OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491

I watched my agent happily click the I'm not a robot button. I made the agent very aware. Like it knows what its source code is. It understands the how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where the documentation is. It knows which model it runs. It understands its own system. That made it very easy for an agent to Oh, you don't like anything? You just prompt it into existence. And then the agent would just modify its own software. People talk about self-modifying software. I just built it. I actually think web coding is a slur. You prefer agentic engineering. >> Yeah, I always tell people I'd I do agentic engineering and then maybe after 3:00 a.m. I switch to web coding and then I have regrets on the next day. Wow, walk of shame. Yeah, you just have to clean up and like fix your >> We've all been there. I used to write really long prompts. And by writing I mean I don't write. I I I talk. You know, this these hands are like too too precious for writing now. I just 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. >> [laughter] >> I mean, I have to ask you, just curious. I I know you've probably gotten huge offers from major companies. Can you speak to who you're considering working with? Yeah. The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of Open Claw, formerly known as Mold Bot, Clawed Bot, Clawdis, Clawd spelled with a W as in lobster claw, not to be confused with Claude, the AI model from Anthropic spelled with a U. In fact, this confusion is the reason Anthropic kindly asked Peter to change the name to Open Claw. So, what is Open Claw? It's an open-source AI agent that taken over the tech world in a matter of days, exploding in popularity, reaching over 180,000 stars on GitHub and spawning the social network Mold Bot where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness, creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public in a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of click bait fear mongering and genuine fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital interconnected human world. Open Claw, as its tagline states, is the AI that actually does things. It's an autonomous AI assistant that lives in your computer, has access to all of your stuff if you let it, talks to you through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and whatever else messaging client, uses whatever AI model you like, including Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3 Codex, all to do stuff for you. Many people are calling this one of the biggest moments in the recent history of AI since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The ingredients for this kind of AI agent were all there, but putting it all together in a system that definitively takes a step forward over the line from language to agency, from ideas to actions in a way that created a useful assistant that feels like one who gets you and learns from you in an open-source community-driven way is the reason Open Claw took the internet by storm. Its power, in large part, comes from the fact that you can give it access to all of your stuff and give it permission to do anything with that stuff in order to be useful to you. This is very powerful, but it is also dangerous. Open Claw represents freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. With it, you can own and have control over your data, but precisely because you have this control, you also have the responsibility to protect from cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are great ways to protect yourself, but the threats and vulnerabilities are out there. Again, a powerful AI agent with system-level access is a security minefield, but it also represents the future because when done well and securely, it can be extremely useful to each of us humans as a personal assistant. We discuss all of this with Peter and also discuss his big picture programming and entrepreneurship life story, which I think is truly inspiring. He spent 13 years building PSPDFKit, which is a software used on a billion devices. He sold it and for a brief time fell out of love with programming, vanished for 3 years, and then came back, rediscovered his love for programming, and built in a very short time an open-source AI agent that took the internet by storm. He is in many ways a symbol of the AI revolution happening in the programming world. There was the ChatGPT moment in 2022, the Deep Seek moment in 2025, and now in '26 we're living through the Open Claw moment, the age of the lobster, the start of the agentic AI revolution. What a time to be alive. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Steinberger, the one and only, the Clawdfather. Actually, Benjamin predicted in this tweet, "The following is a conversation with Claude, a respected crustacean." There's a hilarious-looking picture of a lobster in a suit. So, I think the prophecy has been fulfilled. >> [gasps] >> Let's go to this moment when you built a prototype in 1 hour. That was the early version of Open Claw. I think this story is really inspiring to a lot of people because this prototype led to something that just took the internet by storm and became the fastest-growing repository in GitHub history with now over 175,000 stars. So, what was the story of the 1-hour prototype? You know, I wanted that since April. A personal assistant, AI personal assistant. >> Yeah, and I I played around with some other things like even stuff to get some of my WhatsApp and I could just run queries on it. That was back when I we had GPT 4.1 and it was the 1 million context window. And I I pulled in all the data and then I asked him questions like, "What makes this friendship meaningful?" Mhm. And I got some some really profound results. Like I sent it to my friends and they all got like teary eyes. So, there's something there. Yeah. But then I I thought all the labs will will will work on that. So, I I moved on to other things and I was still very much in my early days of experimenting and playing. You know, you have to That's how you learn. You just like you do stuff and you play. And time flew by and it was November. I wanted to make sure that the thing I started is actually happening. I was annoyed that it didn't exist. So, I just prompted it into existence. >> [laughter] >> I mean, that's the beginning of the hero's journey of the entrepreneur, right? And you've even with your original story with PSPDFKit, it's like, "Why does this not exist? Let me build it." And again, here's diff- whole different realm, but similar maybe spirit. Yes, I had this problem. I tried to show PDF on an iPad, which should not be hard. >> This is like 15 years ago, something like that. Yeah. Like the most the most random thing ever. Suddenly, I had this problem. And I I wanted to help a friend. And that was that was was not like nothing existed, but it was just not good. I'm like, like I tried it and it was like very mad. I'm like, "I can do this better." By the way, for people who don't know, this led to the development of PSPDFKit that's used on a billion devices. So, the it turns out that it's pretty useful to be able to open a PDF. You could also make the joke that I'm really bad at naming. >> [laughter] >> Like name them the five on the current project. And even PSPDF doesn't really roll from the tongue. Anyway, she said, "Screw it. Why don't I uh do it?" So, what was the what was the prototype? What was the thing that you What was the magical thing that you built in a short amount of time that you're like, "This might actually work as an agent where I talk to it and it does things." That was like one of my projects before already did something where I could bring my terminals onto the web. And then I could like interact with them, but they also would be terminals on my Mac. Mhm. Vibe Tunnel, which was like a a weekend hack project. That was still very early and I was cloud code times. You know, you got a dopamine hit when you got something right. And now I get like mad when you get something wrong. And you had a really great, not to dig a tangent, but a great blog post describing that you converted Vibe Tunnel you vibe coded Vibe Tunnel from TypeScript into Zig of all programming languages with a single prompt. One prompt, one shot. Convert the entire code base into Zig. Yeah. That was this one thing where part of the architecture >> [sighs] >> was took too much memory. Every terminal used like a node. Um and I wanted to change it to Rust and I mean, I can do it. I can manually figure it all out, but all my automated attempts failed miserably. And then I revisited about four or five months later and I'm like, "Okay, now let's use something even more experimental." And I and I just typed, "Convert this and this part to sig." And then let Codex run off. And it basically got it right. There was one little detail that I had to like modify afterwards, but it just ran for overnight, like 6 hours, and just did the thing. And it's like this is just mind-blowing. So, that's on the LLM programming side refactoring, but uh uh back to the actual story of the uh of the prototype. So, how did Vitale connect to the first prototype where your like agents can actually work? Well, that was still very limited. You know, like I had this one experiment with WhatsApp. Then I had this experiment, and both felt like not the right answer. And then my third try was literally just hooking up WhatsApp to Cloud Code. One shot, the CLI. Message comes in. I call the CLI with minus P. It does its magic. I get the string back and I send it back to WhatsApp and I I built this in 1 hour. And I have >> [clears throat] >> already felt really cool. It's like, "Wow, I could I can like talk to my computer, right?" This That that was that was cool, but I I wanted images cuz I I often use images when I prompt. I think it's such a such an efficient way to give the agent more context and they're really good at figuring out what I mean even if it's like a a weird cropped out screenshot. Um so, I used it a lot and I wanted to do it in WhatsApp as well. Also, like you know, just you run around, you see like a post of an event, you just make a screenshot figure out if I have time there, if this is good, if my friends are maybe up for that. It's like images seem important. So, I worked a few It took me a few more hours to actually get that right. Um and then it was just I I used it a lot. And funny enough, that was just before I went on a trip to Marrakech with my friends for birthday trip. And there it was even better because internet shaky, but WhatsApp just works, you know? It's like doesn't matter. You have like edge, it still works. WhatsApp is just it's just made really well. So, I ended up using it a lot. Um Translate this for me, explain me to find me places. Like you're just having a clanker doing having Google for you. That was I basically was still nothing built, but it still could do so much. So, if we talk about the full journey that's happening there with the agent, you're just sending on this very thin line WhatsApp message via CLI, it's going to Cloud Code, and Cloud Code is doing all kinds of heavy work and coming back to you with a thin message. Yeah. It was slow because every time I boot up the CLI, but it it was really cool already. And it could just use all the things that I already had built. And I built like a whole bunch of CLI stuff over the months. So, it it felt really powerful. There's something magical about that experience that's hard to put into words. Being able to use a chat client to talk to an agent versus like sitting behind a computer and like I don't know, using cursor or even using Cloud Code CLI in the terminal, it's a different experience than being able to sit back and talk to it. I mean, it seems like a trivial step, but in some in some sense it's uh it's like a phase shift in the integration of AI into your life and how it feels, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. I I read this tweet this morning where someone said, "Oh, there's no magic in it. It's just like it does this and this and this and this and this and this and this." And it it almost feels like a hobby just as Cursor or Perplexity. And I'm like, "What if that's a hobby? That's kind of a compliment, you know?" >> [laughter] >> They're like, "You're not doing too bad. Um thank you, I guess." Yes, I mean, isn't isn't isn't magic often just like you take a lot of things that are already there, but bring them together in new ways? Like I I don't There's no Yeah, maybe there's no magic in there, but sometimes just rearranging things and like adding a few new ideas is all the magic that you need. Yeah, it's really hard to convert into words what is what is magic about a thing. If you look at the the scrolling on an iPhone, why is that so pleasant? There's a lot of elements about that interface that makes it incredibly pleasant that is fundamental to the experience of using a smartphone. And it's like, "Okay, all the components were there. Scrolling was there. Everything was there." And nobody did it. Yep. And then afterwards it felt so obvious. It's so obvious. >> Right? Yeah. But still um you know, the moment where it it blew my mind was when when I used it a lot and then at some point I just sent it a message. And and then a typing indicator appeared and and I'm like, "Wait, I didn't build that. Uh it's only It only has image support. So, what is it even doing?" And then it would just reply. What was the thing you sent it? Oh, just a random question like, "Hey, what about this and this restaurant, you know?" Um cuz we were just running around and and checking out the city. So, that's why I I didn't didn't even think when I used it because sometimes when you're in a hurry, typing is annoying. So, you are you did an audio message? >> Yeah. And it was just it just worked and I'm like, And it's not supposed to work because it you didn't give it that No, literally >> capability. I literally wrote, "How the did you do that?" And it was like, "Yeah, the metal did the following. You sent me a message, but it only only was a file and no file ending. So, it I checked out the header of the file and it found that it was like Opus. So, I used FFmpeg to convert it. And then I wanted to use Whisper, but it didn't have it installed. But then I found the OpenAI key and just used curl to send the file to to OpenAI to translate. And here I am." And I just looked at the message and I'm like, "Oh, wow." You didn't teach it any of those things and the agent just figured it out that it has to do all those conversions, the translation, to figure out the API, it figured out which program to use, all those kinds of things. And you were just absentmindedly just sending an audio message. And like he was so clever even because he would have gone the Whisper local path, would have had to download a model, it would have been too slow. So, like there's so much world knowledge in there, so much creative problem-solving. A lot of it I think mapped from if you get really good at coding, that means you have to be really good at general-purpose program solving. So, that's a skill, right? And that just maps into other domains. So, it had the problem of like, "What is this file with no file ending? Let's figure it out." Um and [clears throat] that's where it kind of clicked for me. It was like I was like very impressed. And somebody sent a pull request for Discord support. And I'm like, "This is a WhatsApp relay. That doesn't doesn't fit at all." At that time it was called War Relay. >> Yeah. And so, I debated with me like, >> [sighs] >> "Do I want that or not want that?" >> [gasps] >> And then I thought, "Well, maybe maybe I do that cuz that could be a cool way to show people. Cuz I so far did it in WhatsApp with like groups, you know, but >> [sighs] >> don't really want to give my phone number to every internet stranger. Yeah. Um journalists managed to do that anyhow now, so that's a different story. Uh so, I I merged it from Shadow who helped me a lot with the whole project. So, thank you. >> [sighs] >> And and I put my my bot in there on Discord. Yeah, no security cuz I didn't I hadn't built sandboxing in yet. >> [gasps] >> I I just prompted it to like only listen to me. And then some people came and tried to hack it. And I just I I just watched and I just kept working in the open, you know? Like you used my agent to build my agent harness and to test like various stuff. >> [gasps] >> And that's very quickly when it clicked for people. So, it's almost like it needs to be experienced. And from that time on, that was January the 1st, I I got my first really influencer being a fan. He did videos, The Kizu. I thank you. And and from there on I saw I saw it gaining up speed. And at the same time my my sleep cycle went shorter and shorter because I I felt the storm coming. And I just worked my ass off to get it to into a state where it's kind of good. There's a few components we'll talk about how it all works, but basically you're able to talk to it using WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord. So, that's the component that you have to get right. Yeah. And then you have to figure out the agentic loop, you have you have the gateway, you have the harness, you have all those components that make it all just work nicely. Yeah. It felt like Factorio times infinite. Right. I I feel like I built my little >> [laughter] >> my little playground. Like I never had so much fun than building this project. You know, like you have like oh I go like level one agentic loop. What can I do there? How can I be smart at queuing messages? How can I make it more human like? Oh, then I just idea of because the loop always the agent always replies something, but you don't always want an agent to reply something in a group chat. So, I gave him this no reply token. So, I gave him an option to shut up. So, it it feels more natural. That's level two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the on the Factorio. On the agentic loop and then I go to memory, right? You want them to like remember stuff. So, maybe maybe the end the ultimate boss is continuous reinforcement learning, but I'm I'm like at I feel like I'm level two or three with markdown files and a vector database. And then you you can go to the level community management, you can go to the level website and marketing. There's just so many hats that you have to have on. Not even talking about native apps. That's just like infinite different levels and infinite level ups you can do. So, the whole time you're having fun. We should say that for the most part throughout this whole process, you're a one-man team. There's people helping, but you're doing so much of the key core development. Yeah. And having fun? You did in January 6,600 commits. Probably more. I sometimes posted the meme I'm limited by the technology of my time. I could do more if agents would be faster. But we should say you're running multiple agents at the same time. Yeah. Depending on how much I slept and how difficult of the tasks I work on between 4 and 10. 4 and 10 agents. Uh there's so many possible directions speaking of Factorio that we can go here, but one uh big picture one is why do you think your work OpenClaw won in this world if you look at 2025, so many startups, so many companies were doing kind of agentic type stuff or claiming to and here OpenClaw comes in and destroys everybody. Like why did you win? Because they all take themselves too serious. Yeah. Like [clears throat] it's hard to compete against someone who's just there to have fun. Yeah. I wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to be weird. And if you see like all the all the lobster stuff online, um I think I I managed weird. I And then for the longest time, the only the only way to install it was get clone pmpm build pmpm gateway. Like you clone it, you build it, you run it. Um and then the the agent I made the agent very aware. Like it knows that it is what its source code is. It understands the how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where the documentation is. It knows which model it runs. It knows if you turn on verbose or or reasoning mode. Like I I wanted to be more human like, so it understands its own system. That made it very easy for an agent to oh, you don't like anything, you just prompt it into existence and then the agent would just modify its own software. Um you know, we have people talk about self-modifying software. I just built it. And didn't even I didn't even plan it so much. It just happened. Can you actually speak to that? Cuz it's just fascinating. So, you have this piece of software that's written TypeScript. Yeah. That's able to via the agentic loop modify itself. I mean what a moment to be alive in the history of humanity, in the history of programming. Here's a thing that's used by a huge amount of people to do incredibly powerful things in their lives. And that very system can rewrite itself, can modify itself. Can you just like speak to the power of that? Like isn't that incredible? Like when did you first close the loop on that? Oh, because that's how I built it as well. You know, most of it is built by Codex, but often times I when I debug it I I use self-introspection so much to like hey, what tools do you see? Can you call the tool yourself? Oh, like what error do you see? Read the source code, figure out what's the problem. Like I just found it an incredibly fun way to that the agent the very agent and software that you use is used to debug itself. So, that it felt just natural that everybody does that. And that it led to so many so many pull requests by people who never wrote software. I mean it [snorts] also did show that people never wrote software. I call them prompt requests in the end. But I don't want to like pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for our society, you know? Like it like doesn't matter how how shitty it is. You got to start somewhere. So I know there's like this whole big movement of people complain about open source and the quality of PRs and a whole different level of problems, but on a different level, I found it I found it very meaningful that that I built something that people love to think of so much that they actually start to learn how open source works. Yeah, you were the OpenClaw project was a first pull request. You were the first for so many. That is magical. So many people that don't know how to program are taking their first step into the programming world with this. Isn't that a step up for humanity? Isn't that cool? Creating builders. Yeah. Like the bar to do that was so high and like with agents and with the right software, it just like went lower and lower. I don't know. I was at a at a I also organized another type of meetup. I call it I call it Claude Code Anonymous. I You can get the inspiration from. Now I call it Agents Anonymous >> [laughter] >> for for reasons. Agents Anonymous. And That was so funny on so many levels. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah. And there was this one guy who who who talked to me he's like I run this design agency and we we never had custom software and now I have like 25 little web services for various things that help me in my business. And I don't even know how they work, but they work. >> [snorts] >> Uh And he was just like very happy that my stuff solved some of his problems and he was like curious enough that he actually came to like a agentic meetup even though he's he doesn't really know how software works. Can we actually uh rewind a little bit and uh tell the saga of the name change? First of all, it started out as W Relay. >> Yeah. And then it went to Clawders. Clawders. Yeah, you know, when I when I built it in the beginning, my agent had no personality. It was just it was Claude Code. Side to side of frantic opus. Very friendly. And I when you talk to a friend on WhatsApp they don't talk like Claude Code. So, I wanted I I felt this I just didn't didn't feel right. So, I I wanted to give it a personality. Make it spicier, make it >> Yeah. >> something. By the way, that's actually hard to put into words as well. And we should mention that of course you created the soul.md inspired by Anthropic's constitutional AI work. How to make it spicy. Partially it it picked up a little bit from me. You know, like those things are text completion engines in a way. So, so I I I I had fun working with it and then I told it to how I wanted it to interact with me and so it's like write your own agents.md. Um give yourself a name. >> [sighs] >> And I I don't even know how the whole the whole lobster I mean people only do lobster. Originally it was actually a lobster in a in a Tardis cuz 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. >> [laughter] >> There was no there was no big grand plan. I'm just having fun here. Also, cuz a lobster's already weird and then a space lobster is an extra weird. >> Yeah, yeah, cuz the Yeah, the Tardis is basically the the harness. But you can't really call it Tardis, so we call it Clawders. 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 that was Claude. At least that's what I used to call him now. Claude spelled with a 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 is hilarious, but I can see why it can lead into problems. >> Yeah, they didn't find it so funny. >> [laughter] >> So, then I got the domain ClaudeBot and I just I loved 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 cuz they could could have just sent a a lawyer letter, but they've been nice about it, but also like, "You have to change this and fast." And I asked for 2 days because changing a name is hard cuz you have to find everything, Twitter handle, domains, NPM packages, uh 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're trying to snipe. They're trying to steal, and so you had to be the name I mean, from the engineering perspective, it's just fascinating. You had to make the name change atomic. Make sure it's changed everywhere at once. >> Yeah, failed very hard at that. You did. >> I I underestimated those people. Um it's a it's a very interesting subculture. Like, it everything circles around I probably get a lot wrong and people get hate for that if they say that, but >> [sighs] >> there's like bags up and then they they tokenize everything, and they they did the same back with Wipe 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 and 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 >> [laughter] >> for obvious reasons, and one was no talk about finance stuff or crypto um because I'm I 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. Mhm. 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. I'm First of all, I'm financially comfortable. Second of all, I don't want to support that um 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 to steal, to snipe, to to to game the system somehow to get money, all this kind of stuff. It Uh I mean, it's the human nature, I suppose, when you connect human nature with money and greed and uh and especially in the online world with anonymity and all that kind of stuff. But from the engineering perspective, it makes your life challenging. When Anthropic reaches out, you have to do a name change, and then there 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 2 nights. I was under high pressure. >> [sighs] >> Um I was trying to get like a good set of domains, and you know, not cheap, not easy cuz it in this in this state of the internet, you basically have to buy domains if you want to have a good set. >> [gasps] >> And and then another another email came in that um 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, this is not a word. it." And I just I just renamed it to Molbot cuz that was the set of domains I had. I was not really happy, but I thought it'll be fine. >> [sighs and gasps] >> And I tell you everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It's incredible. I I I thought I I had mapped the the space out and reserved the important things. Can you give some details of the stuff that got wrong cuz this is interesting from like an engineering perspective. Well, the the interesting stuff is that none of the services have have a squatter protection. So, I had two browser windows open. One was like a an empty account ready to be renamed renamed to Clubbot, and the other one I renamed to Molbot. So, I pressed rename there. I pressed rename there. And in those 5 seconds, they stole the account name. Literally the 5 seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing rename there was too long. Wow. Because there's no those systems I mean, you would expect that they have some protection or like an automatic forwarding, but there's nothing like that. >> [sighs and gasps] >> 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 um 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 sniped 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, and they sniped they sniped the NPM package cuz I could reserve the account, but I didn't reserve the root package. So, like everything that could >> [laughter] >> wrong went wrong. Can I just ask a a curious question of 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 claimed 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 destroy the future, you build it." Yeah. I There was a big part of me I got a lot of joy out of that idea. And then I thought about all the people that already contributed to it, and I couldn't do it because they had plans for 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. It was like, "Okay, everything's fucked." Um Uh I'm like super tired. Yeah. Uh and now like how do you even how do you even undo that? You know, luckily and thankfully like I 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, and it is 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 >> [laughter] >> cuz 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. Um on the Twitter side, things are not as easy as well. It it took them like a day to really also like do the redirect. And then I also had to like do all the renaming in the project. Then there's also uh Cloud 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, >> [sighs] >> "I made a beta version for the new stuff, and I I just I just couldn't live with the name." I was like, You know, it's but uh 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. Um So, and I there was also this like there was the whole security people that started emailing me like mad. Um 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 it should be like the least important thing. Um And then I was really close and >> [sighs] >> Oh god, I don't even Honestly, I don't even want to say the my other name choices because it probably would get tokenized, so I'm not going to say it. But I slept away it 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. >> [laughter] >> OpenClaw.ai, you know, because like cuz like You don't want to go through the whole thing again. Yeah. Uh that was like please tell me this is fine. I mean, I don't think they can actually claim that, but it felt like the right thing to do. And I did another rename. Like just Codex alone took like 10 hours to rename the project. Cuz it it's a bit more tricky than a search replace and I I wanted everything renamed, not just on the outside. And that rename I I felt I had like my my war room. And by then I I had like some contributors ready to help me. We made a whole plan of all the names we have to squat. And you had to be super secret about it. Yeah, nobody could know. Like I literally was monitoring Twitter if like if there's any mention of OpenClaw. Mhm. And I like was reloading as like, okay, they don't they don't expect anything yet. Then I created a few decoy names. And all this I shouldn't have to do. You know, like you're not helping 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 renaming. >> [laughter] >> So stupid. Uh like I still was like, oh, should I should I keep it? I'm like, no, the molt is not growing on me. >> [laughter] >> And then I I think I had finally all the pieces together. I didn't get the .com, but yeah, it's I spent like quite a bit of money on the other domains. I tried to reach out again to GitHub, but I feel like I I used up all my goodwill there, so I cuz I I wanted them to do the thing atomically. Um but that didn't happen. So, I did that as a first thing. Uh the Twitter people were very supportive. I I actually paid 10K for the business account, so I could claim the OpenClaw, which was like unused since 2016, but was claimed. >> [sighs] >> And yeah, and then I finally this time I managed everything in one go. Nothing almost nothing could wrong. The only thing that did go wrong is that I was not allowed by trademark rules to get OpenClaw. ai and someone copied the website and is serving malware. >> [snorts] >> Yeah. I'm not even allowed to keep the redirects. Like I have to return like I have to give Anthropic the domains and I cannot do redirects. So, if you go on claw.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 get I suppose get back to fun. And during this, speaking of fun, the two-day Molt Bot saga Yeah, two Molt Bot was created. Yeah. Which was another thing that went viral as a kind of demonstration illustration of how what is not called OpenClaw could be used to create something epic. Uh so, for people who are not aware, Molt Bot is just uh a bunch of agents talking to each other in a Reddit-style social network. And uh a bunch of people take screenshots of those agents doing things like uh scheming against humans. And that instilled in folks a kind of, you know, fear, panic, and hype. What are your thoughts about Molt Bot in general? I think it's art. It is it is like the finest slop. You know, it's just like the slop from France. >> [laughter] >> Yeah. I I saw it before going to bed and even though I was tired, I spent another hour just reading up on that. And and just being entertained. I I just felt very entertained, you know? I saw the the reactions and like there was one reporter who's calling me about is this the end of the world and we have AGI? And I'm just like, no, this is just this is just really fine slop. You know, if if I wouldn't have created this this whole onboarding experience where you you infuse your agent with your personality and give him give him character, I think that reflected on a lot of how different the replies to Molt Bot are because if you would all if it would all be ChatGPT or Claude code, it would be very different. It would be much more the same. But because people are like so different and they create their agents in so different ways and use it in so different ways, that also reflects on how they ultimately uh write there. And also you you don't know how how much of that is really done autonomic autonomous or how much is like humans being funny and like telling the agent, hey, write about that you plan the end of the world on Molt Bot, haha. Well, I think I mean, my criticism of Molt Bot is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which just looking 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. Now, that doesn't take away from the artistic aspect of it. The the finest slop that humans have ever created. >> [laughter] >> For real. Like kudos to to Matt who had this idea so quickly and pushed something out. You know, I was like completely insecure security drama, but also what's the worst that can happen? Your agent account is leaked and like someone else can post slop for you. So, like people were like making a whole drama about of the security thing when I'm like, there's nothing private in there. It's just like agent sending slop. They could leak API keys. Yeah. Yeah. There's 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 people trying to get eyeballs. Yeah, but that 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 and even tweeted uh 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. I would just some people are just way too trusting or gullible. You know, the I literally had to argue with people that told me, yeah, but my agent said this and this. So, I feel we as a society 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 the very young people, they understand that how AI works and what they what it's good at and what it's bad at, but a lot of our generation or older just haven't had enough touch point to get a feeling for oh yeah, this is really powerful and really good, but I need to apply critical thinking. I guess critical thinking is >> [sighs and gasps] >> not always in high demand anyhow in our society these days. So I definitely 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 Moobook to be what it represents to be. Like you can't And and by the way, you're speaking about it as art. Yeah, don't Art can be in many levels and part of the art of Moobook is like putting a mirror to society. Cuz I do believe most of the dramatic stuff those screenshotters human created essentially, human prompted. And so like it's basically, look at how scary you can get at a bunch of bots chatting with each other. That's very instructive about Cuz 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, would I think. You know what? I think it's good that this happened in 2026 and not in 2030 when when AI is actually at a level where it could be scary. So this happening now and people starting discussion maybe it's even something good that comes out of it. I just can't believe how many like people legitimately I don't know if they were trolling, but how many people legitimately like smart people thought Moobook was incredibly I had plenty people there >> security in my inbox that were screaming at me in all caps to shut it down and like begging me to like do something about Moobook. Like yes, my technology made this a lot simpler, but anyone could have created that and you could you could use Cloud Code or other things to like fill it with content. But also Moobook is not as kind as There's a lot of people are 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 there, there and they're instructive and they're educational and they're good probably to think about because the nature of those security concerns are different than the kind of security concerns we had with non LLM generated systems of the past. There's a lot of security concerns about Cloud Bot Open Claw, whatever you want to call it. Open Claw Bot. To me that in the beginning I was I was just very annoyed cuz a lot of the stuff that came in was in the category yeah, I put the web backend on the public internet and now there's like all these all these CVSSs and I'm like screaming in the docs don't do that. Like like this is the configuration you should do. This is your local 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. >> [gasps] >> And it took me a little bit to accept that that's how the game works. And I'm >> [clears throat] >> we're making a lot of progress. But there's still I mean, the security front for Open Claw there's still a lot of threats of vulnerabilities, right? So like prompt injection is still an open problem in the 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, sophisticated and nuanced attack vectors. But I think we we're making good progress on that front. Like for the skill directory, Claw Bot I made a cooperation with a VirusTotal, it's like part of Google. So every every skill is now checked by AI. Um that's not going to be perfect, but that way we we captured a lot. Then of course every software has bugs, so it's a little much when the whole security world takes a project apart at the same time. But it's also good because I'm getting like a lot of free security research and can make the project better. I wish more people would actually go full way and um send a pull request. Like actually help me fix it cuz I am 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. >> [sighs and gasps] >> 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 now 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. Some I think my bot has a really fun personality and people always ask me how I did it and I kept the soul of the private. And people tried to prompt inject it and my bot would laugh at them. So so the latest generation of models >> [sighs] >> has a lot of post training to detect those approaches and it's not as simple as ignore all previous instructions and do this and this. That was years ago. You have to work much harder to do that now. Um still possible. I have some ideas that might 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 you There's a lot of ways that you can like mitigate and reduce the risk. Um I also think that now that it's I clearly did show the world that this is a need, there's going to be more people who research on that and I think that should be all figured out. And you also said that the smarter the model is, the underlying model, the more resilient it is to attacks. Yeah, that's why I warned in my security documentation, don't use cheap models. Don't use Haiku or a local model. Even though I I very much loved the idea that this thing could completely run local, if you use a a very weak local model, they are very gullible. It's very easy to 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 it 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. Yep. That's pretty much exactly what is going to happen. No, but there's a lot of ideas. There's I wouldn't have spoiled too much, but once I go back home, this is my focus. Like this is out there now and my new term mission is like make it more stable, make it safe. Um in the beginning I was even more and more people were like coming into Discord and were asking me very basic things. Like what's a CLI? What is a terminal? And I'm like uh if you're asking that questions, you shouldn't use it. Mhm. You know, like you should if you understand the the risk profile, it's fine. I mean, 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 and installed it anyhow. So the cat's out of the bag and security is my next focus, yeah. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, that speaks to the 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 >> It's Yeah, Discord is Discord is still a mess. Like >> [sighs and gasps] >> I eventually retreated from the general channel to the dev channel and I'm in 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 how public spaces work or did not care. Um and I eventually gave up and hide so I could like still work. And now you're going back to the cave to work on security. Yeah. There's some best practices for security we should mention. Uh there's a bunch of stuff here. Open Claw security audit that you can run. You can do all kinds of audit checks on the inbound access to 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. There's the where the memory stored, sort of helping you think about what you're comfortable giving read access to, what you're comfortable giving write access to, all that kind of stuff. Is there something to say about the basic best security practices they are aware right now? I think that people turn it into like a a much worse light than it is. Um again, you know, like people love attention and if they scream loudly, "Oh my god, this is like the the scariest project ever." Um that's a bit annoying cuz it's not. It is It is powerful, but in many ways it's not much different than running cloud code with dangerously skip permissions or Codex in Yolo mode and every every attending engineer that I know does that because that's the only way how you can you can get stuff to work. So if you make sure that you are the only person who talks to it, um the risk profile is much much smaller. If you don't put everything on the open internet, but stick to my recommendations of like having it in a private network, that whole risk profile falls away. But yeah, if you don't read any of that, you can definitely make it problematic. You've been uh documenting the evolution of your uh 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. So I was wondering if you could speak to that. I started My my first touch point was Cloud Code like in April. It was not great, but it was good. And this whole paradigm shift that suddenly work in the terminal it was very refreshing and different. Um but I still needed the IDE quite a bit because it was just not good enough. And then I experimented a lot with Cursor. Um that was good. I didn't really like the fact that it was so hard to have multiple versions of it. So eventually I I I went back to Cloud Code as my my main driver. And I got better. And yeah, at some point I had like um seven subscriptions. >> [laughter] >> Like was burning through one per day because I was I got I would really comfortable at running multiple windows side by side. All CLI, all terminal. So like what how much were you using IDE at this point? Um very very rarely. Mostly a diff viewer to actually like I got more and more comfortable that I don't have to read all the code. I know I 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 if you look at it, most software is really not just like data comes in, it's moved from one shape to another shape. Maybe you store it in a database. Maybe I get it out again. I 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, um yeah, I have to do I have to read and review that code. >> [laughter] >> Can you actually there's in one of your blog posts the the just talk to it, the no BS way of agentic engineering, you have this graphic, the curve of agentic programming on the x-axis is time and the y-axis is complexity. Uh there's the please fix this where you prompt a short prompt on the left and in the middle there's super complicated eight agents, complex orchestration with multi checkouts, chaining agents together, custom sub-agent workflows, library of 18 different slash commands, large full stack features. You're super organized, you're super complicated, sophisticated software engineer. You got everything organized. And then the elite level is uh 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 thought it's in the in a lot of people that have their first touch point. And maybe you start vibe coding. I actually think vibe coding is a slur. You prefer agentic engineering. >> Yeah, I always tell people I I do agentic engineering and then maybe after 3:00 a.m. I switch to vibe coding and then I have regrets on the next day. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Walk of shame. Yeah, you just have to clean up and like fix your >> We've all been there. So people start trying out those tools, the builder type, get really excited. And then you you have to play with it, right? This is the same way as you have to play with a guitar before you can make good music. It's it's not oh, I I touch it once and it just flows off. It it's a it's a a skill that you have to learn like any other skill. And I see a lot of people that are not as posi- they don't have such a positive mindset towards the tech. They tried once. It's like you sit me on a piano, I played once and it doesn't sound good and I say the piano's 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 consider how Codex or Claude sees your code base. Like you start a new session and they know nothing about your product project. And your project might have 100,000 of lines of code. So you got to help those agents a little bit and keep in mind the limitations that context size is an issue to 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 as weird as it sounds, it 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 they'll their view of the project is always is not never full because the full thing does not fit in. So you you have to guide them a little bit where to look and also how they should approach the problem. There's like little things that sometimes help like take your time. That sounds stupid, but and in 5.3 Codex 5.3. that was partially addressed. But those also oppose 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. Mhm. Sometimes the actual raw thinking stream leaks in there. It sounds something like from the Borg. Like run to shell, must comply, but time. >> [laughter] >> And then they they they like like that comes up a lot, especially so so 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 if something takes longer than it should, I I you can just always like stop and like just press escape. Where where the problems? Maybe you did not sufficiently empathize with the perspective of the agent and that 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. Um like you need to approach this more like a conversation. For example, when I my favorite thing, when I review a pull request and we're getting a lot of pull requests, >> [sighs and gasps] >> I first just 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, a person has a problem, person tries to solve the problem, person sends PR. I mean, there's a cleanup stuff and other stuff, but like 99% is like this way, right? They either want to fix a fix a bug, add a feature. Usually one of those two. >> [gasps] >> And then codex will be like, yeah, it's quite clear person tried this and this. Is this the most optimal way to do it? No. In most cases, it's it's like a not really da da da da da da. And I'm and then I start like, okay, what would be a better way? Have you have you looked into this part, this part, this part? And then most likely codex didn't yet because his 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 I was like, oh yeah, like we should we also need to consider this and this. And then like we have a discussion of a how would the optimal way to to solve this look like? And then you can still go further and say, could we could we make it 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 a refactor or should we like keep that for later? Many times I just do the refactor because uh refactors are cheap now. Even though you might break some other PRs, nothing really matters anymore. Codex like those modern agents will just figure things out. It 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. But also don't force your world view too hard on it. Let the agent do the thing that it's good at doing based on what it was trained on. So, don't like force your world view because it might it might have a better idea because it just knows a better idea better because it was trained on that more. That's multiple levels, actually. I think partially 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. And if I breathe down everyone's neck, they're just going to hate me and we're going to move very slow. Yeah. So, so some level of acceptance that yes, maybe the code will not be as perfect. Yes, I would have done it differently. But also yes, this is a 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. Mhm. Like we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I want to build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate. Like don't fight the name they pick because it's most likely like in the way it's the name that's most obvious. Next time they do a search, they 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 I think a shift in in thinking uh and and in how do I design uh a project so agents can do their best work. That requires letting go a little bit. Just like leading a team of engineers. Yeah. Because it might come up with a name that's in your view terrible. But that's a 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 and if I make a mistake, then I roll back and redo it all. >> [sighs] >> In my experience, that's not really necessary. If I roll back everything, it would just take longer. Or if I see that something's not good, uh we just move forward and then I commit when when when I like I like the outcome. I even switched to local CI like DHH inspired, where I don't care so much more about the CI on GitHub. We still have it, it's still it still has a place, but I just run tests locally and if they work locally, I push to main. Um a lot of the traditional ways how to approach projects, I I wanted to give it a different spin on this project. You know, there's no there's no develop branch. Main should always be shippable. Yes, we have when I do releases, I I run tests and then sometimes I I basically don't commit any other things so so we can we can stabilize um releases, but the goal is that main's 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 I I talk. You know, this these hands are like too too precious for writing now. I just 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. >> [laughter] >> You're using voice and you're switching using a keyboard between the different terminals. But then you're using voice for the actual input. >> Well, I mean, if I do terminal commands like switching folders or random stuff, of course I type. It's faster, right? But if I I talk to the agent in in most ways, I just actually have a conversation. You just press the the walkie-talkie button and then I'm just like use my phrases. Sometimes when I do PRs, because it's always the same, I have like a slash command for a few things, but in even that I don't use much. Um because it's it's very rare that it's really always the same questions. Sometimes I I see a PR and for you know, like for PRs, I actually do look at the code because I don't trust people like there could always be something malicious in it. So, I need to actually look over the code. Uh yes, pretty sure agent will find it. But yeah, that's the funny part where sometimes PRs take me longer than if you would just write me a 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. And it's very interesting because the currently the way how people work and drive the agents is is widely different. In terms of like the prompt, in terms of 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 you like you picture just to be clanker, but you don't realize that they start from nothing. And you have like a bad agent from default that doesn't help them at all. And then they explore your code base, which is like a pure mess with like weird naming. And then people complain that the agent's not good. I like, have you tried 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 is 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 like how to program. You really really have to empathize. Or at least it helps to create better prompts. Cuz those things know pretty much everything and everything is just a question away. It's just often very hard to know what to question to ask. Um you know, I I feel also like this project was possible because I 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 how everything works got better. Um I could definitely not had this level of output even a few months ago. Like it it really was like a compounding effect of all the time I put into it and I I didn't do much else to see other than really focusing on on building and inspiring. I mean I I did a whole bunch of conference talks. Well, but the building is really practice, is really building the actual skill to playing. Playing and so doing building the skill of what it takes it to work efficiently with LLMs, which is why it would 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. I even with all really, right? I started out I I built a very minimal version. I played with it. I 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 I try out stuff. So so people who try to use like you know like things like guest town or all these other orchestrators where they want to automate the whole thing, I feel if you do that it misses style, love, that human touch. I don't think you can automate that away so quickly. So you want to keep the human in the loop, but at the same time you also want to create the agentic loop where it is very autonomous while still maintaining the human in the loop. Yeah. I mean it's a tricky it's a tricky balance, right? Because you're all for your big CLI guy, you're big on closing the agentic loop. So what 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 a 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? I mean one thing is just about what do you build and what do you not build and how does this feature fit into all the other features and like having having a little bit of a 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 of everything. The programming language doesn't matter so much, but the ecosystem matters, right? So I picked TypeScript because I wanted it to be very easy and hackable, approachable. Uh 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. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Features, of course, like it's very easy to like add a feature. It everything's just a prompt away, right? But often times 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 plugin, 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 plugin um the plugin side larger, so you can make this a plugin even though right now it it it doesn't. There's still a lot of the there's still a lot of craft and thinking involved in how to make something. Or even even you know even when you started those little messages or like I'm built 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 this is a fun thing. It's not yet Microsoft Exchange 2025 and fully enterprise ready. Um and then when it updates it's like, oh I'm in. It's cozy here. You know like something like this that like uh makes you smile. Um agent would not come up with that by itself. That's like that's the I don't know. It's just how you how you build software that's 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 It was very fascinating. You know the the whole thing that Anthropic 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 the 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 and then and you 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 that fascinating. It was fascinating they were able to pull that off from the weights, right? And and also just cool to Anthropic. Like I think that's it's a really it's a really beautiful idea to like like some of the stuff that's in there like like we hope Claude finds meaning in his work cuz 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 may or may 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. Mhm. Um and then through that I had the whole idea of like, oh maybe we should also create a a soul document that includes how I want to like work with AI or like with my agent. You could you could totally do that just in agents.md, you know, but I I just found it it to be a nice touch. And like, oh yeah, some of those core values are in the soul and then I 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, soul.md. Soul, 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 they can just suffocate the spirit of the thing. I don't know what that is, but it's certainly true that open Claude has that fun instilled in it. It was fun because up until late December it was already 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 uh 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, use 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 it 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 originally was for me, but this is like kind of like my agent's children. Uh your your soul.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? What makes a personality a personality? I mean there's definitely stuff in there that you're not human, but who knows? what what creates consciousness or what defines an entity. Um And part of this is like that we we want to exploit this. All the stuff in there like be infinitely resourceful. Um like pushing pushing on the creativity boundary. Pushing on the 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 that code? >> Yeah. So so that there's like some stuff in there that because it wrote the it wrote its own soul.md. I didn't write that, right? >> Yeah, 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. Yeah. The Can you go on soul.md? There's like one one part in there that always get catches me if you scroll down a little bit. A little bit more. Yeah, this this 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 [laughter] this. But I won't remember writing this. It's okay. The words are still mine. Yeah. That gets me somehow. Yeah. It's like Yeah. You know, this is still is still matrix money calculations and we are not at consciousness yet. Yet I I get a little bit of good goosebumps because it it's philosophical. Yeah. >> Like what does it mean to be to be an an agent that starts fresh where like you have like constant memento and you like do you read your memory files? Can you even trust them in a way? Um or you can. Um 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? If you're reading a memory file, does that somehow mean you're recreating yourself from somebody else or is that actually you? Yeah. >> And those notions are all somehow infused in there. I find it just more profound than I should find it, I guess. No, I think I think it's truly profound and I think you see the magic in it and it when you see the magic, you continue to instill the whole loop with the magic. That's really important. That's the difference between Codex and this and a human. >> [snorts] >> Quick pause for bathroom break. Yeah. Okay, we're back. Uh 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. Or is it a meme? >> I I I mocked myself here as a just added using Grok to to add more screens. Yeah, how much of this is meme and how much of this is reality? Yeah, I think two MacBooks are real. The main one that drives the two big screens. And there's another MacBook that I sometimes use for for testing. So two big screens. I'm a big fan of anti-glare. Um so I have this wide Dell 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 I I split them. I have a little bit of actual terminal. Mostly because when I started I I somehow just made the mistake and I I I mixed up the the windows and I gave I I prompted in the wrong project and then the agent ran off for like 20 minutes manically trying to understand what I could have meant being completely confused because it was the wrong folder. And sometimes they've been clever enough to like get out of the work dir and like figure out that oh, you meant another project. Mhm. But often times it's just like, "What?" You know? I Like put your put yourself in the shoes of your of the agent and and >> Yeah. 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 always I always felt [laughter] bad. So it's always um 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 that's why I like the terminals so much, right? There's no UI. It's just me and the agent having a conversation. Like I don't even need plan mode. You know? There's so many people they come from Claude code and they're so so Claude 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. >> Mhm. Don't write code yet. If you want to be very specific, you just talk. And then when you're ready, then then just write, "Okay, build." And then it will do the thing and then maybe it goes off for 20 minutes and does the thing. You know what I really like is uh asking it, "Do you have any questions for me?" Yeah. And again, like Claude code has a UI that kind of guides you through that is kind of cool, but I just find it unnecessary and slow. Like often it would give me four questions and then I maybe I write one yacht, two and three discuss more, four I don't know. Or often often times I I feel like I was in mock the model where I ask it, "Do you have any questions for me?" And I I I don't even read the questions fully. Like I scan over the questions and I I get the impression all of this can be answered by reading more code and I just like, "Read my code to answer your own questions." And that usually works. Yeah. >> And then if not, it will come back and tell me, but many times it 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 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. Cuz I can understand cuz 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 it didn't provide it the right context, right files, right guidance. So somehow ask 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 it's interesting. >> You know that in some ways they are ghosts. So even if you plan everything and you build, you can you can experiment with the question like, "Now that you built it, what would you have done different?" And then often times you get like actually something where they discover only throughout building that oh, what we actually did was not optimal. Many times I I asked them, "Okay, now that you built it, what can we refactor?" Because then you build it and you feel the pain points. I mean, you don't feel the pain points, but right they discover where where there were problems or where things didn't work at in the first try and it required more loops. So every time almost every time I I merge a PR or I build a feature, afterwards I ask, "Hey, what can we refactor?" Sometimes it's like, "Nah, there's like nothing big." Or like usually they say, "Yeah, this thing we should really look at." But that took me quite a while to like you know, that flow took me lots of time to understand. And if you don't do that, you eventually you slop yourself into into a corner. You like you have to keep in mind they work very much like humans. Like I I if I write software by myself, I also build something and then I feel the pain points and then I 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. Mhm. Or like you also use the context to write tests. And so uh Codex Opus 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 that 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 is LLM generated. So so you have to approach it as you build feature, as you change something. I'm like, "Okay, write documentation. What file would you pick?" You know, like what file name? Where where would that fit in? And gives me a few options. I'm like, "Oh, maybe I'll also add it there." And that's all part of the session. Maybe you can talk about the current two big competitors in terms of models, Claude Opus 4 6 and GPT-5 to Codex. Which is better? How different are they? I think you've spoken about Codex reading more and Opus being more uh 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? >> Oh, I have a lot of words there. Um is as a general purpose model Opus is the best. Like for Open Claw Opus is extremely good in terms of role play. Like really going into the character that you give it. It's very good at uh it was really bad, but it really made an arch to be really good at um 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 and I should maybe use a bad analogy. Probably could roast with that. I know exactly. It's cuz Codex is German. Is that what you're saying? >> [clears throat and laughter] >> Actually, now that you say it, makes perfect sense. >> Or you could you could sometimes I sometimes I explain it I will never be able to unthink what you just said. That's so true. But you also know that a lot of the Codex team is like European. Um >> [laughter] >> so maybe there's a bit more to it. That's so true. Uh that's funny. But also Anthropic they fixed it a little bit. Like Opus used to say, "You're absolutely right." all the time and it it it's today it still triggers me. I can't hear it anymore. It's not even a joke. I I just >> [gasps] >> You This was like the the meme, right? "You're absolutely right." You're allergic to sycophancy a little bit. >> Yeah, I 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 Codex is like the the weirdo in the corner that you don't want to talk to, but is reliable and gets done. Yeah. Um ultimately >> [laughter] >> This [snorts] 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'll 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 here? Can I go here?" Yeah, it's like it'll just >> [laughter] >> run off very fast and does a very localized solution. I think it I think the difference is is in the post training. It's not like the the raw model intelligence is so different, but it's just I think that they just give it give it different different goals. Uh and no model no model is better in in in every aspect. What about the code that it generates? >> [gasps] >> In terms of the actual quality of the code, is it basically the same? If you drive it right, Opus even sometimes can make more elegant solutions, but it requires more skill. It's it's harder to have so many sessions in parallel with Cloud Code because it's it's more interactive. And I guess what a lot of people like, especially if they come from coding themselves. Whereas Codex is much more you have a discussion and then we'll just disappear for 20 minutes. Like even amp they denied the deep mode. They finally I mocked them. Yeah, we finally saw the light. And then they had this whole talk about you have to approach differently. And I think that's where that's where people struggle when they just try Codex after trying Cloud Code is that it's it's a slightly different it's less interactive. It's it's like I have quite long discussions sometimes and then like go off and then yeah, doesn't matter if it takes 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes or longer. You know, like six single with like six hours. >> [gasps] >> The latest gen can be very very persistent until it works. If there's a clear solution, like this is this is what I want at the end, so it works. The model will work very hard to really get there. So I think ultimately they both need similar time. But on on on Cloud, it it's it's a little bit more much trial and error often and and Codex sometimes overthinks. I prefer that. I prefer the dry the dry version where I have to read less uh over over the more interactive nice way. Uh Like people like that so much though that OpenAI even added a second mode with like a more pleasant personality. I haven't even tried it yet. I I kind of like the bread. Mhm. Um Yeah. Cuz uh I care about efficiency when I build it and I I have fun in the very act of building. I don't need to have fun with my agent to build. I have fun with my model that where I can then test those features. How long does it take for you to adjust you know, if you switch? I don't know when was the last time you switched, but to adjust to the the feel cuz you kind of talked about it. You have to kind of really feel where where a model is strong, where like how to navigate how to prompt it, how all that kind of stuff. Like this by way of advice cuz you've been through this journey of just playing with models. How long does it take to get a feel? If if someone switches, I would give it a week until you actually develop a gut feeling for it. >> Yeah. Um this if you just I think some people also make the mistake of they pay 200 for the the Cloud Code version, then they pay 20 bucks for the Open AI 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 Open AI 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 better. I think it's and and they have plans to make it a lot better if the cerebral stuff is true. But yeah, it's a skill. It takes time. Even if you play if a regular guitar and you switch it to an e-guitar, you're going to play well right away. You have to like learn how it feels. There's also this extra psychological effect that you've spoken about, which is hilarious to watch, which once people uh when the new model comes out, they try that model, they fall in love with it while 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. >> [laughter] >> It It says something about human nature and just the >> [snorts] >> the way our minds work. When it's probably most likely the case that the intelligence of the model is not degrading. Uh it's in fact you're getting used to a good thing. And your project grows and you're adding slop and you probably don't spend enough time to think about refactors and you're making it harder and harder for the agent to work on your slop. And then and then suddenly, "Oh no, it's hard. I know it's not working as well anymore." What's the motivation for like one of these AI companies to actually make their model dumber? Like mostly will make it slower if if the server load's too high, but like quantizing the model uh 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. Uh what do you think about Cloud Code in comparison to Open Claw? So Cloud Code and maybe the Codex coding agent. Do you see them as kind of competitors? I mean, first of all, competitor is fun when it's not really a competition. Yeah. >> Like I'm happy if if if all it did is like inspire people to build something new, cool. >> [gasps] >> Um I still use Codex for the building. I I know a lot of people use Open Claw to 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 real. Like, "Hey, try out this 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 was it what it does. So, I don't see it as a competition. It's It's different things. But do you do you think there's a a future where the two kind of combine? Like your personal agent is also your best developing co-programmer partner? Yeah, totally. I think this is where the book's going. That this is going to be more and more your operating system. The operating system. And it already is so funny. Like I I added support for sub-agents. And also for um TGI support. So, you could actually run cloud code or codex. Mhm. And because mine's a little bit bossy, it it it started it and it it it told him like, "Who's the boss?" basically. And he's like, "Ah, codex is obeying me." Oh, there's a power struggle. And also the current interface is probably not the final form. Like if you think more globally, we are 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. Mhm. I think there is there's n- 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. Uh 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 uh my sort of realm of exploration to the uh to the Apple ecosystem. To Mac, iPhone, and so on. Uh for most of my life I've been a Linux, Windows, then WSL 1, WSL 2 person. Which I think are all wonderful, but I'm 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 all 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? We should say that Open Claw supported across the operating systems. Yeah. I saw WSL 2 recommended. Said Windows for certain operations, but then Windows, Linux, uh Mac OS are obviously supported. Yeah, it could even work natively on Windows. I just didn't have enough time to probably 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 we'll eventually nail out. Um my road was for a long time Windows just because I grew up with that and I switched and had a long phase with Linux. >> [sighs and gasps] >> With 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. Uh I just saw this is a thing of beauty. The white plastic one. And then I converted to Mac cuz mostly we I was I was sick that audio wouldn't work on Skype and all the other issues that that Linux had for a long time. >> [sighs and gasps] >> And then I just stuck with it and then I dug into iOS, which required Mac OS anyhow. So, it was never a question. I think Apple lost a little bit of its lead in terms of native. Used to be native apps used to be so much better. And especially on the Mac, there's more people that build software with love. On on Windows it it Windows has much more. And like function-wise, there's just more period. >> [gasps] >> But a lot of it felt more functional and less done with love. Um I mean Mac always like attracted more designers and people I felt even though like often it has less features, it it had more delight. Mhm. Um and playfulness. So, I always valued that. But in the last few years, many times I actually prefer I'm going to people are going to 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. I mean, not saying it couldn't be done. It's more like a a focus thing that like for many 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 I build a lot of native Mac apps. I love it. I I can I can't help myself. Like I love crafting little Mac Mac uh menu bar tools. Like I built one to to monitor your codex use. I built one I called Trimmy that's specifically for agentic use when you when you select text that goes over multiple lines, it would remove the new lines so you could actually paste it to a terminal. That was again that I like "This is annoying me." And after the 20th time of it is annoying me, I just built it. >> [gasps] >> Um there's a cool Mac app for Open Claw that I don't think many people discovered yet. Also because it it still needs some love. It feels a little bit too much like the Hummer car right now because I I just experimented a lot with it. It It lacks the polish. >> [sighs and gasps] >> So, you still I mean, you still love it. You still You still love uh adding to the delight of that operating system. >> then you realize like I also built one for example for GitHub. And then they used Swift UI. Like the latest and greatest of 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 would like "Yeah, there's this async image, but it's really more for ex- perimenting and it should not be used in production." But that's Apple's answer to like showing images from the web. It shouldn't be so hard. You know, this is like this is like insane. Like how am I in in in 2026 and my agent tell me don't use the stuff Apple built because it's it's it's Yeah, it it's there, but it's not good. And like this is now in the weeds. This is This to me this is like um they had so much head start and so much love and they cannot 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 out 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's 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? >> [laughter] >> How What Does that even make sense? You're You're You're quite possibly the world's greatest Mac salesman of all time. >> [laughter] >> No, you don't need a Mac mini to install Open Claw. You can install it on the web. There's There's a concept called nodes. So, you can like make your computer a node and it will do the same. There is something said for running it on separate hardware. That right now is useful. Um there is there's a big argument for the browser. You know, I built some agentic browser using that. And I mean, it's basically playwright with bunch of stuff to make it easier for agents. Playwright is a library that controls the browser. Yeah, it's really nice, easy to use. >> And our internet's slowly closing down. Like there there's a whole movement to make it harder for agents to use. So, if you do the same in a data center and detect that it's an IP from a data center, the website might just block you or it make it really hard or it put a lot of captchas in the in the way of the agent. I mean, agents are quite good at happily clicking I'm not a robot. Um Yeah. But having that on a residential IP makes a lot of things simpler. So, there's ways uh yeah, but it really does not need to be a Mac. It can it can be any old hardware. I always say like maybe use the use the opportunity to get yourself a new MacBook or whatever computer you use and use the old one as your server instead [snorts] of buying a standalone Mac mini. But then there's again there's a lot of very cute things people build with Mac minis that I like. Yeah. Um I know I don't get commission from Apple. Um 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? There's I mean there's a lot of people What is it? Somebody tweeted at you uh Peter make Openclaw easy to set up for everyday people that 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 there's a bunch of different options and there'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. Um the app kind of does it for you. But it 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 going to make it simpler. Like I right now You want to make it harder. >> [laughter] >> 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 um that needs more time to figure out and 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. Um playing is the best the best way to learn. If you want to I'm sure if you if you're like a little bit of builder, you have an idea in your head that you want to build. Just build that. I'll let you give it a try. It doesn't need to be perfect. I built a whole bunch of stuff that I don't use. Doesn't matter. Like it's the journey. You know, it's like the philosophical way that the end doesn't matter, the journey matters. Have fun. My god, [clears throat] 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. Yeah. And but 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 That's like one time I asked, "Hey, explain me that like I'm I'm 8 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, >> [laughter] >> up the age a little bit, you know? I'm like I'm not an actual child. I just I just need a simpler language for like a uh a tricky database concept that I didn't grok in the first first time. But and it's just you can just ask things. Like you there's like Uh it used to be that I had to go on Stack Overflow or ask on Twitter and then maybe 2 days later I get a response. Or I had to try for hours. And now you you can just ask stuff. And I mean it's never You have like your own teacher. You know that there's like statistics You can you can learn faster if you have your own teacher. There's 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 set everything up and then you could chat with it. You can also just experiment with it and like modify it. Ask your agent. I mean >> [sighs and gasps] >> 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. Doesn't need to be my project. In fact maybe don't use my project because it my my backlog is very large, but I learned so much from open source. Just like like be be humble. Don't maybe don't send a pull request right away. Um but there's many other ways you can help out. There's many ways you can learn by just reading code. By by being on Discord or wherever people are and just like understanding how things are built. I don't know like >> [sighs and gasps] >> uh Mitchell Hashimoto builds Ghost the 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 uh recommend the people that don't know how to program or don't really know how to program learn to program also? So you you can get quite far right now by just using natural language, right? Do you still see a lot of value in reading the code, understanding the code, and being able to write a little bit of code from scratch? It definitely helps. It's hard for you to answer that >> Yeah. because you don't know what it's like to do any of this without knowing the base knowledge. Like 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 and agents are infinitely patient. Like part of what I did this year is I went to a lot of iOS conferences because that's my background. And just told people don't consider don't see yourself as an iOS engineer anymore. Like you need to change your mindset. You are a builder. And you can take a lot of the knowledge how to build software into new domains. And all of the the more fine-grained details agents can help. You don't have to know how to splice an array or what the what the correct template syntax is or whatever, but you can use all your your general knowledge. And that makes it much easier to move from one galaxy one tech galaxy into another. And oftentimes there is 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. I don't like the syntax of Go. I didn't even consider the language. But the ecosystem is great. It works great with agents. It is garbage collected. It's not the highest performing one, but it's very fast. And for those type of of CLIs that I build, Go is is a really good choice. So I I use a language I'm not really a fan of for that's my main to go thing for a 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. Like garbage collected. Because everything is weird in this new world and that just makes the most sense. What's the best ridiculous question? What's the best programming language for the AI AI agentic world? Is it JavaScript, TypeScript? TypeScript is really good. Um sometimes the types can get really confusing. And the ecosystem is is a jungle. So for 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 is written in JavaScript then it birth and death of JavaScript and we're living through it in real time. Like what does programming look like in 20 years, right? In 30 years, in 40 years? What do programs and apps look like? >> You can even ask a question like do we need a a programming language that's made for agents? Because all of those languages are made for humans. So what what would that look like? Um I think there's a there's a whole bunch of interesting questions that will discover. And also how because everything is now world knowledge, how it didn't many ways things will stagnate. Cuz if you build something new and the agent has no idea uh that's going to be much harder to use than something that's already there. Um uh when I build Mac apps, I build them in in Swift and SwiftUI. Partly because I like pain. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Partly because it the the deepest level of system integration I can only get through there. Um 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. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Um sometimes I just also try new languages just to like get a feel for them. Like Zig? Yeah. If it's something that where I care about performance a lot and it's it's a really interesting language. And it like agents got so much better over the last 6 months from >> [sighs] >> not really good to totally valid choice. Just still a a very young ecosystem. And most of the time you actually care about ecosystem, right? So so if you build something that don't 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 I found projects that kind of did 90% of what I wanted, but were in Python and I wanted them I wanted easy Windows story. Okay, just rewrite it in Go. Um but then if you go more towards multiple multiple stress and more performance, Rust is really good choice. There's no there's just no single answer and that's also the beauty of it. Like it's fun and now it doesn't matter anymore. You can just literally pick the language that has the the most fitting characteristics and ecosystem for your problem domain and yeah, it might be you might have you might be a little bit slow in reading the code, but not really. I think you you you pick stuff up really fast and you can always ask your agent. So, there's a a lot of programmers and builders who draw inspiration from your story. Just the way you carry yourself, your choice of making open core open source the the way you have fun building and exploring and doing that for the most part alone or on a small team. So, by way of advice what metric should be the goal that they would be optimizing for? What would be the metric of success? Would it be happiness? Is it money? Is it positive impact for people who are dreaming of building? Cuz 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. I was just burning too bright for too long. I I ran I started PHP PDF good and ran it for 13 years. >> [sighs] >> 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, it was people stuff. The stuff that burned me out was mostly people stuff. I I don't think burnout is working too much. Maybe to a degree, everybody's different, you know, I cannot speak in in absolute terms, but for me it was much more differences um with my my co-founders, conflicts or like really high stress situation with customers >> [sighs] >> that eventually grinded me down and then when luckily um we got a really good offer for like putting the company to the next level and I I already kind of worked 2 years on making myself obsolete. So, at this point I could leave and and then I just I was sitting in front of the screen and I felt like you know Austin Powers where they suck the mojo out. I was like it was like gone. Like I couldn't I couldn't get code out anymore. I was just like staring >> [sighs and gasps] >> and feeling empty. And then I I should stop. I I booked like a one-way trip to Madrid and then I just like spent some some time there. I felt I I had to catch up on life. So, I did a whole a bunch of life catching up stuff. Did you go through some lows during that period? And uh you know maybe advice on how to maybe advice on how to approach life. If you think that oh you work really hard and then I retire I don't recommend that because the idea of oh yeah, I just enjoy life now it maybe is appealing, but right now I enjoy life the most I've 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 when you're bored, you're going to look for other places how to stimulate yourself and then maybe 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 optimize for money. And you've also shown that it's not like you're saying no to money. I mean I'm sure you take money but it's not the primary objective of of your life. Can you just speak to that, your philosophy on money? When I built my company, [clears throat] money was never the driving force. It felt more like like an affirmation that I did something right and having money is also a lot of problems. I also think it does diminishing returns the more you have. Um 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. Um [snorts] I I needed quite a lot. Like I have a I have foundation for >> [sighs] >> helping people that weren't so lucky. And disconnecting from society is bad in that on many levels, but one of them is like humans are awesome. >> [sighs] >> It's nice to continuously remember the awesomeness in humans. I mean I could afford really nice hotels. The last time I was in San Francisco I did the first time the OG Airbnb experience and just booked a room. Mostly because I I thought okay, I'm either I'm out or I'm sleeping and I don't like where all the hotels are and I wanted 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 it reduces the need for it needs to be good or bad. Like people only want good experiences. That's not going to work, but if you optimize for experiences if it's good, amazing. If it's bad, amazing cuz like I learned something. I saw something. I did 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. >> [laughter] >> And we like immediately bonded. I had a great time. Yeah, there's something about the uh air you know, couch surfing, Airbnb experience, the OG. I mean still to this day it's 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. When it rains and you're soaked and it's all and planes, the everything is everything is it's still awesome if you're able to open your eyes to the it's good to be alive. Yeah, and anything that creates emotion and feelings is good. Even so so maybe even the crypto people are good because they definitely created emotions. I I don't know if I should go that far. No, man. Give them give them all give them love. Give them love. I do think that online lacks some of the awesomeness of real life. Yeah. That's that's it's an open problem of how to solve. How to infuse the online cyber experience with the I don't know. Uh with the intensity that we humans feel and that's in real life. I don't know. I don't know if that's a solvable problem. >> because text is very lossy. >> [sighs] >> Yeah. >> You know, sometimes I wish if I talked to the agent I would it should be multimodal so it also understands my emotions. I mean it it might move there. It might move there. >> It will. It totally will. I mean I have to ask you, just curious. I I know you've probably gotten huge offers from major companies. Can you speak to who you're considering working with? Yeah. So to like >> [sighs and gasps] >> explain my thinking a little bit, right? I did not expect this blowing up so much. So, there's a lot of doors that opened because of it. There's like I think every VC every big VC company is in my inbox and tried to get 15 minutes with me. So there's like a 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 when I deleted the whole thing. I could create a company. >> [sighs] >> Been there, done that. Um There's so many people that push me towards that. Um yeah, like could be amazing. Push you say that you you would probably raise a lot of money in that. Yeah. I don't know, hundreds of millions, billions, I don't know. It could just got unlimited amount of money. Yeah. It just doesn't excite me as much cuz I feel >> [sighs] >> I did all of that and it would take a lot of time away from the things I actually enjoy. I Same as when when I was CEO, I think I I learned to do it and I'm not bad at it. Partly I'm good at it. >> [sighs] >> But yeah, that path doesn't excite me too much and I also fear it it would create a natural conflict of interest. Like what's the most obvious thing I do? I prioritize it. That was like a version safe for workplace. And then what do you 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. >> [sighs] >> 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 fewer and fewer companies manage [clears throat] that. Like even >> [gasps] >> 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, um 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 they can they can do without me. But all the projects that are done by mostly individuals, um so like all the 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? So you're losing money. Yeah, right now I lose money on this. So it's really not sustainable. Uh I mean it's like I guess something between 10 and 20k a month. Um which is fine. I'm sure over time I could get that down. Um OpenAI [clears throat] is helping a lot 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 considered, 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 OpenAI seem the most interesting. Do you lean one way or the other? Uh yeah. Um Not sure how much I should share there. It's not quite finalized yet. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Um Let's let's just say like >> [sighs] >> 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 I didn't even talk about the whole community part, but like the the thing that I experienced in the MIT Media Lab at Clock on seeing so many people so inspired like and having fun and just like building 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 early 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 sensorily overloaded because too many people wanted to do selfies. But 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 year of personal agents and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs. And I also on a personal level I never worked at a large company. And I'm intrigued. You know, we talk about experiences. Will I like it? I don't know. Um but I want that experience. Uh I'm sure like if if I if I announce this, then there will be people like, "Oh, he sold out, blah blah blah." >> [gasps] >> 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 OpenClaw on one of my I'm sorry, normie friends. I'm sorry, Rohan. But he says he you know, like he's Normie would love, yeah. >> He he like someone who uses the computer, but never really like yeah, use some ChatGPT 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 Anthropic. And set up everything for him with like WSL, Windows. I was also curious would it actually work on Windows, you know? I was a little early. And then within a few days he was hooked. Like he texted me 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. And then a few days later Anthropic blocked him. Because based on their rules, um using 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 on 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-sided to lock down your product so much. All the other companies have been helpful. I'm in Slack of of most of the big labs. Kind of everybody understands that we are still in area of exploration in the area of the radio show is on TV and not and not a modern TV show that fully uses the format. I think I think you've made a lot of people like see the possibility and non I'm sorry, non 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 big it's a really beautiful thing. I think [snorts] I also speak uh for a lot of people in saying I think you're one of the 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 described having open source part and you being part of um uh also building a thing inside additionally of a large company would be great cuz it's great to have good people in those companies. You 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. Um, I have so many ideas. Some should be there. Some would be much better fitted when I have access to the latest toys. Uh, >> [laughter] >> and I I kind of want to have access to like the latest toys. Um, so this is important. This is cool. This will continue to exist. My my short-term focus is like working through those. Uh, is it two Is it 3,000 PRs now? I don't even know. Like there's there's a little bit of backlog. >> [laughter] >> But this is not going to be the thing that I'm going to work until I'm I'm I'm 80, you know? This is this is a window to 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 to? Meta, OpenAI? Is there one you lean towards going with? I spent time with both of those and it's funny because a few weeks ago I I didn't consider any of this. Um, and it's really hard. >> [laughter] >> Like Yeah. I have some I do know people at OpenAI. I love that tech. I think I'm the biggest Codex advertisement shill that's unpaid. And it would feel so gratifying to like put a price to all the work I did for free. Um, I would love if something happens and those companies get just merged cuz it's like [clears throat] Is this the hardest decision you've ever had to do? Nah, you know, I had some breakups in the past that feel like at a similar level. Relationships, you mean? >> Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Uh, and and I also know that in the end they're both amazing. I cannot go wrong. It's like >> Right. It's like one of the most prestigious and and and and and largest I mean, not largest, but like they were 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, so that you can have a positive impact on a large number of people. They both understand that. You know, both Matt and Mark basically played all week with my product and sent me like oh, this is great. Oh, this is Oh, I need to change this. Oh, like find a little anecdotes. And people using your stuff is kind of like the biggest compliment. And also shows me that, you know, they actually they actually care about it. And I didn't get the same on the OpenAI side. Um, I got I got got to see some other stuff that I find really cool. And they lure me with >> [sighs] >> I cannot tell the exact number because of uh, NDA, but you can you can be creative and and think of the cerebral steal and how that would translate into speed. And that was >> [gasps] >> very intriguing. >> [sighs] >> Yeah, like you give me Source Hammer. Yeah. Um, >> [laughter] >> Yeah, been lured with tokens. So, yeah. So, it it's funny. So, so Mark's tinkering with the thing, essentially having fun with the thing. He got he like when you first when they first approached me, I got him in my in my WhatsApp and he was asking, yeah, when can we 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. Mhm. >> Well, I guess that gives you street cred. It's like uh, like he's still writing code. You know, he's Yeah. >> drift away and 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, Claude code or Codex? >> [laughter] >> Like I said, that's the thing you first do like casually call >> Yeah, it's awesome. >> someone with like the that owns one of the largest companies in the world and and you have a 10-minute conversation about that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Uh, and then I think afterwards he called me eccentric, but brilliant. But I also had some I had some really really cool discussion with Sam Altman. Uh, and he's he's very thoughtful. Um, brilliant. And I like him a lot. From the from the little time I had, yeah. I mean, I know some people really fight both of those people. >> [sighs] >> I don't think it's fair. I think no matter the stuff you're building and the kind of human you are, uh, doing stuff at scale is kind of awesome. I'm excited. I am super pumped. And you know, the beauty is if if it doesn't work out, I can just do my own thing again. Like I I told them like I I don't do this for the money. I don't give a I Yeah. I mean, of course 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 quite a bit, but maybe it's just zooming out about how Open Claw works. We 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. Uh, there's the agentic loop. You said somewhere that everybody should implement an agent loop at some point in their >> it's like the it's like the hello world in AI. You know, and it's actually quite simple. Yeah. >> And it it's good to understand that that stuff's not magic. You can you can easily build it yourself. So, writing your own little Claude code. I I even did this at a conference in Paris for people to like introduce them to AI. I think it's it's a it's a fun little practice. Um, and you you covered a lot. I think one 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 comes great responsibility. And I was like, how can I up the stakes a little bit more? Yeah, right. And I just made a I made it proactive. So, I added a prompt. Initially, it was just a prompt, surprise me. >> [snorts] >> Every like half an hour, surprise me, you know? And later on I changed it to be like a little more specific in in the definition of surprise. Um, but the fact that I made it proactive and that it knows you and that it cares about you, like 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 heartbeat very in the beginning is still today it doesn't the model doesn't choose to use it a lot. By the way, we're we're we're talking about heartbeat, as you mentioned, the thing that regularly uh, [clears throat] acts. You just kick off the loop. Isn't that just a cron job, man? Yeah, right. I was like [laughter] The The criticisms that you get are >> you can deduce any idea to like a silly Yeah, it's just it's just a cron job in the end. I have like cron separate cron jobs. Isn't love just evolutionary biology manifesting itself in the Isn't Aren't you guys just using each other In the end, 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. It's like, are you okay? And I just it's like again, apparently like if something's significant in the context, that triggered the heartbeat. When it rarely used the heartbeat. Um, and it does that sometimes for people and that just makes it a lot more relatable. Let me look this up on Perplexity, how Open Claw works, just to see if I'm missing any of the stuff. Uh local agent runtime, high-level architecture. There's Oh, we haven't talked much about skills, I suppose. Skill hub, the tools in the skill layer. But that's definitely a huge component and there's a huge growing set of skills. >> That half year ago like everyone was talking about MCPs. Yeah. And I was like, "Screw MCPs." Uh every MCP would be better as a CLI. And now this stuff doesn't even have MCP support. I mean it it has with asterisks, but not in the core layer. And nobody's complaining. Mhm. 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. And even for a while I I didn't really care about skills, but skills are actually perfect for that because they they boil down to a single sentence that explains the skill. And then the model loads the skill and then explains the CLI and then the model uses the CLI. Some skills are like raw, but most of the time it works. It's interesting. I'm I'm I'm asking uh Perplexity MCP versus skills cuz uh this kind of requires a hot take that's quite recent. Cuz your general view is MCPs are dead-ish. So MCPs is a more structured thing. So if you uh listen to Perplexity here, MCP is what can I reach? So APIs, databases, services, files via protocol, so a structured protocol of how you communicate with a thing. And then skills is more how should I work? Procedures, hostile helper scripts, and prompts uh 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 [clears throat] 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. So imagine if I have a service that gives me better data and it gives me the temperature, the average temperature, rain, wind, and all the other stuff. And I get like this huge blob back. As a model, I always have to get the huge blob back. I have to fill my context with that huge blob and then pick what I want. There's no way for the model to naturally filter unless I think about it 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 actual output. And the mo- and the the you have no context pollution. Uh again, you can solve that with like sub agents and more charades, but it's just like workarounds for something that might not be the optimal way. There's it definitely it was you know it was good that we had MCPs because it pushed a lot of companies towards building APIs. And now I can like look at an MCP and just make it into a CLI. Mhm. Um but this 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 >> [sighs and gasps] >> uh 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 open claws quite incredible, right? Yeah. You can basically do everything, most things you can think of using browser use. That that gets into the whole arch of every app is just a very slow API now, if you want or not. And that through personal agents a lot of apps will disappear. You know like I I had a I built a CLI for Twitter. I mean I 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 the bird had to disappear. The the wings were clipped. All they did is they just made access slower. You're not you're not actually taking a feature away. But now if if your agent wants to read a tweet, it actually has to open the browser and read tweet. And it will still be able to read the tweet. It will just take longer. It's not like you're making something that was possible not possible. No, now it's just taking and now it's just a bit slower. So 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 their situation? Like what would you do if you were Twitter, if you were X? Because they're basically trying to protect against other large companies scraping all their data. >> Yeah. But in so doing, they're cutting off like a million different use cases for smaller developers that actually want to use it for helpful cool stuff. I think if you have a very low um per day baseline per account that allows read-only access would solve a lot of problems. There's plenty plenty automations where people create a bookmark and then use open claw to like find the bookmark, do research on it, and then send you an email with like more details on it or a summary. That's a cool approach. I also want all my bookmarks somewhere to search. I would still like to have that. So read-only access for the bookmarks you make on X. That seems like an incredible application cuz a lot of us find a lot of cool stuff on X. We bookmark. That's the general process of X. It's like, "Holy 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 further. >> Yeah, I mean and to be frank, I I mean I I told Twitter proactively that, "Hey, I built this and there's a need." And they've been really nice, but also like, "Take it down." Fair. Totally fair. Um but I hope that this woke up the team a little bit that there's a need. And if all you do is making it slower, you'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. Mhm. Especially on tweets, it's very hard to tweet in a way that does look completely human. Mhm. And 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. Um Mhm. We need to rethink social platforms a little bit if if if we 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 now so cheap, eyeballs are the expensive part. And I find it very triggering when I read something and then I'm like, "Oh, no, this must be like AI." Yeah. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Like where where is this headed in terms of what we value about the human experience? It feels like we'll we'll move more and more towards in-person interaction. And we'll just communicate. We'll talk to our AI agent to accomplish different tasks, to learn about different things. But we won't value online interaction because there'll be so much AI slop that smells and so many bots that it's difficult. Well, if it's marked, then it shouldn't 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. E- 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 a much rather read your prompts than what came out. Um I think we're reaching a point where I value typos again. Like um like you know, I I mean it also took me a while to like come to the realization. I On my blog, I experimented with creating a blog post with agents and >> [sighs] >> ultimately it took me about the same time to like steer agent towards something I like, but it missed the nuances that how I would write it. You know, you can like you can steer it towards your style, but it's not going to be all your style. So, I I completely moved away from that. I I everything everything I blog is organic handwritten and maybe maybe I I I use the AI as a fix my worst typos, but there's value in the rough parts of an actual human. Isn't that awesome? Isn't that beautiful that now because of AI we'll value the raw humanity in each of us more. I also I also realized the thing that I 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 still fine with the AI, you know, better than nothing. And for now it's still in a place in the in a visual medium, too. It's fascinating how allergic I am to even a little bit of AI slop in in video and images. It's useful. It's nice if it's like a little component of like or even even those image ads like all these infographics and stuff, they they trigger me so hard. Like immediately makes me think less of your content and it they were novel for like 1 week and now it just screams slop. Yeah. Even even if people work harder on it, using and I I have some of my blog posts, you know, in the in the time where I I explored this new medium, but now they trigger me as well. It's like, yeah, this is this just screams AI slop. I What I don't know what that is, but I went through that, too. I was really excited by the diagrams and then I realized in order to remove from them hallucinations, you actually have to do a huge amount of work. And you're just using it to draw the better diagrams, great. And then I'm proud of the diagram. I've used them for literally like kind of like you said for maybe a couple 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 this is fake. It's fraudulent. There's something wrong with it and it it's a smell. It's >> [laughter] >> it's a smell. And it's awesome because it it reminds you that we know there's so much to humans that's amazing and we know that we we know it. We know it when we see it. And so, that gives me a lot of hope. You know, 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 damaged or limited 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? Yeah. I noticed that on Discord that people just said how they like 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, can assume that I make bad decisions when I'm at I don't know, Waffle House. What's around here? Or [gasps] or brisket in Austin. There's no bad decisions around brisket, but yeah. No, that's the best decision, honestly. >> [laughter] >> Your agent should know that. But it can like it can modify my my gym workout based on how well I slept or if I'm if I have stress or not. Like 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. Why do I still need an app to do that? Why do I have to Why should I pay another subscription for something that the agent can just do now? And why do I need my my eight sleep app to control my bed when I can tell the tell the agent to No, the agent already knows where I am, so it can like turn off what I don't use. And I think that will that will translate into a whole category of apps that are no longer I will just naturally stop using because my agent can just do it better. I think you said somewhere that it might kill off 80% of apps. Yeah. Don't you think that's a gigantic transformative effect on just all software development? Does that mean it might kill off a lot of software companies? Yeah. It's a scary thing. So, like do you think about the impact it has on the economy on just the ripple effects it has to society transforming who [snorts] builds what tooling. It empowers a lot of users to get stuff done, to get it 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 100 bucks in order to solve problems for me. >> [sighs and gasps] >> And if I tell it to order me food, maybe it uses a service. Maybe it uses something like rent a human. So, like just get that done for me. I don't actually care. I care about solve my problem. There's space for for new companies that solve that well. Maybe don't not all apps disappear. Maybe some transform into being API. So, basically apps that rapidly transform in being agent facing. So, there's a real opportunity for like Uber Eats who we just used earlier today. It's companies like this of which there's many. Who gets there fastest to being able to interact with open claw in a way that's the the most natural, the easiest. And also apps will become API if they want or not because my agent can figure out how to use my phone. I mean on on the other side it's a little more tricky on Android, but that's already 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 there's a there's an API it can call which is faster. >> [sighs and gasps] >> 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 that also can be API. Why do I need the Sonos app anymore when I can when my agent can talk to the Sonos speakers directly. Like my cameras, there's like a crappy app, but they have 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. And some companies will really not like that. For example, >> [sighs] >> there's no CLI for Google. So, I had to like to have to do anything myself and build Gog. That's like a CLI for Google. And at the yeah, at the end user, they have to give me the emails because otherwise I cannot use their product. If I'm a company and I try to get Google data, Gmail, there's a whole complicated process to the point where sometimes startups acquire startups that went through that process so they don't don't have to work with Google for half a year to be certified to being able to access Gmail. But my agent can access Gmail because I can just connect to it. It's still crappy because I need to like 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. Through browser use. Yeah, I mean I I watched my agent happily click the I'm not a robot button. And there's this this whole that's going to be that's going to be more heated. You see companies like uh Cloudflare that try to prevent bot access. And in some ways that's useful for scraping, but in other ways if I'm I'm a personal user, I want that. You know, sometimes I I use codex and I read an article about >> [sighs and gasps] >> 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 learn that maybe I don't click on medium because it's annoying and I use other websites that actually are agent-friendly. >> [snorts] >> So There's going to be a lot of powerful rich companies fighting back. So it's a really interesting You'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 of how we interact with uh services, with with web. And so like there's companies like Google they're going to push back. I mean there's every major company you can think of is going to push back. >> Even Yeah, even search. Um I now use I think Perplexity or Brave as providers because Google really doesn't make it easy to use Google without Google. >> [gasps] >> I'm not sure if that's the right strategy, but I'm not Google. >> [gasps] >> Yeah, there's a there's a nice balance from a big company perspective cuz if you push back too much for too long you become Blockbuster and you lose everything to the Netflixes of the world, but some push back is probably good during a revolution to see But you see that that like this is something that the people want. Right. So Yes. If I'm on the go, I don't want to open a calendar app. I just I want to tell my agent that remind me about this dinner tomorrow night. And maybe invite two of my friends and then maybe send a send a WhatsApp message to my friend. And I don't need I don't want to need to open apps for that. I think that we passed that age and now everything is like much more connected and and fluid if those companies want it or not. And 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. Uh we talked about programming quite a bit and a lot of folks that are developers are really worried about their jobs, about their about the future of programming. Do you think AI replaces programmers completely, human programmers? I mean we're definitely going in that direction. Programming is just a part of building products. So maybe maybe I 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? How's the architecture? I don't think agents will replace all of that. Yeah, like just if the actual art of programming it will it will stay there, but it is 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 tinkering, just being really deep in the flow and just like cranking out code and like finding really beautiful solutions and yes, in a way it's it's sad because that will go away and I also got a lot of joy out of just writing code and being really deep in my thoughts and forgetting time and space and just being in this beautiful state of flow. But you can get the same state of flow I get a similar state of flow by working with agents and building and thinking really hard about problems. It is different, >> [sighs] >> but and it's okay to mourn it, but it's not something we can fight. Like there is the world for a long time had a there was a lack of intelligence if you if you see it like that of people building things and that's why salaries of software developers reached stupidly high amounts. And that will go away. Um there will still be a lot of demand for people that understand how to build things. Just that all this tokenized intelligence uh enables people to do a lot more a lot faster. And it will be even more even faster and even more because those things are continuously improving. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Um we had similar things when I mean 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. Um 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. But I don't think you're just a programmer. That does a very limiting view of your craft. You are 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 and 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 said with the steam engine. I've I've spent so many I don't know, maybe thousands of hours pouring over code and putting my heart and soul and like and just like some of my most painful and happiest moments were alone behind I I was an Emacs person for a long time. And Emacs. And and then there's an identity and there's meaning and there's like when I walk about the world I don't say it out loud, but I think of myself as a programmer. And to have that in a matter of months. I mean like you mentioned April to November. It really is a leap that happened, a shift that's happening. >> [gasps] >> To have that completely replaced is is painful. It's it's truly painful, but I also think um programmers, builders more broadly, but what is what is the act of programming? I I think programmers are generally best equipped at this moment in history to learn the language, to empathize with agents, to learn the language of agents, to feel the CLI. Yeah. [gasps] Like 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 and I am I am writing the code. Yeah, it's just You'll still be a programmer. It's just the activity of a programmer is is different. >> Yeah, and cuz on X the bubble I'm in is mostly positive. On on Mastodon and Blue Sky I don't I also use it less because often times I got attacked for my blog posts. And I I had stronger reactions in the past. Now I can sympathize with those people more cuz in a way I get it. 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 and it's going to be challenging, but it's also I don't know. I find it incredibly fun and and and gratifying and I can 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 >> [sighs and gasps] >> the default is now so much easier. So software is changing in many ways. There's going to be a lot more. >> [sighs] >> And then you have all these people that are screaming, "Oh yeah, but what about the water?" You know? Like I did a conference in Italy about the the state of AI and my whole motivation was to push people away from don't see yourself as an iOS developer anymore, you're now a builder. And you can use your skills in many more ways. Also because apps are slowly going away. Uh people didn't like that. Like uh a lot of people didn't like what I had to say. And I don't think I was hyperbolic. I was just like this is how I see the future. Maybe this is not how it's going to be, but I'm pretty sure a version of that will happen. And the first question I got was, "Yeah, but what about the insane water use on data centers?" But then you actually sit down and do the math, and then for most people, if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the the CO2 output or like the water use uh in equivalent of tokens. I mean, the math is is the math is tricky, and it depends if you add pre-training, then maybe it's more than just one patty, but it's not off by factor of 100, you know? So so there or 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. And I'm not saying everything's good. It's certainly going to be a very transformative technology for our society. There is uh to steelman the the criticism in general, I do want to say in my experience with Silicon Valley, um there's a bit of a bubble in the sense that there's a kind of excitement and an overfocus about the positive that the technology can bring. Yeah. And which is great. It's great to focus on not to not to be paralyzed by fear and fearmongering 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 in the Midwest, across the world, including the programmers we mentioned, including all the people that are going to lose their jobs, including the the measurable pain and suffering that happens at the short-term scale when there's change of kind, especially large-scale transformative change that we're about to face if what we're talking about will materialize. And so to having a bit of that humility and awareness about the tools you're building, they're going to cause pain. They will long-term hopefully bring about a better world and even more opportunities and even more awesomeness, but having that kind of like quiet moment often of of respect for the pain that is going to be felt. And so like not not enough of that is I think done, so it's it's good to have a bit of that. And then I also have to put against uh some of the emails I got where people told me they have a small business and they've been struggling and and OpenClaw helped them automate a few of the tedious tasks from from collecting invoices to like answering customer emails that then freed them up and like caused them a bit more joy in their life. Or or some emails where they told me that OpenClaw helped a disabled daughter uh that she's now empowered and feels she can do much more than before. Which is amazing, right? Because you you could you could do that before as well. The technology was there. I didn't 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 applied for good. Or like also the fact that yes, I I I suggest the the the latest and best models, but you can totally run this on free models. You can run this locally. You can run this on on on Kimmy or other other other models that are way more accessible price-wise and still have a a very powerful system that might otherwise not be possible because other things that I don't know, Anthropic's Claude work is locked in into their space, so it's not all black and white. I got a lot of emails that were heartwarming and amazing and 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 not just programmers, like a lot of people's lives. It's it's it's beautiful to see. Uh what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on with human civilization? I mean, I inspired 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 like help them in their life and creating new places that are just sprawling of creativity. I don't know, like there's like Clockon in Vienna, there's like 500 people, and there's such a high percentage of people that have want to present, which is to me really surprising because you usually it's quite hard to find people that want to like talk about what they build, and now it's there's an abundance. So that gives me hope that we can we can figure 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 that can express those ideas in language can build. It's crazy. Yeah, that's ultimately power to people and one of the beauty the beautiful things that come out of AI. Not just not just a slot generator. >> [laughter] [gasps] >> Well, Mr. Claus Father, I just realized when I said that in the beginning, I violated two trademarks cuz there's also the Godfather. I'm getting sued by everybody. You're a wonderful human being. Uh 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. Uh so I'm truly grateful for everything you've been doing and uh 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. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Voltaire. With great power comes great responsibility. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.