AI Agents Are Real. So Is the Hype. My experience with OpenClaw.
New AI software and some doom-scenario articles are causing panic in the stock market and general anxiety about job loss. CEO’s of AI companies aren’t making things better. Elon Musk (xAI / Grok) is out there recommending people not to save for retirement because AI will solve everything, and Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic / Claude) is predicting 50% of entry-level jobs disrupted in 1-5 years.
It seems the AI narrative has recently taken a more ‘society might collapse’ arc, and I wanted to understand everything more viscerally. To be honest, I kinda get the mindset, the pace of change is dizzying, and in my tech-o-sphere the productivity gains are undeniable. So I downloaded one of the newest AI softwares, called OpenClaw, a few weeks ago to test it out. I want to tell you about my experience with it.
(spoiler: I’ll also tell you why I think everyone needs to take a chill pill.)
Meet Daedalus
OpenClaw is the fastest growing open source project in history. In my opinion, it’s the first practical seeds of where all these AI tools are headed.
OpenClaw lives on your computer, and can operate your computer. Your email, calendar, browser, logins, files, spreadsheets. Anything you can do on a computer, it can do. OpenClaw is not an AI model, but uses AI to orchestrate tasks to be done on your computer. It’s best used by asking it to do something, and it’ll go do it.
To set it up, you need a totally separate computer from the one you normally use. It’s still technically in beta and you don’t want to expose all of your personal information. So, I set it up on Ren’s old MacBook Air that I wiped clean. I named my Claw Daedalus (the storied inventor and father of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun) and got going.
It took about 2 hours to setup, and it was a pretty technical process. I wanted Daedalus to have access to the internet, but I didn’t want to share any of my passwords, so I gave Daedalus it’s own email account and set it up with a new Squarespace account. I also setup texting so I could text with Daedalus, and ask it to do things on my computer while I was away.
The Personal Assistant We Were Promised
To test it out, I asked Daedalus to build me a Squarespace website for Somewhat Useful, my podcast with Christy. I watched as it opened Chrome, navigated around the Squarespace editor and clicked on different UI elements to add and edit pages. It went to our current website to find the podcast titles and added those same titles as blog posts in Squarespace. All without asking me for anything. I easily could have been cooking dinner, or answering emails, as it did this, but I just watched because it was so cool seeing an AI build things on my computer. Literally, it can do anything you can do on a computer.
Of course, the website it built was utter garbage and of course riddled with errors… but, no offense 😬 so was your first website; and today is the worst the AI models will ever be.
Sidenote to Squarespace
There's a real opportunity here. AI tools are going to create enormous demand for richer content APIs. The workflow above is so helpful, but right now, it just uses fragile browser-based hacks. With properly documented APIs you'd become the platform web designers reach for when working with AI. Time consuming activities, like creating bulk placeholder content, site wide search-and-replace, and ideating through different page layouts can now takes minutes instead of hours or days. The designers and developers who love your platform are looking for a reason to stay. Give them the APIs and they'll build the next generation of AI-powered workflows on top of you.
This level of proactiveness, this level of agency, is why everyone is going so crazy about OpenClaw. I didn’t have to program anything. I just told it what I wanted, where to find information, and it did it. This is really cool… and to be honest, fueled my anxiety about the future. If it could already do this, what would the technology be capable of next year, or even next month? And what would that mean for me, as a developer?
But I put my anxiety aside and continued to trial offloading tasks to Daedalus. Next, I wanted to test a real-world recurring workflow. I need to add a record to a Notion database for Rikki, the podcast editor I work with, every time I get an email from a certain client about about editing their podcast. This Notion database is what Rikki uses to know deadlines and find project information. It’s not a hard thing for me to do by any means, but it’s a task on my list nonetheless.
After just a few prompts, 10-15 minutes max, Daedalus was ready to go. And when the next email came through, it just worked™! I can’t explain how cool it is to have one of those mindless, repetitive little tasks you’ve had to do for years, automated away with a-plumb.
Where It Actually Breaks Down
At this point you may be thinking, “So Will… this feels pretty existential. I’m still anxious".”
But here’s what I didn’t mention, and haven’t heard from many other people; there were massive technical hurdles and security tradeoffs that I had to make along the way.
If you don’t setup the message service correctly, anyone could message in and take over your machine.
If you give it too many permissions for your email & calendar, it could start sending rogue emails to clients from you in your sleep, or permanently delete emails.
The setup involved a lot of terminal commands. I’ve luckily become comfortable with it over the years, but the terminal is scary for a reason, it’s basically open heart surgery on your computer.
All of this costs real money! I spent $50 in AI credits, that first day of using Daedalus. That’s $1,500 a month, if not mitigated.
In our current state, there’s not an easy answer. What makes you so vulnerable to remote takeovers, rogue emails, and money pits is the same thing that makes this so helpful. OpenClaw, like much of AI, is super cool and helpful individually, but it’s not ready for deployment at scale. (to me, this feels like we’ll need dedicated hardware, which will take time to ramp up)
And it didn’t stop there. I’ve had to restart, tweak, monitor and fix a number of issues since setting it up. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it type solution.
Take a Breath
The insinuation, that some are pushing, that we’re all gonna be out of jobs and should stop saving for retirement because we’re all irrelevant now, is irritating. The anxiety people are feeling about AI is reasonable based on the rhetoric, but it just doesn’t match the reality I’m seeing. It’s possible a lot of people in the tech world are out of touch with reality (I’m shocked, shocked).
Don’t get me wrong, AI is incredible and our workflows will be forever changed. But humans are more than capable of adopting to this change, and finding meaningful work to do. It’s daunting because we can’t predict what our work will look like 3 years into the future, and constant unpredictability becomes exhausting. But it doesn’t mean we’re on the precipice of societal collapse.
Be open to changing your workflow, incorporate AI where it actually makes sense, and execute any work you have today with excellence. This transition doesn’t need to be anxiety-producing, like a lot of tech CEO’s and twitter pundits seem to want you to believe. It can be fun. It’s gonna be okay.
Keep building,
Will
