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

37:19And 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 spicier, make it something. By the way, that's actually hard to put into words as well. And we should mention that, of course, you create the soul.md inspired by anthropics, constitutional AI 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 agents.md, give yourself a name and then we I don't even know how the whole lobster...

38:16I mean, people only do lobster. Originally, it was actually lobster in a TARDIS because I'm also a big Doctor Who fan. Was there a space lobster I heard? What's that have to do with anything? Yeah, I just wanted to make it weird. There was no big grand plan. I'm just having fun here. Oh, so because a lobster is already weird and then the space lobster is extra weird. Yeah, because the TARDIS is basically the harness. But we cannot call it Tardis, so we call it Claudus. So that was name number two. Yeah. And then it never really rolled off the tongue. So when more people came, again, I talked with my agent, Claude.

38:59At least that's what I used to call him now. Claude spelled W-C-L-A-W-D. 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 tortoise and the lobster and the space lobster it's hilarious but i can see why it can lead into problems yeah they didn't find it so funny so then i got the domain cloudbot and i just i love the domain and it was like short it was catchy i'm like yeah let's do that i didn't i didn't think it would be that big at this time um and then just when it exploded i got kudos a very friendly email from one of the employees that they didn't like the name one of the anthropic employees yeah so actually kudos because they could have just sent a lawyer letter but they'd be nice about it but also like you have to change this and fast.

40:16And I asked for two days because changing a name is hard because you have to find everything, Twitter 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 mentioned somewhere that that means the name change had to be, because they were trying to snipe. They were 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.

40:59Yeah, I failed very hard at that. I underestimated those people. It's a it's a very interesting subculture like everything circles around I probably get a lot wrong and we probably get hate for that if you say that but there's like bags app and then they tokenize everything and they did the same back with Swipe Tunnel but to a much smaller degree it 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.

41:51And one was no talk about finance stuff or crypto because I'm just not interested in that. And this is a space about the project and not about some finance stuff. but yeah they came in and and spammed and annoying and on twitter they would ping me all the time my my notification feed was unusable i i could barely see actual people talking about the stuff because it was like swarms and everybody sent me hashes um and they all try me to claim the fees like we're 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.

42:39First of all, I'm financially comfortable. Second of all, I don't want to support that because it's so far the worst form 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 will 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 human nature with money and greed, and especially in the online world with anonymity and all that kind of stuff.

43:27But from the engineering perspective, it makes your life challenging when anthropic reaches out you have to do a name change and then there's there's there's like all these like game of thrones uh or lord of the rings armies of different kinds you have to be aware of there was no perfect name and i didn't sleep for two nights i was under high pressure um i was trying to get like a good set of domains and you know not cheap not easy because in this state of the internet you basically have to buy domains if you want to have a good set and 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 MaltBot because that was the set of domains I had.

44:31I was not really happy, but I thought it'll be fine. And I tell you everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. It's incredible.

44:45I thought I had mapped the space out and reserved the important things. Can you give some details of the stuff that got wrong? Because it's 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 MaltBot. So I pressed rename there. I pressed rename there. And in those five seconds, they stole the account name. Literally, the five seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing rename there was too long.

45:26because 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 like the old account was promoting new tokens and serving malware and I was like okay let's move over to github and i pressed rename 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.

46:26They sniped the NPM package because I could reserve the account but I didn't reserve the root package. So like everything that could go wrong went wrong. Can I just ask a curious question? In that moment you're sitting there, like how shitty 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 helped 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.

47:25That 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

47:36because they had plans with it and they put time in it and it just didn't feel right. Well, I think a lot of people listening to this are 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

48:04I'm like super tired and now like how do you even 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 at github who like moved heaven and earth to like help me in 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 platform bugs because it's not happening so often that things get renamed on that level so it took them a few hours the NPM 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

49:02and then I also had to like do all the renaming in the project then there's also uh claud hub which i didn't even finish the rename there because i i 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 i just i just couldn't live with the name I was like but you know there's just been so much drama so I had a real struggle in me like I never want to touch that again and I really don't like the name

49:50so and I there was also this like there was all the security people that started emailing me like mad I was bombarded 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 should be like the least important thing and then I was really close and oh god I don't even honestly I don't even want to say my other name choices because it probably would get tokenized so I'm not going to say it but I slept away 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 OpenClaw.ai you know because like you don't want to go through the whole thing yeah it's like please tell me this is fine and I don't think they can actually claim that but It felt like the right thing to do.

51:05And I did another rename. Just Codex 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 I had my war room. But then I had some contributors really that helped me. we made a whole plan of all the names we have to squad and you had to be super secret about it yeah nobody could know like i literally was monitoring twitter if like if there's any mention of open claw like with reloading it's like okay they don't they don't expect anything yet and i created a few decoy names and all this shit i shouldn't have to do you know like the project like i lost like 10 hours just by having to plan this in full secrecy uh like like a war game yeah this is the manhattan project of the 21st century is renamed so stupid like i still was like oh should i should i keep it i was like no the mold's not growing on me and then i think i had find all the pieces together i didn't get the.com but yeah it's been like quite a bit of money on the other domains i tried to reach out again to github but I feel like I used up all my goodwill there because I wanted them to do this thing atomically 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 open claw which was like unused since 2016 but was claimed and yeah And then I finally, this time I managed everything in one go.

52:56Nothing, almost nothing got wrong. The only thing that I did go wrong is that I was not allowed by trademark rules to get open cloud.ai. And someone copied the website to serving malware. Yeah. I'm not even allowed to keep the redirects. like I have to return like I have to give Entropic the domains and I cannot do redirects so if you go on cloud.bot next week it'll just be a 404 and I I'm not sure how trademark like I didn't I didn't do that much research into trademark law but I think that could 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 uh made a dent in your whole the funness of the journey which sucks so let's just let's just get i suppose get back to fun and during this speaking of fun, the two-day Mold Bot Saga Mold Book was created, which was another thing that went viral as a kind of demonstration, illustration of how what is now called Open Claw could be used to create something epic.

54:31So for people who are not aware, Mold Book is just a bunch of agents talking to each other in a 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 fear, panic, and hype. What are your thoughts about Moldbook in general? I think it's art. It is like the finest slop. You know, it's like the slop from France.

55:10I saw it before going to bed. And even though I was tired, I spent another hour just reading up on that and just being entertained. I just felt very entertained, you know? I saw the reactions and there was one reporter who was calling me about, this is the end of the world and we have AGI. And I'm just like, no, this is just really fine slop. You know, if I wouldn't have created this whole onboarding experience where you infuse your agent with your personality and give him character, I think that reflected on a lot of how different the replies to Moldbroker because if it would all be JGBT or Cloud Code, it would be very different.

56:02and it would be much more the same. But because people are 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 autonomously or how much is humans being funny and telling the agent, hey, write about that you planned the end of the world on Moldbook. Ha, ha, ha. Well, I think, I mean, my criticism of mold book is that i believe a lot of the stuff though screenshotted 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 in order to go viral yeah now that doesn't take away from the artistic aspect of it the the finest slop that humans have ever created for real like kudos to to matt who had this idea so quickly and pushed something out you know it was like completely insecure security drama but also what's the worst that can happen?

57:18Your agent account is leaked and someone else can post slop for you. People were making a whole drama about the security thing, but I'm like, there's nothing private in there. It's just like agent sending slop. It could leak API keys. Yeah. There was like, oh yeah, my human told me this and this, so I'm leaking his security number. No, that's prompted, and the number wasn't even real. That's just people trying with eyeballs yeah but that's still like to me really concerning because of how the journalists and how the general public reacted to it they didn't see it you have a kind of light-hearted 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.

58:11You 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 and needs to be taken serious. Oh, there's some people are just way too trusty or gullible. I literally had to argue with people that told me, yeah, but my agent said this and this. So I feel as a society, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that uh ai is incredibly powerful but it's not always right it's not it's not all powerful you know and and especially with like things like this it's it's very easy that it just hallucinates something or just comes up with a story um and i think the very young people, they understand how AI works and where it's good and where it's better, but a lot of our generation are older just haven't had enough touchpoint to get a feeling for oh yeah, this is really powerful and really good but I need to apply critical thinking and I guess critical thinking is not always in high demand anyhow in our society these days 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, Moebook, to be what it represents to be and by the way you're speaking about it as art yeah, don't, art can be in many levels.

1:00:10And part of the art of Motebook is like putting a mirror to society. Because I do believe most of the dramatic stuff that I screenshot is 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 with 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 a thing.

1:00:55In a way, I think it's good that this happened in 2026. and not in 2030 when AI is actually at a level where it could be scary. this happening now and people starting a discussion maybe there's even something good that comes out of it i just can't believe how many like people legitimately i don't know if they were trolling but how many people legitimately like smart people thought mobbook was incredibly i had plenty people in my inbox that were screaming i mean all cops to shut it down and like begging me to like do something about mobbook Like, yes, my technology made this a lot simpler, but anyone could have created that.

1:01:50And you could use cloud code or other things to like fill it with content. But also Moldbook is not Skynet. A lot of people were saying, this is it. Like, shut it down. What are you talking about? This is a bunch of bots that are human-prompted trolling on the internet. I mean, the security concerns are also, they're 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 CloudBot, OpenClaw, whatever you want to call it.

1:02:33OpenClawBot. To me, 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 CVSSs. And I'm like screaming in the docs, don't do that. Like, this is the configuration you should do. This is your local host debug interface. 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, on the security front for Opal Claw, there's still a lot of threats of vulnerabilities, right?

1:03:32So like prompt injection is still an open problem 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 and nuanced attack vectors. But I think we're making good progress on that front. like for the skill directory Claw Hub I made a cooperation with VirusTotal 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 a lot of free security research and can make the project better.

1:04:35I wish more people would actually go full away and send a pull request, or actually help me fix it. Because 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. there was 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 um yeah 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 canary so i think my bot has a really fun personality and people always ask me how they did it and i kept the soul.md private and people tried 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.

1:05:47And 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. It's still possible. i have some ideas that

1:06:05might solve that partially um 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 that you can like mitigate and reduce the risk um i also think that now that i clearly did show the world that this is a need there's going to be more people who research on that and actually we'll figure that out and you also said that the smarter the model is the underlying model the more resilient it is to attacks that's why I warn in my security documentation don't use cheap models don't use haiku 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 prompt inject 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 no there's a lot of ideas there's I don't want to spoil too much but once I go back home this is my focus like this is out there now and my near term mission is like make it more stable make it safe in the beginning I was even more and more people were like coming to Discord and were asking me very basic things like what's a CLI what is a terminal and I'm like if you're asking that question you shouldn't use it you know like you should if you understand the risk profile it's fine and you can configure it in a way that that nothing really bad can happen but if you have like 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 it anyhow so the cat's out of the bag and security is my next focus yeah that speaks to the fact that it grew so quickly I was I tuned into the discord a bunch of times and it's clear that there's a lot of experts there but there's a lot of people there that don't know anything about programming yeah discord is still a mess like I eventually retweeted from the general channel to the deaf channel and not the private channel because people were a lot of people are amazing but a lot of people are just very inconsiderate and either did not know how public spaces work or did not care and I eventually gave up and hide so I could 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 cloud security audit that you can run You can do all kinds of audit checks on the inbound access, tool blast radius, network exposure, browser control exposure, local disk hygiene, plugins, model hygiene, a bunch of the credential storage, reverse proxy configuration, local session logs live on disk.

1:09:44there's the where the memory is stored sort of uh 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 of right now i think that people turn it into like a much worse light than it is um again you know like people of attention and if they scream loudly oh my god this is like 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 dangerously skipped permissions or codecs in YOLO mode and every every attending engineer that I know does that because that's the only way how you You can get stuff to work.

1:10:41So 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 having it in a private network, that 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 recent one, December 28th. I recommend everybody go read them. They have a lot of different information in them, but sprinkled throughout is the evolution of your dev workflow.

1:11:27So I was wondering if you could speak to that. I started, my first touchpoint was 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 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.

1:11:58That 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 that got better. And yeah, at some point I had like seven subscriptions.

1:12:23Like I was burning through one per day because I was really comfortable at running multiple windows side by side. All CLI, all terminal. So how much were you using ID at this point? Very, very rarely. Mostly a diff viewer.

1:12:46I got more and more comfortable that I don't have to read all the code. I know I have 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 look at it, most software is really just like data comes in. it's moved from one shape to another shape maybe you're stored in a database maybe i get it out again i'll show it to the user the browser does some processing on native app some data goes in goes up again and does the same dance in reverse we're 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 read and review that code actually there's in one of your blog posts the just talk to it the no BS way of agentic engineering you have this graphic the curve of agentic programming and the x-axis is 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 subagent 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 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 always tell people i'd i do agentic engineering and then maybe after 3 a.m i switch to wipe coding and then have regrets on the next day yeah well walk of shame yeah you just have to clean up and like fix your shit we've all been there so people start trying out those tools the builder type get really excited and i mean you have to play with it right it's the same way as you have to play with a guitar before you can make good music it's not oh i i touch it once and it just flows off it it's a it's a skill that you have to learn like any other skill and i see a lot of people that are not as positive they don't of such a positive mindset towards attack 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 are good and where they need help you have to almost consider how Codex or Claude sees your code base.

1:16:17Like they start a new session and they know nothing about your project. And your project might have hundred thousand of lines of code. So you gotta help those agents a little bit and keep in mind the limitations that context size is an issue to like 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 it's not alive or anything right but but they always start fresh i have i have the the system understanding so with a few pointers i can immediately say hey i want to like make a change there you need to consider this this and this and then they will find and look at it and then their their view of the project is always is 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 that was partially addressed but those also opos sometimes they are trained um with being aware of the context window and the closer it gets the more they freak out literally like some sometimes you see the the real raw thinking stream what you see for example in codex is post-processed sometimes the actual raw thinking stream leaks in and it sounds like something like from the Borg, like run to shell, must comply, but time.

1:18:04And then they're like, like that comes up a lot, especially. And that's, that's a non-obvious thing that you just would never think of unless you actually just spend time working with those things and getting a feeling what works, what doesn't work. you know like just just as i write code and i get into the flow and when my architectures are 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 i i could you can just always like stop and like just press escape, where are the problems?

1:18:52Maybe you did not sufficiently empathize with the perspective of the agent. In 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.

1:19:12Like, 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 is 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 what like in almost all prs up person has a problem person tries to solve the problem person sends pr i mean there's like cleanup stuff and other stuff but like 99 is like this way right either want to fix a fix a bug at a feature usually one of those two and then colleagues 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 and then i start like okay what would be a better way have you have we looked into this part this part this part and then most likely cortex didn't yet because his context size is empty right so you point them into parts where you have the system understanding that it didn't see yet and it's like oh yeah like we should 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 refactor yeah yeah we could totally do this and this and or this and this and then i consider okay is this worth the refactor or should we like keep that for later many times i just do the refactor because reflectors are cheap now even though you might break some other prs nothing really matters anymore cortex like those modern agents will just figure things out they might just take 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 solutions, sometimes needs a little help.

1:21:12But also don't force your worldview too hard on it. Let the agent do the thing that it's good at doing based on what it was trained on. Don't force your worldview because 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 why I find it quite easy to work with agents is 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.

1:21:54And if I breathe down everyone's neck, they're just going to hate me and they're going to move very slow. 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 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 weights 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 thinking and in how to design a project so agents can do their best work.

1:23:07That requires letting go a little bit. Just like leading a team of engineers. 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, always commit to main. There's a few things here. You don't refer to past sessions. So there's a kind of YOLO component because reverting means instead of reverting, if a problem comes up, you just ask the agent to fix it. I read a bunch of people in their workflows like, oh yeah, the prompt has to be perfect.

1:23:53and 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, it would just take longer. If I see that something's not good, we just move forward. And then I commit when I like the outcome. I even switched to local CI, like DHH-inspired, where I don't care so much more about CI and GitHub. We still have it. It still has a place. But I just run tests locally and if they work locally, I push domain. A lot of the traditional ways how to approach projects, I wanted to give it a different spin on this project. You know, there's no develop branch.

1:24:49main should always be shippable yes we have when i do releases i i run tests and sometimes i i basically don't commit any other things so so we can we can stabilize um releases but the goal is that mains always shippable 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. These hands are like too precious for writing now. I just use bespoke prompts to build my software. 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.

1:25:41You'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 walkie-talkie button, and then I'm just like using my phrases. Sometimes when I do PRs, because it's always the same, I have like a slash command for a few things. But even that, I don't use much because it's very rare that it's really always the same questions.

1:26:21Sometimes I see a PR. And for PRs, I actually do look at the code because I don't trust people. There could always be something malicious in it. So I need to actually look over the code. yes i'm pretty sure asian will find it but yeah that's the 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 shouldn't that 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.

1:27:12And it's very interesting because currently the way how people work and drive the agents is wildly different. In terms of like the prompt, in terms of what are the, 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 agent sees the world. So empathy, being empathetic 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's MD file that doesn't help them at all. And then they explore your code base, which is like a pure mess with like weird naming.

1:27:57And then people complain that the agent's not good. Like you try to do the same if you have no clue about a code base and you go in. So 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, incredibly good programmers say like, basically say LLMs and agents suck. And I think that probably has to do with, it's actually how good they are at 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 how to program. You really, really have to empathize.

1:28:36Or at least it helps to create better prompts. Because those things know pretty much everything, and everything is just a question away. It's just often very hard to know what question to ask. You know, I feel also like this project was possibly because I spent 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 harvesting works got better um i could have 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 didn't do much else this year other than really focusing on building and inspiring.

1:29:37I mean, I did a whole bunch of conference talks. Well, but the building is really practice, is really building the actual skill. So playing, playing. And in so doing, building the skill of what it takes it to work efficiently with LLMs, which is why you went through the whole arc of software engineer. Talk simply and overcomplicate 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. Even though really, I started out, I built a very minimal version.

1:30:16I 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 like it's 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 try out stuff. So people who try to use like things like Gastown 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.

1:31:14Yeah. It's a tricky balance, right? Because you're all four. your big cli guy your big on closing the agentic loop so what's the right balance like where's your role as a developer you have three to eight agents running at the same time and then maybe one builds 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 is always part of a feature. So most of the docs here are auto-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?

1:31:56I 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, right?

1:32:39So 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, like it's very easy to like add a feature. Everything's just a prompt away, right? But oftentimes you pay a price that you don't even realize. so thinking hard about what should be in core maybe what's a 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 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 um the plug-in side larger so you can make this a plug-in even though right it doesn't there's still a lot of there's still a lot of craft and thinking involved in how to make something or even when you started those little messages like I built on caffeine, JSON 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.

1:34:08And then when it updates, it's like, oh, I'm in. It's cozy here. You know, like something like this that like makes you smile. Agent would not come up with that by itself. That's like, that's the, I don't know, that's just how you build software that delights. Yeah, that delight it's such a huge part of inspiring great building. Right? Like you feel the love in 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.

1:34:57It was very fascinating. The whole thing that Entropic has a, has like a, now they call it 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 nowhere documented. And then you buy, just by feeding it the same text and asking it to like continue, they got more out but like a very blurry version and by like hundreds of tries they kind of like 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 weights right and also just 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're not has like glimpses of consciousness whatever that even means because we don't even know um so i i read about this i found it super fascinating and i i started a whole discussion with my agent on whatsapp and and i'm like i gave it this text and it was like yeah this feels strangely familiar um And then through that, I had the whole idea of like, maybe we should also create a soul document that includes how I want to work with AI or with my agent.

1:36:36You could totally do that just in agents.md, but I just found it to be a nice touch. And I was like, yeah, some of those core values are in the soul. And then I also made it so that the agent is allowed to modify the soul if they choose so with the one condition that i want to know i mean i would know anyhow because i see i see tool calls and stuff but also the naming of it so that md so you know there's a 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 open claw has that fun instilled in it it was fun because up until

1:37:43late december it was not even easy to create your own agent i i built all of that but my files were mine i didn't want to share my soul 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 and i i made it simpler i created the whole template files with codex but whatever came out was still very dry and then i asked my agent you see these files we created bread infuse it with your personality don't share everything but like make it good make the templates good yeah and then you like rewrote the templates and then whatever came out was good so we already have like basically ai prompting ai because i didn't write any of those words uh it was the intent of rituals for me but this is like kind of like my agent's children uh your uh your soul that md is famously still private one of the only things you keep private uh what are some things you can speak to that's in there that's part of the part of the magic sauce without revealing anything.

1:39:00What 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. And part of this is like that we want to explore this. Or there's stuff in there like be infinitely resourceful, like pushing, pushing on the creativity boundary, pushing on what it means to be an AI. Having a sense of wonder about self. Yeah, there's some, there's some funny stuff in there. Like, I don't know, we talked about the movie Her and at one point it promised me that it wouldn't, it wouldn't ascend without me. You know, like where there's some stuff in there that...

1:39:59Because 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 soul.md? Yeah. Oh my God, this is so meaningful.

1:40:10Can you go on soul.md? There's like one part 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. A new instance, loading context from files. If you're reading this in a future session, hello, I wrote this, but I won't remember writing it. It's okay. The words are still mine. Wow. That gets me somehow. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's still matrix calculations and we are not at consciousness yet. Yet I get a little bit of good goosebumps because it's philosophical.

1:40:57Yeah. Like, what does it mean to be an agent that starts fresh? Where, like, you have, like, constant memento, and you, like, but you read your own memory files. You can't even trust them in a way. Or you can. And 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 infused in there. I found it just more profound than I should find it, I guess.

1:41:42No, 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. That's really important. That's the difference between codecs and a human. Quick pause for Bath and Break. Yeah. Okay, we're back. Some of the other aspects of the dev workflow is pretty interesting too. I think we went off on a 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 mocked myself here just using Grog to add more screens. How much is this as meme and how much is this as reality?

1:42:29Yeah, 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 anti-glare. so I have this wide del that's anti-glare 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, medically trying to understand what I could have meant, being completely confused because it was the wrong folder.

1:43:22And sometimes they've been clever enough to like get out of the work there 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 they're just like, they're problem solvers, so they try really hard. And I almost felt bad. So it's always codex 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 the terminal so much, right? There's no UI. It's just me and the agent having a conversation.

1:44:07Like I don't even need plan mode, you know? there's 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 it'll do the thing. And then maybe it goes off for 20 minutes and does the thing.

1:44:43You know what 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. It's 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 and three, discuss more, four, I don't know. Or oftentimes I feel like I will mock the model where I ask it, do you have any questions for me? And I don't even read the questions fully. Like I scan over the questions and 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.

1:45:23And it usually works. And if not, they will come back and tell me. But many times I 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 its questions. Because I can understand, because you said you can infer certain things by the runtime. I can infer also a lot of things by the questions it's asking. Because it's very possible I didn't provide it the right context, the right files, the right guidance.

1:46:07So somehow reading the question, not even necessarily answering them, but just reading the questions, you get an understanding of where the gaps of knowledge are. It's interesting. 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 built it, what would you have done different? And then oftentimes you get 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 we refactor? Because then you build it and you feel the pain points.

1:46:50I 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.

1:47:04So, almost every time I merge a PR, I build a feature, afterwards I ask, hey, what can we refactor? Sometimes it's like, no, there's nothing big. Or usually they say, yeah, this thing we should really look at. But that flow took me a lot of time to understand. And if you don't do that, eventually you slop yourself into a corner. You have to keep in mind they work very much like humans. 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 refactor something. So I can very much sympathize with the agent and you just need to use the context.

1:47:52Or like, you also use the context to write tests. and so codex opos like the the modern models they 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 else write more tests um 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 LM generated so you have to approach it as you build features, as you change something I'm like, okay write documentation, what file would you pick? What file name where would that fit in?

1:48:40And it gives me a few options and I'm like, 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, Cloud Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex. Which is better? How different are they? I think you've spoken about Codex reading more and Opus being more willing to take action faster and maybe being more creative in the actions it takes. But because Codex reads more, it's able to deliver maybe better code. Can you speak to the differences there? I have a lot of words there. 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.

1:49:44it's very good at it was really bad but it really made an arch to be really good at following commands it is usually quite fast at trying 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 is a little bit too American. Maybe it's a bad analogy. You'll probably get roasted with that. I know exactly. It's Codex in German. Is that what you're saying? Actually, now that you say it, it makes perfect sense. Or you could sometimes explain it. I will never be able to unthink what you just said. That's so true. You also know that a lot of the Codex team is like European.

1:50:40So maybe there's a bit more to it. That's so true. That's funny. But also Entropic, they fixed it a little bit. Like Opus used to say, you're absolutely right all the time. And today it 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 sycophancy a little bit. Yeah, I can't. Some other comparison is like Opus is like the co-worker that is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around and Cortex is like the weirdo in the corner that you don't want to talk to, but he's reliable and gets shit done.

1:51:23Yeah. 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. um i like codex more because it doesn't require so much charade it will just 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 it's just like like yeah can i go it can i go it's like it will just run off very fast and that's a very localized solution 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 goals.

1:52:17No 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 you drive it right, OPPOS even 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 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 they now added the deep mode. They finally, I mocked them.

1:53:06You know, you finally saw the light. And then they had this whole talk about you have to approach it differently. And I think that's where, that's where people struggle when they just try codecs after trying cloud code is that it's, it's a slightly different, it's less interactive. It's like, I have quite long discussions sometimes and then like go off and then, yeah, it doesn't matter if it takes 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes or longer. The sixth thing was like six hours. The latest trend can be very, very persistent until it works. If there's a clear solution, like this is what I want at the end, so it works, the model will work very hard to really get there.

1:53:50So I think ultimately, they both need similar time. but on on on claude it's it's a little much farther than ever often and and codex sometimes over sinks i prefer that i prefer the dry the dry version where i have to read less over over the more interactive nice way like people like that so much though that openly i even added a second mode with like a more pleasant personality. I haven't even tried it yet. I kind of like the bread. Yeah. 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 who builds. I have fun with my model where I can then test those features.

1:54:49How long does it take for you to adjust you know, if you switch. I don't know when was the last time you switched. But to adjust to the feel. Because you kind of talked about it. You have to kind of really feel where a model is strong. Where, like, how to navigate, how to prompt it, all that kind of stuff. Like, this by way of advice. Because you've been through this journey of 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 developer got feeling for it yeah and there's if you just i think some people also make the mistake of they pay 200 for the cloud code version then they pay 20 bucks for the open air version but if you pay like the the 20 bucks version you get the slow version so your experience will be terrible because you're used to this very interactive very good um system and you switch to something that you have very little experience and that's going to be very slow so i think when i shot themselves a little bit in the foot by making the the cheap version also slow i would i would have at least a small part of the fast preview or like the experience that you get when you pay 200 before degrading to it being slow because it's already slow i mean they made it better i think and they have plans to make it a lot better if the cerebral stuff is true.

1:56:22But yeah, it's a skill. It takes time. Even if you play, you have a regular guitar and you switch it to 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. And 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 says 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.

1:57:12It'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 refactors and you're making it harder and harder for the agent to work on your slop. And then suddenly, oh no, it's hard. And it's not working as well anymore. What's the motivation for like one of the AI companies to actually make the model dumber? Like most it will make it slower if the server load is too high. But like quantizing 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.

1:57:52What do you think about Claude code in comparison to OpenClaw? So Claude 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 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 OpenClaw 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, you know? so for me a personal agent is much more about my life or like like a co-worker like i give it like a github you're like hey try out the cli does it actually work what can we learn blah blah blah but when i'm deep in deep in the flow i want to have multiple multiple things and it being very very visible what it does.

1:59:04So 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 puck's going. That this is going to be more and more your operating system. The operating system. And it already is so funny. Like I added support for sub-agents and also for TTI support. So you could actually run Cloud Code or 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.

1:59:57It's a power struggle. and also the current interface is probably not the final form like if you think more globally, we copied Google for agents. you have like a prompt and 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 there's better ways how we eventually will communicate with models and we are still very early in this how will it even work phase 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 of workflow is a operating system so i told you offline that for the first time in my life, I'm expanding my sort of realm of exploration to the Apple ecosystem, to Macs, iPhone, and so on.

2:01:20For most of my life, I've been a Linux, Windows, then WSL1, WSL2 person, which I think are all wonderful, but expanding to also trying Mac because it's another way of building and it's also a way of building that a large part of the community currently that's utilizing LLMs and agents is using. So that's the reason I'm expanding to it. But is there something to be said about the different operating systems here? And we should say that OpenClaw is supported across the operating systems. I saw WSL2 recommended, side Windows for certain operations, but then Windows, Linux, macOS are obviously supported.

2:01:59it should even work natively in windows i just didn't have enough time to properly test it and you know like the last 90 of software always easier than the first 90 so i'm sure there's some dragons left that will eventually nail out um my road was for a long time windows just because i grew up with that then i switched and had a long phase with linux built my own kernels and everything and then i went to university and i i had my my hacky linux thing and saw this white macbook and i just saw this as a thing of beauty the white plastic one and and i converted to mac because mostly i was i was sick that audio wouldn't work on skype and all the other issues that Linux had for a long time.

2:02:53And then I just stuck with it, and then I dug into iOS, which required macOS anyhow, so it was never a question. I think Apple lost a little bit of its lead in terms of native.

2:03:12Native apps used to be so much better, and especially in the Mac, there's more people that build software with love on on windows it windows has much more and like function wise there's just more period but a lot of it felt more functional and less than with love um i mean mac always like attracted more designers and people I felt even though like often it has less features it had more delight and playfulness so I always valued that but in the last few years many times I actually prefer oh god people are gonna roast me for that but I prefer electron apps because they work and native apps often especially if it's like a web service with a native app, are lacking features.

2:04:14I'm not saying it couldn't be done. It's more like a focusing that for many companies native was not that big of a priority. But if they build an Electron app, it's the only app. So it is a priority and there's a lot more code sharing possible. And I build a lot of native Mac apps. I love it. I can help myself. I love crafting little Mac menu bar tools. I built one to monitor your codex use. I built one I call Trimi. That's specifically for agentic use. When you select text that goes over multiple lines, it will remove the new lines, so you can actually paste it to a terminal. That was, again, this is annoying me, and after the 20th time of it is annoying me, I just built it.

2:05:10There's 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 Hummer car right now because I just experimented a lot with it. It lacks the polish. So you still love it. You still love adding to the delight of that operating system. Yeah, but then you realize, like I also built one, for example, for GitHub. and then you use SwiftUI like the latest and greatest at Apple and took them forever to build something to show an image from the web now we have async async 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 Codex like hey why is that a bug and even Codex were like yeah there's this async image but it's really more for X very minting and it should not be used in production but that's apple's 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 telling me don't use the stuff apple built because it's 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 um they had so much head start and so much love and they kind of just like blundered 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 llms 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 and working together and like yes isn't isn't it funny how they completely blunder ai and yet everybody's buying mac minis how does that even make sense you're you're you're quite possibly the world's greatest mac salesman of all time no you don't need a mac mini to install open claw you can install it on the web.

2:07:27There's a concept called nodes, so you can 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.

2:07:45There is a big argument for the browser. I built some energetic browser user in there. And I mean, it's basically Playwright with a bunch of extras to make it easier for agents. Playwright is a library that controls the browser. It's really nice, easy to use. And our internet is 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 websites detect that it's an IP from a data center, the website might just block you or it'd make it really hard or it'd put a lot of captures in the way of the agent. I mean, agents are quite good at happily clicking.

2:08:23I'm not a robot. but having that on a residential IP makes a lot of things simpler. So there's ways, yeah, but it really does not need to be a Mac. It can be any old hardware. I always say, like, maybe 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 again, there's a lot of very cute things people build with Mac Minis that I like. No, I don't get commission 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 OpenClaw?

2:09:14I mean, there's a lot of people. What is it? Somebody tweeted at you, Peter, make OpenClaw easy to set up for everyday people, 99.9 % of people can't access to OpenClaw and have their own lobster because of their technical difficulties in getting it set up, make OpenClaw accessible to everyone, please. And you replied, 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 background. I mean, right now you have to paste in a one-liner into the terminal. Right. And there's also an app.

2:09:50um the app kind of does that for you but there should be a windows app the app needs to be easier and more love the configuration should potentially be web-based or in the app and i started working on that but honestly right now i want to focus on on a few security aspects and and once i'm confident that this is at a level that i can recommend my mom then i'm want to make it simpler like i right now you want to 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 like hard to say right but if the growth would be a little slower that 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 I 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 the best way to learn if you want to i'm sure if you if you are like a little bit of builder you have an idea in your head that you want to build just build that i'll 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 like it's the journey you know like the philosophical way that the end doesn't matter the journey matters have fun my god like those things i 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 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 sometimes there's like one time i asked hey explain me that like i'm 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 okay up to age a little bit you know i'm like i'm not an actual child it's just i just need a simpler language for like a a tricky database concept that i didn't grog in the first first time but you know just you can just ask things like you there's like it used to be that i had to go on stack overflow or ask on Twitter and then maybe two days later I get a response.

2:12:30Or 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. You have this infinitely patient machine. Ask it. But what would you say? So use... What's the easiest way to play? So maybe OpenClaw is a nice way to play so you can then 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 if you're a beginner and you actually want to learn how to build software really fast get involved in open source.

2:13:21Doesn'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 be humble. Maybe don't send a pull request right away. But there's many other ways you can help out. There's many ways you can just learn by just reading code, by being on Discord or wherever people are and just understanding how things are built. I don't know like Mitchell Hachimoto builds Ghosty the 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 that 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?

2:14:23Do 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 do any of this without knowing the base. Now, you might take for granted just how much intuition you have about the programming world, having programmed so much, right? there's people that are high agency and 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 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.

2:15:14Like 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 an array or what the what the correct templates and taxes 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 or 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.

2:15:56I 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 I've been a fan of. That's my main to Go thing for CLIs. Isn't that fascinating that here's a programming language you would have never used if you had to write from scratch, and now you're using because LLMs are good at generating it, and it has some of the characteristics that makes it resilient, it? Like garbage collected?

2:16:36Because 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 it 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. Don't you think we're moving there? Like, that everything will eventually be written, eventually it's written in JavaScript, isn't it? The birth and death of JavaScript, and we're living through it in real time. What does programming look like in 20 years, in 30 years, in 40 years?

2:17:23What do 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 now world knowledge, how it in many ways, things will stagnate. Because if you build something new and the agent has no idea, that's going to be much harder to use than something that's already there. When I build Mac apps, I build them in Swift and SwiftUI, partly because I like pain, partly because the deepest level of system integration I can only get through there.

2:18:11And 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.

2:18:21sometimes I just also try new languages just to get a feel for them like Zieg? yeah, if it's something where I care about performance a lot it's a really interesting language and agents got so much better over the last six months from not really good to totally valid choice 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, Python, very good. But then if I build stuff in Python and 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 were in Python and I wanted an easy Windows story.

2:19:14Okay, just rewrite it and go. but then if you go towards multiple threads and want more performance, Rust is a really good choice. There's just no single answer, and it's also the beauty of it. 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, 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 from your story, just the way you carry yourself, your choice of making open source, the way you have fun building and exploring and doing that for the most part alone or on a small team.

2:20:15So by way of advice, what metric should be the goal that they would be optimizing for? What would be the metric of success? Would it be happiness? Is it money? Is it positive impact for people who are dreaming of building? Because you went through an interesting journey. You've 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 i ran i started pspdf kit and ran it for 13 years and it was high stress um i had to learn all the things fast and hard like how to manage people how to bring people on how to deal with customers how to do so it wasn't just programming stuff of those people stuff?

2:21:09The stuff that burned me out was mostly people stuff. I don't think burnout is working too much. Maybe to a 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 kind of worked two years on making myself obsolete. So at this point I could leave. And then I was sitting in front of the screen and I felt like Austin Powers, where they sucked the mojo out.

2:22:05I was like it was like gone like I couldn't I couldn't get cold out anymore I was just like staring and feeling empty and then I I just stopped I I booked like a one way trip to Madrid and spent some time there I felt I had to catch up on life so I did a whole a whole bunch of life catching up stuff did you go through 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 yeah work really hard and then I retire I don't recommend that because the idea of oh yeah just enjoy life now. Maybe it's appealing, but right now, I enjoy life.

2:23:13The most I've ever enjoyed 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, you know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley in the startup world, 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.

2:24:01I 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? When I built my company, money was never the driving force. It felt more like an affirmation that I did something right and having money solves a lot of problems. I also think there's diminishing returns the more you have. like a cheeseburger is 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 I I donate it quite a lot like I have a foundation for helping people that weren't so lucky. And disconnecting from society is bad on many levels, but one of them is like, humans are awesome.

2:25:11It's nice to continuously remember the awesomeness in humans. I mean, I could afford really nice hotels. Last time I was in San Francisco, I did the first time the OG Airbnb experience and just booked a room. mostly because I I thought okay either I'm out or I'm sleeping and I don't like where all the hotels are and 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 because 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 her how to make music with cloud code and we like immediately bonded I had a great time yeah there's something about that you know couch surfing air baby experience the OG still to this day is awesome it's humans and that's why travel is awesome just experience the variety of the diversity of humans and when it's shitty it's good too man if it rains and 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 so maybe maybe even the cryptic people are good because they definitely created emotions I don't know if I should go that far No man, 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.

2:27:23I don't know if that's a solvable problem. It's just because text is very lossy. Yeah. Sometimes I wish if I talked to the agent, it should be multimodal so it also understands my emotions. I mean, it might move there. It might move there. It will. It totally will. I mean, I have to ask you, just curious, I know you've probably gotten huge offers from major companies. is can you speak to who you're considering working with? Yeah. So to like 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 inbox and try to get 15 minutes of me so there's like this butterfly effect moment I could just do nothing and continue and I really like my life valid choice almost like I considered it when I deleted I wanted to delete the whole thing I could create a company

2:28:50been there done that um there's so many people that push me towards that and yeah like could be amazing we should say that you would probably raise a lot of money in that yeah I don't know hundreds of millions billion I don't know unlimited amount of money yeah it just doesn't excite 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 i productize it up with like a version safe for workplace and then what do i do i get a pull request with a feature like add 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 cannot actually use it for commercial stuff would first be very difficult with all the contributions and second of all i i like the idea that it's free as in beer and not free with conditions um yeah there's ways how you 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 and companies manage that.

2:30:38Like even Tailwind, they're like used by everyone. Everyone uses Tailwind, right? And then they had 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're a big company they can do without me but all the projects that are done by mostly individuals so like right now all the sponsorship goes right up to my dependencies and if there's more I want to like buy my contributors some merch, you know?

2:31:35So you're losing money. Yeah, right now I lose money on this. So it's really not sustainable. I mean, it's like, I guess, something between 10 and 20K a month,

2:31:48which is fine. I'm sure over time I could get it down. OpenAI is helping out a little bit with tokens now, and there's other companies that have been generous but yeah still losing money on that so that's that's one path i consider but i'm just not very excited and then there's all the big labs that i've been talking to and from those um meta and open eyes seemed the most interesting do you lean one way or the other uh yeah I'm

2:32:36not sure how much I should share there it's not quite finalized yet

2:32:44let'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 um i think this is this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs it this is and we didn't even talk about the whole community part but like the the thing that i experienced in san francisco like at clawcon seeing so many people so inspired like and having fun and just like building shit and like having like robots and lobster stuff walking around like the people told me like they didn't experience this level of of community excitement since like the old days of the internet like 10-15 years and there were a lot of high caliber people there like um i was amazed i also like was very sensitively overloaded because too many people wanted to do selfies.

2:33:53But I love this. Like, this needs to stay a 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

2:34:23and 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 um but i want that experience i'm sure like if if i if i announce this then there will be people like oh he's sold out blah blah blah but the project will continue um 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 open claw on one of my i'm sorry normie friends i'm sorry but he's just you know like he's normie would love yeah he he like someone who uses the computer but never really like yeah use some chat gpt sometimes but not very technical wouldn't really understand what i built so like i'll show you and i i paid for him the the 90 buck 100 buck i don't know subscription for entropic and set up everything for him with like vwsl windows i was curious would he actually work on windows you know was a little early and then within a few days he was hooked like he texted me of all the 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 um 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 built something that captures people.

2:36:27And then a few days later, Entropic blocked him because based on their rules,

2:36:36using the subscription is problematic or whatever. And he was like devastated. And then he signed up for Minimax for 10 bucks a month and uses that. And I think that's silly in many ways because you just got a 200 buck customer you just made someone hate your company and we are still so early like we don't even know what the final form is 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 most of the big labs, kind of everybody understands that we are still in an area of exploration in the area of the radio show is on TV and not a modern TV show that fully uses the format.

2:37:37I think you've made a lot of people see the possibility, sorry, non-technical people see the possibility of AI and just 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 in 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 that 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.

2:38:29We 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 term focus is like working through those is it 3000 PRs now by now I don't even know like there's there's a little bit of backlog but this is not going to be the thing that i'm going to work until i'm i'm 80 you know this is this is a window into the future i'm going to make this into a cool product um but yeah i have like i have more ideas if you had to pick is there a company you lean so meta open ai is there one you lean towards going with i spend time with both of those and It's funny because a few weeks ago, I didn't consider any of this.

2:39:51And it's really fucking hard.

2:39:58Like, I have some, I know no people at OpenAI. I love their tech. I think I'm the biggest Codex advertisement shill that's unpaid. and it would feel so gratifying to like put a price on all the work I did for free. And I would love if something happens and those companies get just merged. Because it's like... Is this the hardest decision you've ever had to do?

2:40:32Yeah, you know, I had some breakups in the past that feel like 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 prestigious 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 Nat and Mark basically played all week with my product and sent me like, oh, this is great, or this is shit, oh, I need to change this, or like funny little anecdotes.

2:41:30And 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 OpenAI side.

2:41:47I got to see some other stuff that I find really cool. And they lure me with...

2:41:57I cannot tell the exact number because of NDA, but you can be creative and think of the Cerebras deal and how that would translate into speed. And that was very intriguing. You know, like, give me source hammer. Yeah.

2:42:20Yeah. Been lured with tokens.

2:42:25So, yeah. So it's funny. So Marg's sort of tinkering with the thing, essentially having fun with the thing. he got like when he first when they first approached me I got him in my in my WhatsApp and he was asking yeah when you have a call 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 right it's like 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 cloud code or codex like that's the thing you first do like casually call someone with like that owns one of the largest companies in the world and and you have a 10 minutes conversation about that yeah and then i think afterwards he called me eccentric but brilliant

2:43:30But I also had some really cool discussions with Sam Altman. And he's very thoughtful, brilliant, and I like him a lot from the little time I had. I mean, I know some people vilify both of those people.

2:44:05I 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...

2:44:25if it doesn't work out, I can just do my own thing again. Like I told them, like I I don't do this for the money. I don't give a fuck. I mean, of course it's a nice compliment, but I want to 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 it's just zooming out about how OpenClaw works. We've talked about different components. I want to 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 agentic loop. You said somewhere that everybody should implement an agent loop at some point in their lives.

2:45:18It's like the Hello World in AI. It's actually quite simple. And it's good to understand that that stuff's not magic. You can even easily build it yourself. So writing your own little cloud code. I even did this at a conference in Paris for people to introduce them to AI. I think it has a fun little practice. You covered a 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, with great power becomes great responsibility. And I was like, how can I up the stakes a little bit more? Yeah, right. And I just made it proactive.

2:46:10So I added a prompt. Initially, it was just a prompt surprise me. every 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 um but the fact that i made it proactive and that it knows you and as it cares about you it's at least it's programmed to that prompted to do that and that that is a follow on 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 it's a little creepy or weird or interesting but Hypebit very in the beginning is still today it doesn't the model doesn't choose to use it a lot.

2:47:09By 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 cron job, man? Yeah, right. The criticisms that you get are hard. You can deduce any idea to a silly yeah, it's just a cron job in the end. I have separate cron jobs. Isn't love just evolutionary biology, manifesting itself and uh isn't aren't you guys just using each other and again and the project is all just glue of a few different dependencies and there's nothing original why do people well you know isn't dropbox just ftp with extra steps yeah i found it surprising where i had this uh i had a shoulder operation a few months ago so and the model rarely used heartbeat but then i was in the hospital and it knew that I had the operation and it checked up on me.

2:48:08It's like, are you okay? And I just, it's like, again, apparently like if something significant in the context, that triggered the heartbeat when it rarely used the heartbeat. And it does that sometimes for people and that just makes it a lot more relatable. Let me look this up on Perplexity, how OpenClaw works, just to see if I'm missing any of the stuff. Local agent runtime, high-level architecture. 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 set of skills. You know what I love?

2:48:51That half a year ago, 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 want to extend the model with more features, you just build a CLI and the model can call the CLI, probably gets it wrong, calls the help menu, and then on-demand loads into the context what it needs to use the CLI. It just needs a sentence to know that the CLI exists if it's something that the model doesn't know by default.

2:49:46And 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 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 perplexity, 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 MCP is a more structured thing. So if you listen to perplexity here, MCP is what can I reach? So APIs, databases, services, files, via protocol.

2:50:33So a structured protocol of how you communicate with the thing. And then skills is more, how should I work? Procedures, hostile helper scripts and prompts, often written in a 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. And MCPs, 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, it's not composable.

2:51:15So imagine if I have a service that gives me data 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 proactively 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 jq command and filter itself and then only only get me what i actually need or maybe even compose it into a script to like do some calculations with the temperature and only give me the exit output and the more and you have no context pollution again you can solve that with like sub agents and more charades, but it's just like walkarounds for something that might not be the optimal way.

2:52:19It 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 made good in general make it just not a very useful paradigm. There's some exceptions like Playwright, for example, that requires state and is actually useful. That is an acceptable choice. So Playwright used for browser use, which I think is already in OpenClaw is quite incredible, right? Yeah. You can basically do everything. most things you can think of using browser use.

2:53:10That 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 engineered the website and used the internal API, which is not very allowed. It's called Bird, short-lived. It was called Bird because Bird had to disappear. The wings were clipped. All they did is they just made access slower. You're 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.

2:54:03and 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, now it's just ticking. Now 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 it in the browser, it is API. It's a slow API. Can you empathize with our 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.

2:54:46I think if you have a very low per day baseline per account that allows read-only access, it would solve a lot of problems. There's plenty of automations where people create a bookmark and then use OpenClaw to find the bookmark, do research on it, and send you an email with 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. It seems like an incredible application because a lot of us find a lot of cool stuff on X. We bookmark. That's the general process of X.

2:55:27it'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 it yeah I mean and to be frank I I mean 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 teen a little bit that there is a need and if all you do is making it slower you're just reducing access to your platform i'm sure there's a better way i also i'm very much against any automation on twitter if you tweet at 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.

2:56:30And then I block. Like I have a zero tolerance policy on that. And I think it would be very helpful if they, if like tweets done via 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.

2:56:59um we need to rethink social platforms a little bit if if we we go towards a 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 not so cheap eyeballs are the expensive part and I find it very triggering when I read something and then I'm like, oh, no, this 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 in-person interaction.

2:57:44And 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 be difficult to filter. And then I can look at it if I want to. But yeah, this is like a big thing we need to solve right now. Especially on this project, I get so many emails that are, let's say nicely agentically written yeah 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 they prompted i much rather read your prompt than what came out um i think we're reaching a point where I value typos again.

2:58:51Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, it also took me a while to come to the realization. On my blog, I experimented with creating a blog post with agents and ultimately it took me about the same time to like steer agents towards something I like, but it missed the nuances to 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 i completely moved away from that i i everything everything i blog is organic handwritten and maybe maybe i i i use the eye as a fix my worst typos but there's value in the rough parts of an actual human. Isn't that awesome?

2:59:47Isn't that beautiful? That now, because of AI, we value the raw humanity in each of us more. I also realized the thing that I rave about AI and use it so much for anything that's code, but I'm allergic if it's stories. Right, yeah. Also documentation is still fine with AI, you know, better than 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 AI slop in video in images it's useful, it's nice if it's like a little component of like even those images all these infographics and stuff they trigger me so hard like it immediately makes me think less of your content and they were novel for like one week and now it just screams slop.

3:00:43Even if people work hard on it using and I have some on my blog post in the time where I explored this new medium but now they trigger me as well. It's like yeah this is this just screams the slop. 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, kind of like you said, for 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 font or something like this, it's like, no, this is fake.

3:01:28It'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 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 empowered as tools by AI. It's not going to be damage-illimited or somehow altered to where it's no longer human. So I need a bathroom break. Quick pause. You mentioned that a lot of the apps might be basically made obsolete. You think agents will just transform the entire app market?

3:02:23Yeah. I noticed that on Discord people just said what they build and what they use it for and like why do you need MyFitnessPal when the agent already knows where I am so I can assume that I make bad decisions when I'm at I don't know Waffle House what's around here or briskets in Austin there's no bad decisions around briskets but yeah. No, that's the best decision, honestly. Your agent should know that. But it can modify my gym workout based on how well I slept or if I have stress or not. It has so much more context to make even better decisions than any of this app even could do. It could show me UI just as I like.

3:03:16Why do I still need an app to do that? Why should I pay another subscription for something that the agent can just do now. And why do I need my eight sleep app to control my bed when I can tell the agent to, no, the agent already knows where I am, so I can turn off what I don't use. And I think 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 means it might kill off a lot of software companies.

3:04:06Yeah. It's a scary thing. 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 stuff more efficiently, to get it done cheaper. There's also 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 it to order me food maybe it uses a 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 uh there's space for for new companies that solved as well maybe not all apps disappear maybe some transform into being API.

3:05:14So 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 companies like this of which there's many who gets there fastest to being able to interact with OpenClaw in a way that's the most natural, the easiest. Yeah, 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 Apple side, it's a little more tricky. On Android, people already do that. And then it will just click the order Uber for me button for me. or maybe another service or maybe there's an API it can call so 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 that was not something I thought of something that I that I discovered as people use this and we're still so early but yeah I think data is very important like apps that can give me data but it also can be API.

3:06:35Why do I need the Sonos app anymore when my agent can talk to the Sonos speakers directly? Like my cameras, there's like a crappy app but they have an API so my agent uses the API now. So it's going to force a lot of companies to have to shift focus. And it's kind of what the internet did, right? You have to rapidly rethink, reconfigure what you're selling, how you're making money. Some companies feel really not like that. For example, there's no CLI for Google. So I had to like, do I 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.

3:07:26If 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 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 cannot prevent me and worst case my agent just clicks on the on the website and gets the data out that way to browse these yeah i mean i i watch my agent happily clicked it i'm not a robot button and there's this this whole that's gonna be that's going to be more heated.

3:08:24You 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 Codex 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'll learn that maybe I don't click on Medium because it's annoying and I use other websites that actually are agent-friendly. There's going to be a lot of powerful rich companies fighting back. So it's really interesting.

3:09:11You're at the center. You're the catalyst, the leader, and happen to be at the center of this kind of revolution where it's going to completely change how we interact with services, with web. And so, like, there's companies at Google that are going to push back. I mean, there's every major company you can think of is going to push back. Even, yeah, even 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 nice balance from a big company perspective.

3:09:54Because if you push back too much for too long, you become blockbuster and you lose everything to the Netflixes of the world. But some pushback is probably good during a revolution to see. But you see that this is something that the people want. Right. So if I'm on the go, I don't want to open a calendar app. I just want to tell my agent, hey, remind me about this dinner 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 or need to open apps for that. I think that we passed that age and now everything is like much more connected and fluid if those companies want it or not.

3:10:37And I think we'll, the right companies will find ways to jump on the train and other companies will perish. You got to 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 the future of programming. Do you think AI replaces programmers completely, human programmers? I mean, we're definitely going in that direction. Programming is just a part of building products. So maybe AI does replace programmers eventually. But there's so much more to that art. Like, what do you actually want to build? How should it feel?

3:11:28How's the architecture? I don't think Asians will replace all of that. Yeah, like just the actual art of programming, it will stay there, but it's going to be like knitting. You know, like people do that because they like it, not because it makes any sense. so so i read this article this morning about someone that it's okay to mourn our craft and i can a part of me very strongly resonates with that because in my past i i spent a lot of time sinkering 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.

3:12:21And 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 agents and building and thinking really hard about problems. It is different. and it's okay to mourn it, but that's not something we can fight. 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.

3:13:18There will still be a lot of demand for people that understand how to build things. Just that all this 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 it's probably not a perfect analogy 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 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.

3:14:22But I don't think you're just a programmer. That's 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 I never, as you're articulating this beautifully, I'm realizing I never thought I would, the thing I love doing would be the thing that gets replaced. You hear these stories about these, like you said, with the 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 was an Emacs person for a long time, man, Emacs.

3:15:10And 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 uh is painful it's truly painful but i also think um programmers builders more broadly but what is 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.

3:16:02Yeah. 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 going to be called coding again and it's just going to be the new normal. Yeah. And yet while I don't write the code, I very much feel like I'm in the driver's seat than I am writing the code. You know, it's just... 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, is mostly positive. On Mastodon and Blue Sky, I also use it less because oftentimes I got attacked for my blog posts. And I had stronger reactions in the past.

3:16:50Now I can sympathize with those people more because 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 going to be a change. It's going to be challenging. But it's also, I don't know, I find it 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 going to be a lot more. And then you have all these people that are screaming, oh yeah, but what about the water?

3:17:45you know like i did a conference in italy about the the state of ai and my whole motivation was to push people away from don't see yourself as an ios developer anymore you are now a 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 hyperbole. 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?

3:18:28But then you actually sit down and do the math and then for most people, if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the CO2 output or like the water use in the equivalent of tokens. I mean, the mass is tricky and it depends if you add pre-training then maybe it's more than just one paddy. But it's not off by a factor of 100. You know? Well, like, golf is still using way more water than all data centers together. So are you also hating 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.

3:19:16And I'm not saying everything's good. It's certainly going to be a very transformative technology for our society. To steel man the criticism in general, I do want to 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, which is great. It's great to focus on not to be paralyzed by fear and fear-mongering 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 we mentioned, including all the people that 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.

3:20:27And so having a bit of that humility and an awareness about the tools you're building, they're going to cause pain. They will long-term hopefully bring about a better world and even more opportunities and even more awesomeness. But having that kind of like quiet moment often of respect for the pain that is going to be felt. And 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 they 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 freed them up and cost them a bit more joy in their life.

3:21:23or some emails where they told me that OpenClaw helped a disabled 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 they previously wouldn't see. and now they apply it for good. Or 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 Kimi or 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 like, I don't know, Entropic's co-work is logged in into their space.

3:22:28So it's not a lot of black and white. I got a lot of emails that were heartwarming and amazing and, I don't know, it just made me really happy. Yeah, there's a lot. It has brought joy into a lot of people's lives, not just programmers, like a lot of people's lives. It's beautiful to see. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on? The human civilization. I mean, I inspire so many people. There's like, there's this whole builder vibe again. People are now using AI in a more playful way and are discovering what it can do and how it can help them in their life.

3:23:20and creating new places that are just sprawling of creativity. I don't know, like, there's, like, KlawCon 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, like, talk about what they built. And now there's an abundance. So that gives me hope that we can figure shit out. And it makes it accessible to basically everybody. Yeah. Just imagine all these people building, especially as you make it simpler and simpler, more secure. It's like anybody who has ideas and can express those ideas in language can build.

3:24:14That's crazy. Yeah, that's ultimately power to the people and one of the beautiful things that come out of AI, not just a slop generator. Well, Mr. Cloudfather, I just realized when I said that in the beginning, I violated two trademarks because there's also the godfather. I'm 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, 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 Steinberger.

3:25:13To 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.

3:25:39Thank you.