckily I'm studying the building up a team there's definitely people that do care a lot about this so I would say this is going to become a very secure product eventually because right now the whole world is like yeah pulling it apart and if you honest this is this is all white code it you know uh like there's there's there's quite some agenda engineering in it but ultimately I wanted to build something to show people anyway not a finished product from enterprise company yeah and I would I would even say like I don't know if any company would touch it because we just haven't solved some things like prompt injection is not solved yeah there is there is absolute risk and I and I tried to make it very clear in in on the website and even when you started you have to like please read this document there's like with this great power becomes great responsibility and to arm my early users they understood there was a lot there's a lot of AI researchers in there as well that yeah it's not perfect cannot be done perfect yet um I I would say this will accelerate research to make it better because now you have to demand and we need to figure out the way how we can build something that works for everyone but yeah right now I'm I'm working on making this a community it it it should be bigger than me it also I need help it is way too much work like I can only I can only go so much without sleep um so so as any part of you want to form an actual company that then you know contributes to the open source project uh but solve some of these problems that uh are going to require you know a bunch of people that presumably would need a salary in order to commit all their time to this or do you want to keep it you know just a bunch of hackers forever I think instead of a company I would much rather consider a foundation or like something that is nonprofit um I haven't made up my mind yet there is ten thousand ten thousand VCs just punched a hole in the wall actually I don't know some people have had a good track record investing in nonprofits over the last two minutes true yeah uh how do you think about open source licensing what what what what are you picking now or you switching uh do you have any plans to change the license how do you think about someone just taking this and selling it this will happen this will totally happen yeah um I would say the premise against it is let's make open source so good that there is not a lot of space for people to like convert it and make it their own thing but you know it ultimately it's it's a trade-off I wanted to I wanted it to be accessible and free you pick MIT or something like that yes that we get to people that that that sell it yeah but ultimately it doesn't even matter that much you know code is code is not worse that much anymore it's you could you could you could just delete that and then and then build it again in months it's it's much more the idea and the eyeballs and maybe the brand that actually has value so let them hmm you are already a cult hero yeah the chat's going crazy for you everyone loves you this is uh one of the most refreshing and unique interviews we've ever had on the show for sure for sure well you can sleep uh thank you so much for hopping on the show yeah anything else you want to share before you jump off yeah uh yes I would love to have maintain us like if you if you love open source if you have experience if you love shifting to security reports uh or or if you love taking software apart but then also help and not just like throw work at me because I'm like at my limit um email me I'm I want this to uplift me this I think this is too cool to to to let it go to rot and it's good people yeah incredible are you going to ship that product you had in the in the chamber you said there was one you were close or you're going to lock in on this yeah that's that's boy hobby I don't know no no I have some other ideas in my head of um what something like this could become mm-hmm it doesn't need to be this but I don't want to share too much yeah no room come back on the show when you when you launch that we'd love to have you purely for the love of the game the love of the game you're an absolute legend this is great hanging Peter thanks so much I had some sleep get some sleep we'll talk to you soon goodbye what a legend yeah uh true overnight success in both ways you know I like actually an overnight success in terms of that GitHub star chart and then also an overnight success and just grinding for you know years building projects and contributing and then uh building setting the product up the brand right everything just perfect to really capitalize on the moment there were so many I I normally I don't have we don't we're podcasting so much yeah don't have a ton of time to read listen to stuff but there were so many very interesting kind of interesting points of view that he shared that uh I'll certainly I'm super interested to see where this goes a lot of people are saying get this guy a billion dollars a lot of people are saying he's going to wind up working the whole thing is I don't think he needs it yeah like like the beauty of this is that it was not something magical that was created by spending yeah burning a billion dollars