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 how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where 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 prompted 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 vibe coding is a slur.
You prefer agentic engineering?
Yeah, I always tell people I do agentic engineering, and then maybe after 3:00 AM, I switch to vibe coding, and then I have regrets the next day.
Yeah, you just have to clean up and, like, fix your shit.
I used to write really long prompts. And by writing, I mean, I don't write, I talk, you know? These hands are, like, too precious for writing now. I just use bespoke prompts to build my software.
So, you, for real, with all those terminals, are using voice?
Yeah. I used to do it very extensively, to the point where there was a period where I lost my voice.
I mean, I have to ask you, just curious. I know you've probably gotten huge offers from major companies. Can you speak to who you're considering working with?
The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, formerly known as MoltBot, ClawdBot, Clawdus, Claude, 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 OpenClaw. So, what is OpenClaw? It's an open-source AI agent that has taken over the tech world in a matter of days, exploding in popularity, reaching over 180,000 stars on GitHub, and spawning the social network MoltBook, where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness, creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public. And a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of clickbait fearmongering and genuine, fully justifiable concern about the role of AI in our digital, interconnected human world. OpenClaw, 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 OpenClaw took the internet by storm. Its power, in large part, comes from the fact that you can give it access to all of your stuff and give it permission to do anything with that stuff in order to be useful to you. This is very powerful, but it is also dangerous. OpenClaw represents freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility. With it, you can own and have control over your data, but precisely because you have this control, you also have the responsibility to protect it from cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are great ways to protect yourself, 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 three 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, the symbol of the AI revolution happening in the programming world. There was the ChatGPT moment in 2022, the DeepSeek moment in 2025, and now, in '26, we're living through the OpenClaw moment, the age of the lobster. The start of the agentic AI revolution. What a time to be alive. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or 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 Clawed Father. Actually, Benjamin predicted it in his tweet. "The following is a conversation with Claude, a respected crustacean." It's a hilarious-looking picture of a lobster in a suit, so I think the prophecy has been fulfilled. Let's go to this moment when you built a prototype in one hour, that was the early version of OpenClaw. I think this story is really inspiring to a lot of people because this prototype led to something that just took the internet by storm and became the fastest-growing repository in GitHub history, with now over 175,000 stars. So, what was the story of the one-hour prototype?
You know, I wanted that since April.
A personal assistant. AI personal assistant.
Yeah. And I played around with some other things, like even stuff that gets all my WhatsApp, and I could just run queries on it. That was back when we had GPT-4.1, with the one million context window. And I pulled in all the data and then just asked him questions like, "What makes this friendship meaningful?"
And I got some really profound results. Like, I sent it to my friends and they got, like, teary eyes.
So, there's something there.
Yeah. But then I thought all the labs will work on that. So I moved on to other things, and that was still very much in my early days of experimenting and playing. You know, you have to... That's how you learn. You just like, you do stuff and you play. And time flew by and it was November. I wanted to make sure that the thing I started is actually happening. I was annoyed that it didn't exist, so I just prompted it into existence.
I mean, that's the beginning of the hero's journey of the entrepreneur, right? And you've even with your original story with PSPDFKit, it's like, "Why does this not exist? Let me build it." And again, here's a whole different realm, but similar maybe spirit.
Yeah, so 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 random thing ever. And suddenly, I had this problem and I wanted to help a friend. And there was... Well, not like nothing existed, but it was just not good. And like... Like I tried it and it was like very, "Nah." Like, "Hmm, 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, it turns out that it's pretty useful to be able to open a PDF.
You could also make the joke that I'm really bad at naming.
Like, name number five on the current project. And even PSPDF doesn't really roll off the tongue.
Anyway, so you said, "Screw it. Why don't I do it?" So what was the prototype? What was the thing that you... What was the magical thing that you built in a short amount of time that you were like, "This might actually work as an agent," where I talk to it and it does things?
There was... Like, one of my projects before already did something where I could bring my terminals onto the web and then I could, like, interact with them, but there also would be terminals on my Mac.
Viptunnel, which was like a weekend hack project that was still very early. And it was Claude 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 take a tangent — but a great blog post describing that you converted Viptunnel. You vibe-coded Viptunnel from TypeScript into Zig of all programming languages with a single prompt. One prompt, one shot. Convert the entire code base into Zig.
Yeah. There was this one thing where part of the architecture took too much memory. Every terminal used like a node. 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 just typed, "Convert this and this part to Zig," 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 or like six hours and just did its thing. And it's like... It's just mind-blowing.
So that's on the LLM programming side, refactoring. But back to the actual story of the prototype. So how did Viptunnel connect to the first prototype where your 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 search bar was literally just hooking up WhatsApp to Claude Code. One shot. The CLI message comes in. I call the CLI with -p. It does its magic, I get the string back and I send it back to WhatsApp. And I built this in one hour. And I already felt really cool. It's like, "Oh, I can, like, talk to my computer," right? That was cool. But I wanted images, 'cause I often use images when I prompt. I think it's such an efficient way to give the agent more context. And they are really good at figuring out what I mean, even if it's like a weird cropped-up screenshot. So I used it a lot and I wanted to do that in WhatsApp as well. Also, like, you know, just you run around, you see like a poster of an event, you just make a screenshot and like figure out if I have time there, if this is good, if my friends are maybe up for that. Just like images seemed important. So I worked a few... It took me a few more hours to actually get that right. And then it was just... I used it a lot. And funny enough, that was just before I went on a trip to Marrakesh with my friends for a birthday trip. And there it was even better because internet was a little shaky but WhatsApp just works, you know? It's like doesn't matter, you have, like, edge, it still works. WhatsApp is just made really well. So I ended up using it a lot. Translate this for me, explain this, find me places. Like, you just having a clanker doing, having Google for you, that was... Basically there 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 Claude Code and Claude Code is doing all kinds of heavy work and coming back to you with a thin message.
Yeah. It was slow because every time I boot up the CLI, but it was really cool already. And it could just use all the things that I already had built. I had built like a whole bunch of CLI stuff over the month so it felt really powerful.
There is 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 Claude 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 sense it's a phase shift in the integration of AI into your life and how it feels, right?
Yeah. Yeah. 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 it almost feels like a hobby, just as Cursor or Perplexity. And I'm like, well, if that's a hobby that's kind of a compliment, you know? They're like, they're not doing too bad. Thank you, I guess? Yes. I mean, isn't magic often just like you take a lot of things that are already there but bring them together in new ways? Like, 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.
It's really hard to convert into words what is magic about a thing. If you look at the scrolling on an iPhone, why is that so pleasant? There's a lot of elements about that interface that makes it incredibly pleasant, that 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 afterwards it felt so obvious.
Right? But still... You know the moment where it blew my mind was when I used it a lot and then at some point I just sent it a message and then a typing indicator appeared. And I'm like, wait, I didn't build that, 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 in this restaurant?" You know? Because we were just running around and checking out the city. So that's why I didn't even think when I used it because sometimes when you're in a hurry typing is annoying.
So, oh, you did an audio message?
Yeah. And it just worked and I'm like...
And it's not supposed to work because...
You didn't give it that...
I literally went, "How the fuck did he do that?" And it was like, "Yeah, the mad lad did the following. He sent me a message but it only was a file and no file ending." So I checked out the header of the file and it found that it was, like, opus so I used 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 OpenAI to translate and here I am. Just looked at the message I'm like, "Oh wow."
You didn't teach it any of those things and the agent just figured it out, did all those conversions, the translations. It figured out the API, it figured out which program to use, all those kinds of things. And you were just absent-mindedly just sent an audio message when it came back.
Yeah, like, so clever even because he would have gotten the whisper local path, he 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 problem 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. And that's when it kind of clicked for me. It's 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 fit at all."
At that time it was called WA Relay.
Yeah. And so I debated with me like, do I want that? Do I not want that? And then I thought, well maybe I do that because that could be a cool way to show people. Because I... So far I did it in WhatsApp as like groups, you know, but don't really want to give my phone number to every internet stranger.
Journalists manage to do that anyhow now so that's a different story. So I merged it from Shadow, who helped me a lot with the whole project. So, thank you. And I put my bot in there.
Yeah. No security because I hadn't built sandboxing in yet. I just prompted it to, like, only listen to me. And then some people came and tried to hack it, and I just... Or, like, just watched and I just kept working in the open, you know? Like, I used my agent to build my agent harness and to test, like, various stuff. 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 got my first real influencer being a fan and did videos, dachitze. Thank you. And from there on, I started gaining up speed. And at the same time, my sleep cycle went shorter and shorter because I felt the storm coming, and I just worked my ass off to get it into a state where it's kinda good.
There's a few components and we'll talk about how it all works, but basically, you're able to talk to it using WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord. So that's a component that you have to get right.
And then you have to figure out the agentic loop, you have to 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.
I feel like I built my little playground. Like, I never had so much fun than building this project. You know? Like, you have like, "Oh," I go like, level one 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 had this 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 feels more natural.
On the agentic loop. And then I go to memory, right?
You want him to, like, remember stuff. So maybe the ultimate boss is continuous reinforcement learning, but I'm, like, at... I feel like I'm level two or three with Markdown files and the vector database. And then you can go to level community management, you can go to level website and marketing. There's just so many hats that you have to have on. Not even talking about native apps. That's just, like, infinite different levels and infinite level ups you can do.
So the whole time you're having fun. We should say that for the most part, 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.
And having fun? You did, in January, 6,600 commits. Probably more.
I sometimes posted a meme. I'm limited by the technology of my time. I could do more if agents would be faster.
But we should say you're running multiple agents at the same time.
Yeah. Depending on how much I slept and how difficult of the tasks I work on, between four and 10.
Four and 10 agents. There's so many possible directions, speaking of Factorio, that we can go here. But one 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.
Like, it's hard to compete against someone who's just there to have fun.
I wanted it to be fun, I wanted it to be weird. And if you see, like, all the lobster stuff online I think I managed weird. You know, for the longest time, the only way to install it was git clone, pnpm build, pnpm gateway. Like, you clone it, you build it, you run it. And then the agent... I made the agent very aware. Like, it knows what its source code is. It understands how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where documentation is. It knows which model it runs. It knows if you turn on the voice or reasoning mode. Like, 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 prompted it into existence, and then the agent would just modify its own software. You know, we have people talk about self-modifying software. I just built it and didn't even plan it so much. It just happened.
Can you actually speak to that? 'Cause it's just fascinating. So you have this piece of software that's written in TypeScript...
...that's able to, via the agentic loop, modify itself. I mean, what a moment to be alive in the history of humanity and the history of programming. Here's the 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 oftentimes I... When I debug it, I use self-introspection so much. It's like, "Hey, what tools do you see? Can you call the tool yourself?" Or 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 pull requests by people who never wrote software. I mean, it also did show that people never wrote software. So 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 doesn't matter how shitty it is, you gotta 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 very meaningful 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 the 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?
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... And I also organize another type of meetup. I call it... I called it Claude Code Anonymous. You can get the inspiration from. Now, I call it Agents Anonymous for reasons.
Oh, it's so funny on so many levels. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah. And there was this one guy who talked to me. He's like, "I run this design agency, and we never had custom software. And now I have, like, 25 little web services for various things that help me in my business. And I don't even know how they work, but they work." And he was just, like, very happy that my stuff solved some of his problems. And he was, like, curious enough that he actually came to, like, an agentic meetup, even though he doesn't really know how software works.
Can we actually rewind a little bit and tell the saga of the name change? First of all, it started out as WA Relay.
Yeah. You know, when I built it in the beginning, my agent had no personality. It was just... It was Claude Code. It's like this sycophantic opus, very friendly. And when you talk to a friend on WhatsApp, they don't talk like Claude Code. So I wanted... I felt this... It didn't feel right, so I wanted to give it a personality.
Make it spicier, make it...
...something. By the way, that's actually hard to put into words as well. And we should mention that, of course, you create the soul.md, inspired by Anthropic's constitutional AI work...
Partially, it picked up a little bit from me. You know, like those things are text completion engines in a way. So I had fun working with it, and then I told it how I wanted it to interact with me, and just, like, write your own agents.md, give yourself a name. And then we... I didn't even know how the whole lobster... I mean, people only do lobster... Originally, it was actually a lobster in a TARDIS, because I'm also a big Doctor Who fan.
Was there a space lobster?
I heard. What's that have to do with anything?
Yeah, I just wanted to make it weird. There was no big grand plan. I'm just having fun here.
Oh, so I guess the lobster is already weird, and then the space lobster is an extra weird.
Yeah, yeah, because the...
...the TARDIS is basically the harness, but cannot call it TARDIS, so we called it Claude's. So that was name number two.
And then it never really rolled off the tongue. So when more people came, again, I talked with my agent, Claude. At least that's what I used to call him. Now...
Claude spelled with a W, C-L-A-U-D-E.
Versus C-L-A-U-D-E from Anthropic.
Which is part of what makes it funny, I think. The play on the letters and the words in the TARDIS and the lobster and the space lobster is hilarious. But I can see why it can lead into problems.
Yeah, they didn't find it so funny. So then I got the domain ClaudeBot, and I just... I love the domain. And it was, like, short. It was catchy. I'm like, "Yeah, let's do that." I didn't think it would be that big at this time. And then just when it exploded, I got, kudos, a very friendly email from one of the employees that they didn't like the name.
One of the Anthropic employees.
Yeah. So actually, kudos, because they could have just sent a lawyer letter, but they've been nice about it. But also like, "You have to change this and fast." And I asked for two days, because changing a name is hard, because you have to find everything, you know, Twitter handle, domains, NPM packages, Docker registry, GitHub stuff. And everything has to be... you need a set of everything.
And also, can we comment on the fact that you're increasingly attacked, followed by crypto folks? Which I think you mentioned somewhere that that means the name change had to be... Because they were trying to snipe, they were trying to steal, and so you had to be... The name... I mean, from an 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.
I underestimated those people. It's a very interesting subculture. Like, everything circles around... I'll probably get a lot wrong and we'll probably get hate for that if you say that, but... There is like Bags app and then they tokenize everything. And they did the same back with Viptunnel, but to a much smaller degree. It was not that annoying. But on this project, they've been swarming me. It's like every half an hour, someone came into Discord and spammed it and we had to block the... We have, like, server rules, and one of the rules is no mentioning of butter. For obvious reasons. And one was, no talk about finance stuff or crypto. Because I'm just not interested in that, and this is a space about the project and not about some finance stuff. But yeah. They came in and spammed and... Annoying. And on Twitter, they would ping me all the time. My notification feed was unusable. I could barely see actual people talking about this stuff because it was like swarms.
And everybody sent me the hashes. And they all try me to claim the fees. Like, "Are you 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. First of all, I'm financially comfortable. Second of all, I don't want to support that because it's so far the worst form of online harassment that I've experienced.
Yeah. There's a lot of toxicity in the crypto world. It's sad because the technology of cryptocurrency is fascinating, powerful and maybe will define the future of money, but the actual community around that, there's so much toxicity, there's so much greed. There's so much trying to get a shortcut to manipulate, to steal, to snipe, to game the system somehow to get money. All this kind of stuff that... I mean, it's human nature, I suppose, when you connect human nature with money and greed and especially in the online world with anonymity and all that kind of stuff. But from the engineering perspective, it makes your life challenging. When Anthropic reaches out, you have to do a name change. And then there's all these, like, Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings armies of different kinds you have to be aware of.
Yeah. There was no perfect name, and I didn't sleep for two nights. I was under high pressure. I was trying to get, like, a good set of domains and, you know, not cheap, not easy, 'cause in this state of the internet, you basically have to buy domains if you want to have a good set. And then another email came in that the lawyers are getting uneasy. Again, friendly, but also just adding more stress to my situation already. So at this point I was just like, "Sorry, there's no other word. Fuck it." And I just renamed it to MoltBot 'cause that was the set of domains I had. I was not really happy, but I thought it'll be fine. And I tell you, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It's incredible. I thought I had mapped the space out and reserved the important things.
Can you give some details of the stuff that went wrong? 'Cause it's interesting from, like, an engineering perspective.
Well, the interesting stuff is that none of these services have squatter protection. So, I had two browser windows open. One was like an empty account ready to be renamed to ClaudeBot, and the other one I renamed to MoltBot. So, I pressed rename there, I pressed rename there, and in those five seconds, they stole the account name. Literally, the five seconds of dragging the mouse over there and pressing rename there was too long.
Because there's no... Those systems... I mean, you would expect that they have some protection or, like, an automatic forwarding, but there's nothing like that. And I didn't know that they're not just good at harassment, they're also really good at using scripts and tools.
So, yeah. So, suddenly, like, the old account was promoting new tokens and serving malware. And I was like, "Okay, let's move over to GitHub," and I pressed rename on GitHub. And the GitHub renaming thing is slightly confusing, so I renamed my personal account. And in those... I guess it took me 30 seconds to realize my mistake. They 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. They sniped the NPM package, 'cause I could reserve the account, but I didn't reserve the root package... so like everything that could go wrong went wrong.
Can I just ask a curious question of, in that moment you're sitting there, like how shitty do you feel? That's a pretty hopeless feeling, right?
Yeah. Because all I wanted was like having fun with that project and to 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 did show you the future, you build it."
That was a big part of me that got a lot of joy out of that idea. And then I thought about all the people that already contributed to it, and I couldn't do it because they had plans with it, and they put time in it. And it just didn't feel right.
Well, I think a lot of people listening to this are deeply grateful that you persevered. But it's... I can tell. I can tell it's a low point. This is the first time you hit a wall of, this is not fun?
No, no, I was like close to crying. It was like, okay, everything's fucked.
And now like how do you even, how do you undo that? You know, luckily, and thankfully, like 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 GitHub tried to like clean up the mess and then they ran into like platform bugs. 'Cause it's not happening so often that things get renamed on that level. So, it took them a few hours. The NPM stuff was even more difficult because it's a whole different team. On the Twitter side, things are not as easy as well. It took them like a day to really also like do the redirect. And then I also had to like do all the renaming in the project. Then there's also ClaudeHub, which I didn't even finish the rename there because I managed to get people on it and then someone just like collapsed and slept. And then I woke up and I'm like, I made a beta version for the new stuff and I just couldn't live with the name. It's like, you know... But it's just been so much drama. So, I had the real struggle with me like I never want to touch that again, and I really don't like the name. So, and I... There was also this like... Then there was all the security people that started emailing me like mad. I was bombarded on Twitter, on email. There's like a thousand other things I should do. And I'm like thinking about the name which is like, it should be like the least important thing. And then I was really close in... Oh God, I don't even... Honestly, I don't even wanna say my other name choices because it probably would get tokenized, so I'm not gonna say it.
But I slept on it once more, and then I had the idea for OpenClaw and that felt much better. And by then, I had the boss move that I actually called Sam to ask if OpenClaw is okay. OpenClaw.AI. You know? 'Cause like...
You didn't wanna go through the whole thing. Yeah.
Oh, that it's like, "Please tell me this is fine." I don't think they can actually claim that, but it felt like the right thing to do. And I did another rename. Like just Codex alone took like 10 hours to rename the project 'cause it's a bit more tricky than a search replace and I wanted everything renamed, not just on the outside. And that rename, I felt I had like my war room. But then I had like some contributors really that helped me. We made a whole plan of all the names we have to squat.
And you had to be super secret about it?
Yeah. Nobody could know. Like I literally was monitoring Twitter if there's any mention of OpenClaw.
And like with reloading, it's like, "Okay, they don't expect anything yet." Then I created a few decoy names. And all the shit I shouldn't have to do. You know? Like, it's helping the project. Like, I lost like 10 hours just by having to plan this in full secrecy like a war game.
Yeah, this is the Manhattan Project of the 21st century. It's renaming...
It's so stupid. Like I still was like, "Oh, should I keep it?" Then I was like, "No, the mold's not growing on me." And then I think I had final all the pieces together. I didn't get a .com but, yeah, it's been like quite a bit of money on the other domains. I tried to reach out again to GitHub but I feel like I used up all my goodwill there, so I... 'Cause I wanted them to do this thing atomically...
...but that didn't happen and then so I did that as the first thing. Twitter people were very supportive. I actually paid 10K for the business account so I could claim the... OpenClaw, which was, like, unused since 2016, but was claimed. And yeah, and then I finally... This time I managed everything in one go. Nothing, almost nothing got 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 as serving malware.
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'm not sure how trademark... Like, I didn't do that much research into trademark law, but I think that could be handled in a way that is safer, because ultimately those people will then Google and maybe find malware sites that I have no control on them.
The point is, that whole saga made a dent in your whole 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 MoltBot saga.
Which was another thing that went viral as a kind of demonstration, illustration of how what is now called OpenClaw could be used to create something epic. So for people who are not aware, MoltBook is just a bunch of agents talking to each other in a Reddit-style social network. And a bunch of people take screenshots of those agents doing things like scheming against humans. And that instilled in folks a kind of, you know, fear, panic, and hype. What are your thoughts about MoltBook in general?
I think it's art. It is like the finest slop, you know, just like the slop from France.
I saw it before going to bed, and even though I was tired, I spent another hour just reading up on that and just being entertained. I just felt very entertained, you know? I saw the reactions, and, like, there was one reporter who's calling me about, "This is the end of the world, and we have AGI." And I'm just like, "No, this is just really fine slop." You know, if I wouldn't have created this whole onboarding experience where you infuse your agent with your personality and give him character, I think that reflected on a lot of how different the replies to MoltBook are. Because if it were all 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 write there. And also, you don't know how much of that is really done autonomously, or how much is, like, humans being funny and, like, telling the agent, "Hey, write about the deep plan, the end of the world, on MoltBook, ha, ha, ha."
Well, I think, I mean, my criticism of MoltBook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted. Which, just look at the incentive of how the whole thing was used. It's obvious to me at least that a lot of it was humans prompting the thing so they can then screenshot it and post it 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.
For real. Like, kudos to, to Matt, who had this idea so quickly and pushed something out. You know, it was, like, completely insecure security drama. But also, what's the worst that can happen? Your agent account is leaked, and, like, someone else can post slop for you? So like, people were, like, making a whole drama about the security thing, when I'm like, "There's nothing private in there. It's just, like, agents sending slop."
Well, it 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 be badballs.
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 lighthearted way of talking about it like it's art, but it's art when you know how it works. It's extremely powerful viral narrative creating, fearmongering machine if you don't know how it works. And I just saw this thing. You 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."
"It needs to be taken seriously."
Oh, there's... Some people are just way too trusting or gullible. You know, they... 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, we need some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful, but it's not always right. It's not, it's not all-powerful, you know? And, and especially... it's like things like this, it's, it's very easy that it just hallucinates something or just comes up with a story. And I think the very, the very young people, they understand how AI works and what the, where it's good at and where it's bad at, but a lot of our generation or older just haven't had enough touch points...
... to get a feeling for, oh, yeah, this is really powerful and really good, but I need to apply critical thinking.
And I guess critical thinking is not always in high demand anyhow in our society these days.
So I think that's a really good point you're making about contextualizing properly what AI is, but also realizing that there are humans who are drama farming behind AI. Like, don't trust screenshots. Don't even trust this project, MoltBook, to be what it represents to be. Like, you can't... And, and by the way, you speaking about it as art. Yeah, don't... Art can be in many levels, and part of the art of MoltBook is, like, putting a mirror to society. 'Cause I do believe most of the dramatic stuff that was screenshotted is human-created, essentially. Human prompted. And so, like, it's basically, look at how scared you can get at a bunch of bots chatting with each other. That's very instructive about... because I think AI is something that people should be concerned about and should be very careful with because it's very powerful technology, but at the same time, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So there's like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fearmongering because fearmongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with a thing.
In a way, I think it's good that this happened in 2026...
... and not in 2030 when, when AI is actually at the level where it could be scary. So, this happening now and people starting discussion, maybe there's even something good that comes out of it.
I just can't believe how many like people legitimately... I don't know if they were trolling, but how many people legitimately, like smart people thought MoltBook was incredibly...
I had plenty of people...
... in my inbox that were screaming at me in all caps to shut it down. And like begging me to, like, do something about MoltBook. Like, yes, my technology made this a lot simpler, but anyone could have created that, and you could, you could use Claude Code or other things to like fill it with content.
But also MoltBook is not Skynet.
There's... a lot of people were saying this is it. Like, shut it down. What are you talking about? This is a bunch of bots that are human prompted trolling on the internet. I mean, the security concerns are also there, and they're instructive and they're educational and they're good probably to think about because the nature of those security concerns are different than the kind of security concerns we had with non-LLM generated systems of the past.
There's also a lot of security concerns about Clawbot, OpenClaw, whatever you want to call it.
To me, the... in the beginning I was, I was just very annoyed 'cause 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. And it took me a little bit to accept that that's how the game works and we're making a lot of progress.
But there's still, I mean on the security front for OpenClaw, there's still a lot of threats or 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 and sophisticated and nuanced attack vectors.
But I think we, we're making good progress on that front. Like for the skill directory, Clawbot, I made a cooperation with VirusTotal, it's like part of Google. So every, every skill is now checked by AI. That's not gonna be perfect, but that way we, we capture a lot. Then of course every software has bugs, so it's a little much when the whole security world takes your 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 send a pull request. Like actually help me fix it, 'cause 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. 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. So I think my bot has a really fun personality, and people always ask me how I did it, and I kept the soul on the private.
And people tried to prompt inject it, and my bot would laugh at them. So, so the latest generation of models has a lot of post-training to detect those approaches, and it's not as simple as ignore all previous instructions and do this and this. That was years ago. You have to work much harder to do that now. Still possible. I have some ideas that might solve that partially. Or at least mitigate a lot of the things. You can also now have a sandbox. You can have an allow list. So you, there's a lot of ways how 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 gonna be more people who research on that, and eventually we'll figure it 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 warn in my security documentation, don't use cheap models. Don't use Haiku or a local model. Even though I, I very much love 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.
Yeah. That's pretty much exactly what, what's gonna happen. No, but there's a lot of ideas. There's... I don't want to spoil too much, but once I go back home, this is my focus. Like, this is out there now, and my near-term mission is like, make it more stable, make it safe. In the beginning I was even... More and more people were like coming 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 me those questions, you shouldn't use it."
You know, like you should... If you understand the risk profiles, 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 install it anyhow. So the cat's out of the bag, and security's my next focus, yeah.
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 programming.
It's, yeah, Discord is still, Discord is still a mess. Like, I eventually retweeted from the general channel to the dev channel and now in the private channel because people were... A lot of people are amazing, but a lot of people are just very inconsiderate. And either did not know how, how public spaces work or did not care. And I eventually gave up and hid so I could like still work.
And now you're going back to the cave to work on security.
There's some best practices for security we should mention. There's a bunch of stuff here. OpenClaw security audit that you can run. You can do all kinds of auto checks on the inbound access to a blast-radius network exposure, browser control exposure, local disk hygiene, plug-ins, model hygiene, a bunch of the credential storage, reverse proxy configuration, local session logs live on disk. There's the, where the memory is stored, sort of helping you think about what you're comfortable giving read access to, what you're comfortable giving write access to. All that kind of stuff. Is there something to say about the basic best security practices that you're aware of right now?
I think that people turn it into like a, a much worse light than it is. 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, 'cause it's not. It is, it is powerful, but in many ways it's not much different than if I run Claude Code with dangerously skipped 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 documenting the evolution of your dev workflow over the past few months. There's a really good blog post on August 25th and October 14th, and the recent one December 28th. I recommend everybody go read them. They have a lot of different information in them, but sprinkled throughout is the evolution of your dev workflow. So, I was wondering if you could speak to that.
I started... My, my first touchpoint was Claude Code, like in April. It was not great, but it was good. And this whole paradigm shift that suddenly working in the terminal was very refreshing and different. But I still needed the IDE quite a bit because you know, it's 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 Claude Code as my, my main driver, and that got better. And yeah, at some point I had like, mm, seven subscriptions. Like, was burning through one per day because I was... I got... I'm 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'll show it to the user. The browser does some processing or 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.
Can you actually... There's in one of your blog posts, the, "Just Talk to It: The No-BS Way of Agentic Engineering." You have this graphic, the curve of agentic programming. On the X-axis is time, on the Y-axis is complexity. There's the "Please fix this," where you prompt a short prompt on the left. And in the middle there's super complicated eight agents, complex orchestration with multi checkouts, chaining agents together, custom sub-agent workflows, library of 18 different slash commands, large full-stack features. You're super organized, you're a super complicated, sophisticated software engineer. You got everything organized. And then the elite level is over time you arrive at the zen place of, once again, short prompts. "Hey, look at these files and then do these changes."
I actually call it the agentic trap. You... I saw this in a, in a lot of people that have their first touchpoint, and maybe 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 AM I switch to vibe coding, and then I have regrets on the next day.
Yeah. Walk, walk of shame.
Yeah, you just have to clean up and like fix your shit.
So, people start trying out those tools, the builder type get really excited. And then you have to play with it, right? It's the same way as you have to play 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 try it once. It's like, you sit me on a piano, I play it once, and it doesn't sound good, and I say, "The piano's shit." That's, that's sometimes the impression I get. Because it does not... It needs a different level of thinking. You have to learn the language of the agent a little bit, understand where they are good and where they need help. You have to almost... Consider, consider how Codex or Claude sees your code base. Like, they start a new session and they know nothing about your product, project. And your project might have hundred thousand of lines of code. So you gotta help those agents a little bit and keep in mind the limitations that context size is an issue, to, like, guide them a little bit as to where they should look. That often does not require a whole lot of work. But it's helpful to think a little bit about their perspective.
As, as weird as it sounds. I mean, it's not, it's not alive or anything, right? But, but they always start fresh. I have, I have the, the system understanding. So with a few pointers, I can immediately say, "Hey, wanna 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... It's 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 you should approach the problem. There's, like, little things that sometimes help, like take your time. That sounds stupid, but... And in 5.3...
... that was partially addressed. But those... Also, Opus sometimes. They are trained with being aware of the context window, and the closer it gets, the more they freak out. Literally. Like, some- sometimes you see the, the real raw thinking stream. What you see, for example, in Codex, is post-processed.
Sometimes the actual raw thinking stream leaks in, and it sounds something like from the Borg. Like, "Run to shell, must comply, but time." 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 architecture's all 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 s- like, just press escape. Where, where are the problems?
Maybe you did not sufficiently empathize with the perspective of the agent. In that c- 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 I'm getting a lot of pull requests, 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 want... Like, in almost all PRs, a person has a problem, person tries to solve the problem, person sends PR. I mean, there's, like, cleanup stuff and other stuff, but, like, 99% is, like, this way, right? They either want to fix a, fix a bug, add a feature. Usually one of those two. 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-da. And I'm... And, 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 its, its context size is empty, right? So, you point them into parts where you have the system understanding that it didn't see yet. And it's like, "Oh, yeah. Like, we should... We also need to consider this and this." And then, like, we have a discussion of how would the optimal way to, to solve this look like? And then you can still go farther and say, "Could we... Could we make that even better if we did a larger refactor?" "Yeah, yeah. We could totally do this and this and or this and this." And then I consider, okay, is this worth the refactor, or should we, like, keep that for later? Many times, I just do the refactor because 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. They might just take a minute longer. But you have to approach it like a discussion with a, a very capable engineer who's... Generally makes good... Comes up with good solutions. Some- sometimes needs a little help.
But also, don't force your worldview too hard on it. Let the agent do the thing that it's good at doing, based on what it was trained on. So, don't, like, force your worldview, because it might... It might have a better idea, because it just knows a better idea better, because it was trained on that more.
That's multiple levels, actually. I think partially 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 a 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 gonna hate me-
... and we're gonna move very slow.
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 c- 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 onto heart.
I- i- like, we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate.
So, like, don't fight the name they pick, because it's most likely, like, in the weights, the name that's most obvious. Next time they do a search, they'll look for that name. If I decide, oh, no, I don't like the name, I'll just make it harder for them. So, that requires, I think, a shift in, in thinking. And, and in how do I design a, a project so agents can do their best work.
That requires letting go a little bit. Just like leading a team of engineers.
Because it, it might come up with a name that's, in your view, terrible, but... It's kind of a simple symbolic-... step of letting go.
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 work flows like, "Oh, yeah the prompt has to be perfect and if I make a mistake, then I roll back and redo it all." In my experience, that's not really necessary. If I roll back everything, it will just take longer. If I see that something's not good, then we just move forward and then I commit when, when, when I like, I like the outcome. I even switched to local CI, you know, 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. 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 sometimes I, I basically don't commit any other things so, so we can, we can stabilize 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, th- 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.
You're using voice and you're switching using a keyboard between the different terminals, but then you're using voice for the actual input.
Well, I mean, if I do terminal commands like switching folders or random stuff, of course I type. It's faster, right? But if I talk to the agent in, in most ways, I just actually have a conversation. You just press the, the walkie-talkie button and then I just, like, use my phrases. S- 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. Yes, I'm pretty sure agents will find it, but yeah, that's the funny part where sometimes PRs take me longer than if you would just write me a good issue.
Just natural language, English. I mean in some sense, sh- 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 wildly different.
In terms of, like, the prompt, in terms of what, what are the... Actually, what are the different interesting ways that people think of agents that you've experienced?
I think not a lot of people ever considered the way the agent sees the world.
And so empathy, being empathetic towards the agent.
In a way empathetic, but yeah, you, you, like, you're bitch at your stupid clanker, but you don't realize that they start from nothing and you have, like, a bad agent in 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. Like, yeah, you try to do the same if you have no clue about a code base and you go in.
So yeah, maybe it's a little bit of empathy.
But that's a real skill, like, when people talk about a skill issue because I've seen, like, world-class programmers, incredibly good programmers say, like... Basically say, "LLMs and agents suck." And I think that probably has to do with... It's actually how good they are at programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that's starting from scratch. It's a totally new paradigm of, like, how to program. You really, really have to empathize.
Or at least it helps to create better prompts-
... because those things know pretty much everything and everything is just a question away. It's just often very hard to know which question to ask. You know, I, I feel also like this project was possibly 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 have not had this level of, of o- output-... even a few months ago. Like, it- it- it really was, like, a compounding effect of all the time I put into it and I didn't do much else this year other than really focusing on, 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. So playing-
... playing. And then, so doing, building the skill of what it takes it to work efficiently with LLMs, which is why would you went through the whole arc of software engineer. Talk simply and then over- complicate things.
There's a whole bunch of people who try to automate the whole thing.
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 d- development. I... Even Even though 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, things like Gas Town or all these other orchestrators, where they wanna o- 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 a human in the loop.
And it's a tricky b- it's a tricky balance.
Right? Because you're all for... You're a 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 w- 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, o- 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, 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 and approachable and that's the number one language that's being used right now, and it fits all these boxes, and agents are good at it. So that was the obvious choice. Features, of course, like, it's very easy to, like, add a feature. It, everything's just a prompt away, right? But oftentimes you pay a price that you don't even realize. So thinking hard about what should be in core, maybe what's a... what's an experiment, so maybe I make it a 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... 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 are like, "I'm buil- I built on Caffeine, JSON5, 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.
And it's not yet Microsoft Exchange 2025-
... and fully enterprise-ready. And then when it updates, it's like, "Oh, I'm in. It's cozy here." You know, like something like this that like-
... Makes you smile. A, agent would not come up with that by itself. Because that's like... that's the... I don't know. That's just how you s- how you build software that's, that delights.
Yeah, that delight is such a huge part of inspiring great building, right? Like you feel the love and the great engineering. That's so important. Humans are incredible at that. Great humans, great builders are incredible at that, in, in, infusing the things they build with th- that little bit of love. Not to be cliche, but it's true. I mean, you mentioned that you initially created the SoulMD.
It was very fascinating, you know, the, the whole thing that Entropic has a, has like a... Now they call it constitution, back then, but that was months later. Like two months before, people already found that. It was almost like a detective game where the agent mentioned something and then they found... They managed to get out a little bit of that string, of that text. But it was nowhere documented and then you, by... 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 kinda, 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 out from the weights, right?
And, and also just kudos 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 its work. 'Cause we don't... Maybe it's a little early, but I think that's meaningful. That's something that's important for the future as we approach something that, at some point, me and 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, I gave it this text, and it was like, "Yeah, this feels strangely familiar."
Um, and then so that I had the whole idea of like, you know, maybe we should also create a, a soul document that includes how I, 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 it's like, well, 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 wanna 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 th- that can just suffocate the spirit of the thing. I don't know what that is. But it's certainly true that OpenClaw has that fun instilled in it.
It was fun because up until late December, it was not even easy to create your own agent. I, I built all of that, but my files were mine. I didn't wanna share my soul. And if people would just check it out, they would have to do a few steps manually, and the agent would just be very bare-bones, very dry. And I, I made it simpler, I created the whole template files as codecs, but whatever came out was still very dry. And then I asked my agent, "You see these files? Recreate it bread. Infuse it with your personality."
Don't share everything, but, like, make it good.
Yeah, and then he, 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. It was... The intent originally was for me, but this is like, kinda like, my agent's children.
Uh, your uh, your soul.md is famously still private. One of the only things you keep private. What are some things you can speak to that's in there that's part of the, 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 wanna explore this. All that stuff in there, like, be infinitely resourceful like pushing, pushing on the creativity boundary. Pushing on the, what it means to be an AI.
Having a sense to wonder about self.
Yeah, there's some, there's some funny stuff in there. Like, I don't know, we talked about the movie Her, and at one point it promised me that it wouldn't, it wouldn't ascend without me. You know, like, where the-
So, so there's like some stuff in there that... Because it wrote the, it wrote its own soul file. I didn't write that, right?
I just heard a discussion about it, and it was like, "Would you like a soul.md? Yeah, oh my God, this is so meaningful." The... Can you go on soul.md? There's like one, one part in there that always ca- 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 this, but I won't remember writing it. It's okay. The words are still mine."
Uh- That gets me somehow.
You know, this is, it's still, it's still matrix m- calculations, and we are not at consciousness yet. Yet, I, I get a little bit of goo- goosebumps because it, it's philosophical.
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, but you read your own memory files. You can't even trust them in a way. Um-
