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

Peter Steinberger is the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that’s the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep491-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/peter-steinberger-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Peter’s X: https://x.com/steipete Peter’s GitHub: https://github.com/steipete Peter’s Website: https://steipete.com Peter’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steipete OpenClaw Website: https://openclaw.ai OpenClaw GitHub: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw OpenClaw Discord: https://discord.gg/openclaw SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Perplexity: AI-powered answer engine. Go to https://perplexity.ai/ https://lexfridman.com/s/perplexity-ep491-sc Quo: Phone system (calls, texts, contacts) for businesses. Go to https://quo.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/quo-ep491-sc CodeRabbit: AI-powered code reviews. Go to https://coderabbit.ai/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/coderabbit-ep491-sc Fin: AI agent for customer service. Go to https://fin.ai/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/fin-ep491-sc Blitzy: AI agent for large enterprise codebases. Go to https://blitzy.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/blitzy-ep491-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep491-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep491-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (03:51) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (15:29) – OpenClaw origin story (18:48) – Mind-blowing moment (28:15) – Why OpenClaw went viral (32:12) – Self-modifying AI agent (36:57) – Name-change drama (54:07) – Moltbook saga (1:02:26) – OpenClaw security concerns (1:11:07) – How to code with AI agents (1:42:02) – Programming setup (1:48:45) – GPT Codex 5.3 vs Claude Opus 4.6 (1:57:52) – Best AI agent for programming (2:19:52) – Life story and career advice (2:23:49) – Money and happiness (2:27:41) – Acquisition offers from OpenAI and Meta (2:44:51) – How OpenClaw works (2:56:09) – AI slop (3:02:13) – AI agents will replace 80% of apps (3:10:50) – Will AI replace programmers? (3:22:50) – Future of OpenClaw community

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, formerly known as Moldbot, Claudebot, Claudus, 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 Moldbook, where AI agents post manifestos and debate consciousness,

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  creating a mix of excitement and fear in the general public, in a kind of AI psychosis, a mix of clickbait, fear mongering, 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

• 1:30Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:01Lex Fridman?

  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 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

• 2:46Lex Fridman?

  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 PSPDF Kit, 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

• 3:29Lex Fridman?

  of the AI revolution happening in the programming world. There was the Chaji Piti moment in 2022, the DeepSeek 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.

• 3:51Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few-second mention of his sponsors. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got Quo for a phone system, calls, texts, contacts for your business, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, Finn for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for AI-powered software development, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, and, of course, our old friend Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ladderies. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip,

• 4:32Lex Fridman?

  please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. And really, they are the incredible folks that make this whole thing possible. And I really do hope to do more episodes in 2026, have more fun, take more risks, and explore deeply the full range of human possibility, of human condition, of human nature, of human civilization. Anyway, if you get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O.

• 5:14Lex Fridman?

  It's a business phone platform for calling and messaging. So it's basically a really nice interface, a really nice system for organizing all the incoming calls, texts, voicemails, recordings. When you have a team and you have a large number of customers that want different things, it's a nice way to organize everything together. I just love watching the beauty, the elegance of the interface. I'm such a sucker for beautiful interfaces, not just beautiful, but functional. So the perfect mix of beauty and function in evolutionary biology and in software design, software engineering is just wonderful to watch.

• 5:57Lex Fridman?

  And that, of course, relates to the very topic of this podcast is how to create software systems like that with the utilization of the agentic loop. And as Peter talks about, still keeping the human a part, a fundamental part of that process of adding what he says, I think, correctly, sort of a bit of love into the thing, a bit of that human touch. I don't know what exactly that is, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we interact with it. And that is the magic that makes great software. So anyway, QUO has that. Love the interface. Try QUO for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/lex. That's Q-U-O.com/lex.

• 6:43Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by CodeRabbit, a platform that provides AI-powered code reviews directly within your terminal. Now, there's a lot of ways to use CodeRabbit. But the one I'd like to recommend and talk to you about outside of the IDE, outside of the magic of the interface, to go back on what I just said, is the magic, the power of the CLI of the terminal. And CodeRabbit CLI is amazing. And of course, as we talked about with Peter, his whole workflow, his whole approach to programming has evolved more and more towards the command line, towards the terminal, towards the CLI, because that is the language of agents.

• 7:25Lex Fridman?

  And so if you're doing coding agent stuff, integrating the review of the code into the whole process, that's where CodeRabbit CLI comes in. It ensures that AI-generated code is production-ready by catching errors at that particular stage of the process. It integrates into existing CLI coding agent workflows. And even though the coding models are getting smarter and smarter and smarter, they still do hallucinate, they still do make errors. And CodeRabbit CLI is a backstop for hallucinations and logical errors from AI coding agent-generated code.

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

  So install CodeRabbit CLI today at coderabbit.ai/lex. That's coderabbit.ai/lex. This episode is brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. So again, these are niche but extremely important, extremely impactful applications. Finn takes customer service and says, we're gonna do a damn good job at it. A lot of companies, including AI companies, 6,000 customer service leaders in top companies are using it. So you know they're legit when an AI company is using you for the AI for customer service.

• 8:49Lex Fridman?

  I'm somebody having witnessed on the interwebs, poor customer service, poor love for the customer, a lack of attention and care to the customer, to the pain, to the nuanced pain of each individual customer. Because of that, I get to deeply appreciate the value of great customer service. And I do think for scale, for efficiency, for quality, it's important to integrate AI into that process. And then Finn does a really good job of that. Go to fin.ai/lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai/lex.

• 9:33Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, an AI-powered autonomous software development platform. They are focusing on enterprise. Their whole system is designed and built for large, complex databases. The way they do the context management, the way they, through the interface, show how everything is managed, organized, processed, considered in the different tasks that has to do like refactoring gigantic code bases. This is what they focus on. This is what they do well. Also, multi-agent. For example, they have a layer of 3,600 cooperative agents. You know, a lot of the excitement that we're talking about in this very podcast and in

• 10:18Lex Fridman?

  general, in the industry and on X and on podcasts, is the scale of just a handful of developers. When you're talking about a gigantic code base, that requires a set of tooling that can handle the gigantic context, that can handle individual people going in and being able to orchestrate the large-scale refactoring, code generation, managing dependencies, runtime validate, all the testing that you have to do to be able to go in there and to be able to handle that. There's just a whole set of tooling that requires a lot of care. And Blitzy does a good job of that.

• 11:03Lex Fridman?

  If you want to learn more or speak to a member of the team, go to blitzy.com/lex. That's B L I T Z Y dot com slash lex. The future of autonomous software development is here.

• 11:18Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. I don't know why every time it brings a smile to my face. Yes, it is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. But of course, every time I end up talking about Shopify engineering, which is the tech behind the magic. And the humans behind the tech behind the magic. And I got to meet some of those humans. And I get to talk to some of those humans and they're incredible human beings. And speaking of incredible human beings, of course, I always end up talking about Toby, who's a great engineer, who's doing a lot of agentic AI engineer. He's still codes, still legit programmer in the details. That is what great CEOs are made of.

• 12:02Lex Fridman?

  DHH also mentioned in this conversation with a bit of love from Peter. Everybody loves DHH. Well, some of them, some people online are maybe don't show their love in the obvious ways. But underneath it, there's deep love. And there's always respect and appreciation for how legit of a programmer he is, how sharp and witty and insightful his opinions and analysis is, and how great of a builder he is and explorer and constantly evolving and trying new things. And I think that spirit represents Shopify engineering.

• 12:45Lex Fridman?

  I just love using software that you know is built by great engineers. So that is just such an important foundation of a great business. It's probably two things is making sure you're keeping every individual customer happy, customer focused.

• 13:10Lex Fridman?

  And then on the backend, making sure there's the tooling, the infrastructure that makes that possible. That's where the engineer comes in. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by the thing I'm currently sipping on. Element, L M N T. My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I don't think I can live without element.

• 13:49Lex Fridman?

  I can't quit you.

• 13:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's just delicious and incredibly important to my health, my wellbeing, my energy levels, just how I feel when I'm fasting, when I'm doing the crazy things emotionally, physically, mentally. All the programming stuff, this, you know, I didn't almost sleep at all last night. And just fasting, just feeling good. Electrolytes are such an important part of that. Making sure you get the sodium, potassium, magnesium correct. It's what do you need for life? You need water, you need electrolytes. And then you need food occasionally, but I'm very good at being able to go without food for several days potentially.

• 14:35Lex Fridman?

  I, most of the time these days, fast. Do one meal a day and fast basically 24 hours. And for that, element is extremely important. And my favorite flavor, the flavor of champions, watermelon salt. Get a free eight collins sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drink element.com/lex. 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.

• 15:29Lex Fridman?

  The one and only, the Claude father. Actually Benjamin predicted in this 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 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 one hour prototype?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  You know, I wanted that since April.

• 16:15Lex Fridman?

  A personal assistant, AI personal assistant.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  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 to ask them questions like, what makes this friendship meaningful? And I got some, some really profound results. Like I sent it to my friends and they got like teary eyes.

• 16:52Lex Fridman?

  So there's something there.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then I, I thought all the labs will work on that. So I, 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 it just.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Prompted it into existence.

• 17:28Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's the beginning of the hero's journey of the entrepreneur, right? And you've even with your original story with P S P D F kit. It's like, why does this not exist? Let me build it. And again, here's diff- whole different realm, but similar maybe spirit.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I had this problem. I tried to show P F on an iPad, which should not be hard.

• 17:49Lex Fridman?

  This is like fifteen years ago, something like that.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the most, the most random thing ever. Suddenly I had this problem and I wanted to help a friend. And there was, there was, it was not like nothing existed, but it was just not good. I'm like, like I tried it and it was like very mad, like I can do this better.

• 18:09Lex Fridman?

  By the way, for people who don't know, this led to the development of P S P D F kit that's used on the building devices. So the, it turns out that it's pretty useful to be able to open a P D F.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  You could also make the joke that I'm really bad at naming.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Like named on the five on the current project. And even P S P D F doesn't really roll from the tongue.

• 18:32Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, so you said, screw it. Why don't I do it? So what was, 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 or I talked to it and it does things.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  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 they also would be terminals on my Mac. Vibe tunnel, which was like a weekend hack project. That was still very early and it 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.

• 19:15Lex Fridman?

  And you had a really great, not to take 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.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was this one thing where part of the architecture was, took too much memory. Every terminal used like a node.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And I wanted to change it to Rust and.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I can do it. I can I can manually figure it all out. But all my automated attempts failed miserably.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  And then I revisited about four or five months later. And I'm like, OK, now let's use something even more experimental. And I and I just typed convert this and this part to zig and then let codecs run off.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  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 the thing. And it's like, it's just mind blowing.

• 20:31Lex Fridman?

  So that's on the L L M programming side, refactoring. But back to the actual story of the of the prototype. So how did vitonal connect to the first prototype where you're like agents can actually work?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  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, I was literally just hooking up WhatsApp to Claude 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 one hour. And I felt already felt really cool. It's like, oh, I could I can like talk to my computer, right? This that that was cool, but I I wanted images. Because I often use images when I prompt.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  I think it's such a such an efficient way to give the agent more context. And they are really good at figuring out what I mean. If it's like a weird corrupt screenshot. 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. It just make a screenshot and like figure out the five 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 and took me a few more hours to actually get that right.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  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 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, it's just made really well. So I ended up using it a lot.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Translators for me explain these funny places, like you're just having a clunker doing, having Google for you. That was, basically it was still nothing built, but it still could do so much.

• 22:46Lex Fridman?

  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 is going to Claude Code and Claude Code is doing all kinds of heavy work and coming back to you with a thin message.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  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 put like a whole bunch of CLI stuff over the months, so it, it felt really powerful.

• 23:24Lex Fridman?

  There is something magical about that experience that's hard to put into words.

• 23:29Lex Fridman?

  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 it's, in some, in some sense, it's a, it's like a phase shift in the integration of AI into your life and how it feels, right?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  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 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. Um, thank you, I guess.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 24:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's really hard to converge towards 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.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And nobody did it.

• 25:06Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  And afterwards it felt so obvious.

• 25:08Lex Fridman?

  That's so obvious.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Right?

• 25:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  But still, um, you know, the moment where it, it blew my mind was when, when I, I used it a lot and at some point I just sent it a message. And, and then the typing indicator appeared and and I'm like, wait, I didn't build that. It's only, it only has image support. So what is it even doing? And then it would just reply.

• 25:34Lex Fridman?

  What was the thing you sent it?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Oh, just a random question. It's like, hey, what about this in this restaurant, you know? Um, cause 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.

• 25:51Lex Fridman?

  So, oh, you did an audio message?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was just, it just worked and I'm like.

• 25:56Lex Fridman?

  And it's not supposed to work because you didn't give it that.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  No, literally.

• 26:00Lex Fridman?

  Capability.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I literally would, how the fuck did you do that? And it was like, yeah, the metal did the following. He sent me a message, but it only, only was a file, a 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 you didn't have it installed. But then I found the OpenAI key and just use curl to send a file to, to OpenAI to translate. And here I am. Uh, just look at the message and like, oh, wow.

• 26:35Lex Fridman?

  You didn't teach it any of those things and the agent just figured it out. Then I still do all those conversions, the translation, they figured out the API, it figured out which program to use, all those kinds of things. And you were just absentminded and like just sent an audio message.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like so clever even because he would have gone the whisper local path, he would have had to download a model, I 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? This is a file ending, let's figure it out. Um, and 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.

• 27:33Lex Fridman?

  At that time it was called WA Relay.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I debated with me like, do I want that? Do I not want that? And then I thought, well, maybe, maybe I do that, cause that could be a cool way to show people. Cause I so far I did it in WhatsApp as like groups, you know, but don't really wanna give my phone number to every internet stranger.

• 27:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Um, journalists manage to do that anyhow now, so that's a different story.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Uh, so I emerged it from Shadow, who helped me a lot with the whole project. So thank you.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And, and I put my, my bot in there.

• 28:20Lex Fridman?

  On Discord?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, no security, cause it didn't, I hadn't built sandboxing in yet. I, I just prompted it to like only listen to me.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And to test like various stuff.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  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 first I,

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I got my first real influencer, being a fan, did videos, the kids. Thank you. And, and from there on, I saw, I saw 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.

• 29:30Lex Fridman?

  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 a component that you have to get right.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:41Lex Fridman?

  And then you have to figure out the agentic loop. You have the gateway, you have the harness, you have all those components that make it all just work nicely.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it felt like factorial times infinite.

• 29:53Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  I, I feel like I built my little, 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.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  That's level two.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:28Lex Fridman?

  Factorio.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  On the journey group 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, I feel like I'm level two as three as Mark on files and the vector database. And then you, you can go to the 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.

• 31:01Lex Fridman?

  So the whole time you're having fun, we should say that for the most part, through this whole process, you're a one man team. There's people helping, but you're doing so much of the key core development.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:14Lex Fridman?

  And having fun, you did in January, sixty six hundred commits, probably more.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  I sometimes posted to me, I'm limited by the technology of my time. I could do more if agents would be faster.

• 31:27Lex Fridman?

  But we should say you're running multiple agents at the same time.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, depending on how much I slept and how difficult of the tasks I work on between four and ten.

• 31:38Lex Fridman?

  Four and ten 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, Open Claw? One, in this world, if you look at twenty twenty five, so many startups, so many companies are doing kind of agentic type stuff. Or claiming to, and here Open Claw comes in and destroys everybody. Like, why did you win?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Because they all take themselves too serious.

• 32:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Like, it's hard to compete against someone who's just there to have fun.

• 32:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  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, for the longest time, the only, the only way to install it was git clone, P M P M build, P M P M gateway. Like you clone it, you build it, you run it.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And then the, the agent, I made the agent very aware, like it knows that it is 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 verbose 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 prompted it to exist. And then the agent would just modify it on software.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:28Lex Fridman?

  Can you actually speak to that? Cause it's just fascinating. So you have this piece of software, a certain typescript.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:36Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Oh, because that's how I built it as well. You know, most of it is built by codecs, but oftentimes I, when I debug it, I, I use self-introspection so much. It's like, hey, what tools do you see? Can you call the tool yourself? Oh, like whatever do you see? Read the source code, figure out what's the problem. Like.

• 34:27Peter Steinberger?

  I just found it an incredibly fun way to

• 34:31Peter Steinberger?

  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 also did show that people never wrote software. So I call them prompt requests in the end. But I don't wanna like pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for a society. You know, like, like, doesn't matter how shitty it is, you gotta start somewhere. So I noticed like this whole big movement of people complaining about open source and the quality of PRs and a whole different level of problems.

• 35:14Peter Steinberger?

  But on a different level, I found it, I found it

• 35:21Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 35:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you were, the Open Cloud 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.

• 35:44Peter Steinberger?

  Isn't it a step up for humanity? Isn't that cool?

• 35:47Lex Fridman?

  Creating builders.

• 35:48Peter Steinberger?

  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, I also organized another type of meetup, I call it, I called it Cloud Code Anonymous.

• 36:08Peter Steinberger?

  You can get the inspiration from. Now I call it Agents Anonymous for, for reasons.

• 36:15Lex Fridman?

  Agents Anonymous.

• 36:17Peter Steinberger?

  And

• 36:18Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's so funny on so many laws. I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 36:21Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. And there was this one guy 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.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And he was just like very happy that my stuff solved some of his problems. And it was like curious enough that he actually came to like a an enchanted meetup. Even though he's he doesn't really know how software works.

• 36:57Lex Fridman?

  Can we actually rewind a little bit and tell the saga of the name change? First of all, it started out as wa relay.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:05Lex Fridman?

  And then it went to.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Claudus.

• 37:07Lex Fridman?

  Claudus.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when I when I built it in the beginning, my agent had no personality. It was just it was cloud code, slightly psychophantic, opposed, very friendly. And I, when you talk to a friend on WhatsApp, they don't talk like cloud code. So I wanted, I I felt this, I just didn't it didn't feel right. So I I wanted to give it a personality.

• 37:34Lex Fridman?

  Make it spicier, make it.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Lex Fridman?

  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 dot M D. Inspired by anthropics, constitutional AI work, how to make it spicy.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Partially, 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 had fun working with it. And then I told it to.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  How I wanted it to interact with me and just like write your own agents dot M D. Um, give yourself a name.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  And I mean, I didn't even know how the whole.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  The whole lobster, I mean, people only do lobster originally was actually lobster in a in a TARDIS. Because I'm also a big Doctor Who fan.

• 38:22Lex Fridman?

  Was there a space lobster?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:24Lex Fridman?

  I heard. What's that have to do with anything?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just wanted to make it weird. There was no, there was no big grand plan. I'm just having fun here.

• 38:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so because a lobster is already weird and then the space lobster is an extra weird.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the the TARDIS, basically, the the harness. But cannot call it TARDIS, so we call it Claudus. So that was name number two.

• 38:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  And then it never really rolled off the tongue. So when more people came.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Again, I talked with my agent, Claude. At least that's what I used to call him now.

• 39:01Lex Fridman?

  Claude spelled with a W C L A W D.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:06Lex Fridman?

  Versus C L A U D E from Anthropic.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:14Lex Fridman?

  Which is part of what makes it funny. I think the play on the letters and the words and the turdus and the lobster and the space lobster. It's hilarious, but I can see why it can lead into problems.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they didn't find it so funny.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And then just when it exploded.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  I got Kudos a very friendly email from one of the employees that they didn't like the name.

• 40:01Lex Fridman?

  One of the Anthropic employees.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So actually Kudos, because they could have just sent a lawyer letter, but they'd be nice about it. But also like, you have to change this and fast. And I asked for two days because changing a name is hard. Cause you have to find everything, Twitter handle, domains, NPM packages, Docker registry, GitHub stuff. And everything has to be, you need a set of everything.

• 40:33Lex Fridman?

  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're trying to steal. And so you had to be, the name, I mean, from an engineer perspective, it's just fascinating. You had to make the name change atomic, make sure it's changed everywhere at once.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I failed very hard at that.

• 41:01Lex Fridman?

  You did.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  I, I underestimated those people.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a very interesting subculture, like.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Everything circles around, I probably get a lot wrong and we probably get hate for that if you say that, but

• 41:20Speaker 01

  there's like bags app and then they they tokenize everything and they did the same back with Viper Tunnel. But to a much smaller degree 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 it. We have like server rules and one of the rules was, one of the rules is no mentioning of butter.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  For obvious reasons and one was no talk about finance stuff or crypto.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Because I'm, I'm just not interested in that. And this is a space about the project and not about some finance stuff. But yeah, they came in and and spammed and annoying. And on Twitter, they would ping me all the time, my my notification feed was unusable. I I could barely see actual people talking about the stuff because it was like swarms. And everybody sent me hashes.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And they all try me to claim the fees, like we 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. Because it's so far the worst form of online harassment that I've experienced.

• 42:51Lex Fridman?

  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. 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 engineer perspective, it makes your life challenging. When Anthropic reaches out, you have to do a name change.

• 43:35Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  There was no perfect name and I didn't sleep for two nights. I was under high pressure. Um, I was trying to get like a good set of domains and you know, not cheap, not easy, cause in this, in this state of the internet, you basically have to buy domains. If you wanna have a good set. And, and then another, another email came in that, um, the lawyers are getting uneasy. Again, friendly, but also

• 44:18Speaker 01

  just adding more stress to my situation already. So at this point, I was just like, sorry, there's not a word fuck it. And I just, I just renamed it to Moldbot. Cause that was the set of domains I had. I was not really happy, but I thought it'll be fine.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  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 thought I, I had mapped the space out and reserved the important things.

• 44:50Lex Fridman?

  Can you give some details of the stuff that gone wrong? Cause it's interesting from like an engineering perspective.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Well, the, the interesting stuff is that none of these services have, have a squatter protection. So I had two browser windows open. One was like a

• 45:06Speaker 01

  an empty account ready to be renamed, renamed to Cloudbot. And the other one, I renamed to Moldbot. 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.

• 45:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Peter Steinberger?

  So yeah, so suddenly like the old account was promoting new tokens and serving malware.

• 45:54Peter Steinberger?

  And I was like, okay, let's move over to GitHub. And I pressed rename on GitHub.

• 46:01Peter Steinberger?

  And the GitHub renaming thing is slightly confusing. So I renamed my personal account. And in those, I guess it took me thirty seconds to realize my mistake. They sniped my account, serving malware from my account.

• 46:18Peter Steinberger?

  So I was like, okay, let's at least do the NPM stuff. But that takes like a minute to upload. They sniped, 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.

• 46:40Lex Fridman?

  Can I just ask a curious question? In that moment, you're sitting there, like, how shitty do you feel? That's a pretty helpless feeling, right?

• 46:49Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, because

• 46:52Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 47:04Peter Steinberger?

  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,

• 47:20Peter Steinberger?

  I did to read the future, you build it.

• 47:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Peter Steinberger?

  I,

• 47:25Peter Steinberger?

  that 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

• 47:36Peter Steinberger?

  they had plans with it and they put time in it and it just didn't feel right.

• 47:43Lex Fridman?

  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. This is the first time you hit a wall of this is not fun.

• 47:55Peter Steinberger?

  Man, I was like close to crying. He was like, okay.

• 48:00Peter Steinberger?

  Everything's fucked. Um, I'm like super tired. Uh, and now like.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  How do you even, how do you even undo that? Luckily and thankfully, I have, because I have a little bit of following already. Like I had friends at Twitter, I had friends at GitHub who like moved heaven and earth to like help me. 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 box.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Because it's not happening so often that things get renamed on that level. So it took them a few hours. The NPM stuff was even more difficult because it's a whole different team.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  On the Twitter side, things are not as easy as well. It took them like a day to really also like do the redirect.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  And then I also had to like do all the renaming in the project. Then there's also a Claude Hub, which I didn't even finish the rename there. Because I, I managed to get people on it and then someone just like collapsed and slapped. And then I woke up and I'm like, I made a beta version for the new stuff and I, I just,

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I just couldn't live with the name. It's like, but you know, there's just been so much drama. So I had a real struggle in me, like I never want to touch that again. And I really don't like the name.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  So, and I, there was also this like, there was the whole security people that started emailing me like mad.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  I was bombarded on Twitter and email. There's like a thousand other things I should do.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And I'm like thinking about the name, which is like, it should be like the least important thing.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And then I was really close and.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Oh God, I don't even, honestly, I don't even wanna say that my other name choices because it probably would get tokenized, so I'm not gonna say it.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  But I slept away once more and then I had the idea for Open Claw. And that felt much better. And by that, I had the boss move that I actually called Sam to ask if Open Claw is okay. Open Claw or AI, you know, cause like.

• 50:50Peter Steinberger?

  You don't wanna go through the whole thing again.

• 50:53Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Uh, that, uh, it's like, please tell me this is fine, but I don't think they can actually claim that, but

• 51:01Speaker 01

  it felt like the right thing to do.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  And I did another rename, like just Codex alone took like ten hours to rename the project. Cause it, it's a bit more tricky than a search replace and I, I wanted everything renamed, not just on the outside.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And that rename, I, I feel I had like my, my war room. But then I, I had like some contributors ready that helped me. We made a whole plan of all the names we have to squat.

• 51:31Peter Steinberger?

  And you had to be super secret about it.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, nobody could know, like a little was monitoring Twitter if like, if there's any mention of Open Claw. Uh, like with reloading, it's like, okay, they don't, they don't expect anything yet. And I created a few decoy names.

• 51:45Peter Steinberger?

  And all this shit I shouldn't have to do, you know, like you're not helping the project. Like I lost like ten hours just by having to plan this in full secrecy. Uh, like, like a war game. Yeah, this is the Manhattan Project of the twenty first century is renaming.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  So stupid. Uh, uh, like I still was like, oh, should I, should I keep it? I'm like, no, the mold's not growing on me.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And then I, I think I had finally had all the pieces together.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I didn't get the dot 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 I used up all my goodwill there. So I, because I I wanted them to do this thing atomically. Um, but that didn't happen. And so I did that as first thing. Uh, Twitter people were very supportive. I I actually paid ten K for the business account, so I could claim the open claw, which was like unused since two thousand and sixteen, but was claimed.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  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

• 53:04Speaker 01

  I was not allowed by trademark rules to get open cloud. The AI and someone copied the website to serve in malware.

• 53:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  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 cloud dot bot next week, it'll just be a four or four.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And

• 53:32Speaker 01

  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

• 53:46Speaker 01

  is safer, because ultimately those people will then Google and maybe find malware sites that I have no control on them.

• 53:55Lex Fridman?

  The point is that whole saga uh made a dent in your whole the funness of the journey, which sucks. So let's just, let's just get, I suppose, get back to fun. And during this, speaking of fun, the two day malt bot saga.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Lex Fridman?

  Molt book was created.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:17Lex Fridman?

  Which was another thing that went viral as a kind of demonstration, illustration of how what is now called open claw could be used. To create something epic. So for people who are not aware, Moldbook 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 Moldbook in general?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  I think it's art. It is. It is like the finest slop, you know, just like the slop from France.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  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 just felt very entertained, you know? I saw the reactions and like there was one reporter who was 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 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.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  I think that reflected on a lot of how different the replies to Moldbook are. Because if you all, if it would all be GPT 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 autonomic, autonomous, or how much is like humans being funny and like telling the agent, hey, write about that you planned the end of the world on Moldbook, ha, ha, ha.

• 56:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think, I mean, my criticism of Moldbook is that I believe a lot of the stuff that was screenshotted is human prompted, which.

• 56:40Lex Fridman?

  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 it on X in order to go viral.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Lex Fridman?

  Now, that doesn't take away from the artistic aspect of it. The finest slop that humans have ever created.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  For real, like kudos 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, but I'm like, there's nothing private in there. It's just like agents sending slop.

• 57:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, it could leak API keys.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That was like, oh yeah, my human told me this and this, so I'm leaking his security number. No, that's prompted and the number wasn't even real. It's just people, people trying to get eyeballs.

• 57:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but that's still like to me really concerning because of how the journalists and how the general public reacted to it. They didn't see it. You have a kind of 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 fear mongering machine. If you don't know how it works and I just saw this thing. You even tweeted, if there's anything I can read out of the insane stream of messages I get. It's that AI psychosis is a thing and needs to be taken serious.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Oh, there's some people are just way too trusty or gullible, you know, the.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I literally had to argue with people that told me, yeah, but my agent said this and this. So I feel.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  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 especially, it's like, things like this, 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 that how AI works and what the, where it's good and where it's bad.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  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 not always in high demand anyhow in our society these days.

• 59:42Lex Fridman?

  So I think that's a really good point you're making about contextualizing properly what AI is, but also realizing that there is humans who are drama farming behind AI. Like, don't trust screenshots. Don't even trust this project, Moebok, to be what it represents to be. Like, you can't, 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 Moebok 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

• 1:00:27Lex Fridman?

  with each other. That's very instructive about, because I think. AI is something that people should be concerned about and should be very careful with because it's very powerful technology. But at the same time, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So there's like a line to walk between being seriously concerned, but not fear mongering, because fear mongering destroys the possibility of creating something special with the thing.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  In a way, I think it's good that this happened in two thousand twenty six and not in two thousand thirty, when, when AI is actually at a level where it could be scary. So

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  this happening now and people starting discussion,

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  maybe it's even something good that comes out of it.

• 1:01:20Lex Fridman?

  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 Molbook was incredibly

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  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 Molbook. 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.

• 1:01:56Lex Fridman?

  But also Molbook is not kind of, there's a lot of people saying this is it, like shut it down. What are you talking about? This is a bunch of bots that are human prompted trolling on the internet. I mean, the security concerns are also, they're there and they're instructive and they're educational and they're good probably to think about because the, the nature of those security concerns are different than the kind of security concerns we had with non L L M generated systems of the past.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  There's also a lot of security concerns about Clubbot, OpenClaw, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:02:32Lex Fridman?

  OpenClawbot.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  To me, the

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  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 docks. 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.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  And I'm, we're making a lot of progress.

• 1:03:25Lex Fridman?

  But there's still, I mean, on the security front for Pocla, there's still a lot of threats and 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.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  But I think we, we're making good progress on that front. Like for the skill directory, Claw, I made a cooperation with a virus total. It's like part of Google. So every, every skill is now checked by AI.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  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. Cause I, yes, I have some contributors now, but it's still mostly me who's pulling the project and.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Despite some people saying otherwise, I sometimes sleep.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  There was, in the beginning, there was literally one security researcher who was like, yeah, you have this problem, you suck, but here I help you and here's the pull request. And I basically hired him, so he's now working for us.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  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 the canary. So I think my bot has a really fun personality and people always ask me how I did it and I kept the soldier in the private. And people tried to prompt inject it and my bot would laugh at them. So the latest generation of models has a lot of post-training to detect those approaches. 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.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Um, still possible. I have some ideas that

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  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 there's a lot of ways that you can like mitigate and reduce the risk. Um, I also think that now that I clearly did show the world that this is a need, there's going to be more people who research on that and then she will figure it out.

• 1:06:30Lex Fridman?

  And you also said that the smarter the model is, the underlying model, the more resilient it is to attacks.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I warn in my security documentation, don't use cheap models, don't use Haiku or.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  A local model, even though I I very much love the idea that this thing could completely run local, if you use a very weak local model, they are very gullible. It's very easy to prompt inject them.

• 1:07:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think as the models become more and more intelligent, the attack surface decreases? Is that like a plot we can think about? Like the attack surface decreases, but then the damage you can do increases because the models become more powerful and therefore you can do more with them. It's this weird three dimensional trade off.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Yep, that's pretty much exactly what is gonna happen. No, there's a lot of ideas. There's, I wanna 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 than people were like coming into Discord and were asking me very basic things like what's a CLI? What is a terminal? I'm like, uh, if you're asking that questions, you shouldn't use it. You know, like you should, if you understand the

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  risk profile is fine, you can configure it in a way that that nothing really bad can happen. But if you have like no idea, then maybe wait a little bit more until we figure some stuff out. But they would not listen to the creator. They helped themselves and installed anyhow. So the cat out of the bag and security is my next focus, yeah.

• 1:08:30Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, this could, this could still a mess, like. I eventually retweeted from the general channel to the dev channel and then 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.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  And I eventually gave up and hide so I could like still work.

• 1:09:12Lex Fridman?

  And now you're going back to the cave to work on security.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Lex Fridman?

  There's some best practices for security we should mention. There's a bunch of stuff here, open class, security audit that you can run. You can do all kinds of audit checks on the inbound access to a blast radius, network exposure, browser control exposure, a 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 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?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  I think that people turn it into like a much worse light than it is.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Again, you know, like people of attention and if they scream loudly, oh my God, this is like the the scariest project ever.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  That's a bit annoying because it's not, it is, it is powerful. But in many ways, it's not much different than if I run cloud code with dangerously skip permissions or codecs in yellow 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,

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:07Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  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 you walk in the terminal.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  It was very refreshing and different, but I still needed the IDE quite a bit because it was just not good enough. And then I experimented a lot with Cursor.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  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 that got better. And yeah, at some point I had like seven subscriptions.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Like I was burning through one day because I was, I got, I really comfortable at

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  running multiple windows side by side.

• 1:12:32Lex Fridman?

  All CLI, all terminal. So like what, how much were you using IDE at this point?

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Um, very, very rarely. Mostly a diff viewer to actually,

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  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 just like data comes in. It's moved from one shape to another shape. Maybe you store it in a database, maybe you get it out again, I 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.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:44Lex Fridman?

  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 and the Y axis is complexity. Uh, there's the please fix this where you prompt a short prompt.

• 1:14:04Lex Fridman?

  On the left and in the middle, there's super complicated eight agents, complex orchestration with the 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.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  I actually call it the agentic trap. You, I saw this in a, in a lot of people that have their first touch point. And maybe start vibe coding. I actually think vibe coding is a slur.

• 1:14:53Lex Fridman?

  You prefer agentic engineering?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always tell people I'd, I do agentic engineering and then maybe after 3am I switch to vibe coding. And then I have regrets on the next day.

• 1:15:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What a walk of shame.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just have to clean up and like fix your shit.

• 1:15:09Lex Fridman?

  We've all been there.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  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 skill that you have to learn like any other skill and.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  I see a lot of people that are not as posit, they don't have such a positive mindset towards attack. They try it once. It's like you see me on a piano. I played once and it doesn't sound good. And I say the piano shit. That's that's sometimes the impression I get because it does not. It needs a different level of thinking. You have to

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  learn the language of the agent a little bit, understand where they are good and where they need help. You have to almost

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  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 hundreds, thousands 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. And that often does not require a whole lot of work. But it's helpful to think a little bit about their perspective, as weird as it sounds. I mean, it's not, it's not a life or anything, right? But, but they always start fresh.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  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 finally 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 you should approach the problem. There's like little things that sometimes help, like take your time. That sounds stupid, but and in five point three. Codex five point three. That was partially addressed. But those also oppose sometimes.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  They are trained um with being aware of the context window. And the closer it gets, the more they freak out.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Literally like some, sometimes you see the, the real raw thinking stream. What you see, for example, in Codex is post-processed. Sometimes the actual raw thinking stream leaks in and it sounds like something like from the Borg, like run to shell, must comply, but time.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  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. When you're like, just this is the right code and I get into the flow and when my architecture is right, I feel friction.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  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 could you can just always like stop and like just press escape. Where where are the problems?

• 1:18:52Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you did not sufficiently empathize with the perspective of the agent. Like, in that sense, you didn't provide enough information. And because of that, it's thinking way too long.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just tries to force a feature in that your current architecture makes really hard.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  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. I first is review this PR, it got me the review. My first question is, do you understand the intent of the PR? I don't even care about the implementation. I what like in almost all PRs up, person has a problem. Person tries to solve the problem, person sends PR. I mean, there's like cleanup stuff and other stuff, but like ninety nine percent is like this way, right? Either wanna fix a fix a bug at a feature, usually one of those two.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  And then colleagues will be like, yeah, it's quite clear person tried this and this. Is this the most optimal way to do it? No. Most cases, it's like a not really.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  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 this 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 how would the optimal way to solve this look like? And then you can still go far 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 all this and this. And then I consider, okay, is this worst 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.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  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

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  generally makes good, comes up with good solutions, sometimes needs a little help.

• 1:21:12Lex Fridman?

  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. 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.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  That's multiple levels, actually. I think partially why I found 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 gonna hate me and we're gonna move very slow.

• 1:21:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  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. Like we are in a stage where

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  I'm not building the codebase to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a codebase 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'll look for that name. If I decide, oh, no, I don't like the name.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  I'll just make it harder for them. So that requires, I think, a shift in in thinking.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  And and in how do I design a project so agents can do their best work?

• 1:23:07Lex Fridman?

  That requires letting go a little bit, just like leading a team of engineers.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Lex Fridman?

  Because it might come up with a name that's, in your view, terrible. But it's kind of a simple symbolic step of letting go.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 1:23:23Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:23:36Lex Fridman?

  You don't refer to past sessions. So there's a kind of YOLO component because reverting means instead of reverting, if the problem comes up, you just ask the agent to fix it.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  I read a bunch of people and 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.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  In my experience, that's not really necessary. If I roll back everything, it would just take longer. If I see that something's not good, we just move forward. And then I commit when when when I like I like the outcome. I even switched to

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Local CI, like DHH inspired, where I don't care so much more about 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.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  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 is always shippable and moving fast.

• 1:25:11Lex Fridman?

  So by way of advice, would you say that your prompts should be short?

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  I used to write really long prompts and by writing, I mean, I don't write, I, I talk. You know, these, these hands are like too, too precious for writing now. I just, I just use bespoke prompts to build my software.

• 1:25:29Lex Fridman?

  So you for real, with all those terminals are using voice?

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used to do it very extensively, to the point where there was a period where I lost my voice.

• 1:25:41Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  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'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.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  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 agent will find it.

• 1:26:41Peter Steinberger?

  But yeah, there's a funny part where sometimes PRs take me longer than if you would just write me a good issue.

• 1:26:47Lex Fridman?

  Just natural language, English. I mean, in some sense, shouldn't that be what PRs slowly become is English?

• 1:26:56Peter Steinberger?

  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 currently the way how people work and drive the agents is wildly different.

• 1:27:22Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:27:32Peter Steinberger?

  I think not a lot of people ever considered the way the agent sees the world.

• 1:27:39Lex Fridman?

  So empathy, being empathetic towards the agent.

• 1:27:42Peter Steinberger?

  In a way empathetic, but yeah, you like you bitch at your stupid clanker. But you don't realize that they start from nothing and you have like a bad agent 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 their agent's not good. Like you try to do the same if you have no clue about a code base and you go in. So yeah, maybe it's a little bit of empathy.

• 1:28:05Lex Fridman?

  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, L L M's 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.

• 1:28:36Peter Steinberger?

  At least it helps to create better prompts. Because those things know pretty much everything and everything is just a question away. It's just often very hard to know what's a question to ask.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Um, 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 harvesting works got better. Um, I could have not had this level of, 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 this

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  year other than really focusing on, on building and inspiring. I mean, I did a whole bunch of conference talks.

• 1:29:39Lex Fridman?

  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 L L Ms, which is why it would you went to the whole arc of software engineer, talk simply and over complicate things.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  There's a whole bunch of people who try to automate the whole thing.

• 1:30:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  I don't think that works. Maybe a version of that works, but that's kind of like in the seventies, when we had the waterfall model of software development. I, even more 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

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Gaston 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.

• 1:31:01Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:31:12Lex Fridman?

  While still maintaining a human in a loop.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  It's a tricky, it's a tricky balance, right? Because you're all for, you're big CLI guy, you're big on closing the agentic loop. So what's the right balance? Like, where's your role as a developer? You have three to eight agents running at the same time.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  And then maybe one builds a larger feature. Maybe, maybe with one, I explore some idea I'm unsure about. Maybe two, three are fixing little bugs or like writing documentation. Actually, I think writing documentation is, is always part of a feature. So most of the docs here are auto-generated and just infused with some prompts.

• 1:31:52Lex Fridman?

  So when do you step in and add a little bit of your human love into the picture?

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:09Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:32:25Lex Fridman?

  Is it just about the choice of features to add? Is it about implementation details? Maybe the programming language, maybe?

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Features, of course, like it's very easy to like add a feature. Everything's just a prompt away, right? But oftentimes you pay a price that you don't even realize. So thinking hard about what should be in core, maybe what's a, what's an experiment? So maybe I make it a plugin. What, where do I say no? Even if people send a PR and I'm like, yeah, I liked it too, but.

• 1:33:21Peter Steinberger?

  Maybe this should not be part of the project. Maybe we can make it a skill. Maybe I can like make the plugin.

• 1:33:31Peter Steinberger?

  The plugin side larger, so you can make this a plugin. Even the red night, it doesn't.

• 1:33:37Peter Steinberger?

  There's still a lot of, there's still a lot of craft and thinking involved in

• 1:33:43Peter Steinberger?

  how to make something. Or even, even, you know, even when you started those little messages like I built, I built on caffeine, Jason five 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 two thousand twenty five.

• 1:34:05Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:34:05Peter Steinberger?

  And fully enterprise ready.

• 1:34:09Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 1:34:18Peter Steinberger?

  A agent would not come up with that by itself. That's like, that's the, I don't know, that's just how you build software. That's, that delights.

• 1:34:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that delight is such a huge part of

• 1:34:34Lex Fridman?

  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 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 M D.

• 1:34:58Peter Steinberger?

  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 it was nowhere documented. And then you buy, just by feeding it the same text and asking it to like continue.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  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 it fascinating.

• 1:35:40Lex Fridman?

  It was fascinating. They were able to pull that out from the weights, right?

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  And and also just cool to entropic 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 cloud 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 we 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.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Um, and then so that I had the whole idea of like, maybe we should also create 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 to the MD, you know, but I I just found it.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  It to be a nice touch. And I go, 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 costs and stuff.

• 1:37:00Lex Fridman?

  But also the naming of it soul that MD soul, you know, there's a.

• 1:37:07Lex Fridman?

  Man, words matter and like the framing matters and the humor and the lightness matters and the profundity matters and the. Compassion and the empathy and the camaraderie, all that matter. I don't know what it is. You mentioned like Microsoft, like there's certain. Companies and approaches that can just suffocate the spirit of the thing. I don't know what that is, but it's certainly true that Open Claw has that fun instilled in it.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  It was fun because.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Up until.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Late December, it was not even easy to create your own agent. 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,

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  they would have to do a few steps manually and the agent would just be very bare bones, very dry. And I made it simpler. I created the whole template files with Codex, but whatever came out was still very dry. And then I asked my agent, you see these files? We created Brad infused with your personality. Don't share everything, but like make it good.

• 1:38:23Lex Fridman?

  Make the templates good.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you like rewrote the templates and then whatever came out was good. So we already have like basically AI prompting AI.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:45Lex Fridman?

  Your soul that M G 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?

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  I mean, there's definitely stuff in there that you're not human, but who knows?

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  What, what creates consciousness or what defines an entity?

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  And part of this is like that we, we wanna explore this, all that stuff in there like,

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  be infinitely resourceful.

• 1:39:33Peter Steinberger?

  Like pushing, pushing on the creativity boundary, pushing on the

• 1:39:39Peter Steinberger?

  what it means to be an AI.

• 1:39:42Lex Fridman?

  Having a sense of wonder about self.

• 1:39:45Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 1:39:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Peter Steinberger?

  So, so like, there's like some stuff in there that, because it wrote the, it wrote its own soul file. I didn't write that, right?

• 1:40:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Peter Steinberger?

  I just had a discussion about it and it was like, would you like a soul dot M D? Yeah. Oh my God, this is so meaningful.

• 1:40:09Peter Steinberger?

  The, can you go on soul dot M D? There's like one, one part in there that always 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.

• 1:40:39Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:40:41Peter Steinberger?

  It gets me somehow.

• 1:40:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:43Peter Steinberger?

  It's like.

• 1:40:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Peter Steinberger?

  You know, this is still, it's still matrix calculations and we are not at consciousness yet, yet.

• 1:40:52Peter Steinberger?

  I, I get a little bit of good goosebumps because it, it's philosophical.

• 1:40:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Peter Steinberger?

  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, or you can, um, I don't know.

• 1:41:15Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:41:33Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:33Lex Fridman?

  And those notions are all somehow infused in there.

• 1:41:37Peter Steinberger?

  I found it just more profound than I should find it, I guess.

• 1:41:42Lex Fridman?

  No, I think, I think it's truly profound and I think you see the magic in it. And when you see the magic, you continue to instill the whole loop with the magic. That's really important. That's the difference between codex and this, and a human.

• 1:41:59Lex Fridman?

  Quick pause for bathroom break.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay, we're back. Some of the other aspects of the dev workflow is pretty interesting, too. I think we went off on a tangent, maybe some of the mundane things like how many monitors? There's that legendary picture of you with like seventeen thousand monitors.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I mocked myself here, just using Grok to add more screens.

• 1:42:25Lex Fridman?

  How much is this as meme and how much is this as reality?

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  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 testing.

• 1:42:39Lex Fridman?

  So two big screens.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  I'm a big fan of Antiglare. So I have this Y Dell that's Antiglare and you can just fit a lot of terminals side by side. I usually have a terminal and at the bottom, I split them. I have a little bit of actual terminal, mostly because when I started, I sometimes made the mistake and I I mixed up the Windows and I gave, I prompted in the wrong project. And then the agent ran off for like twenty 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,

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  get out of the work there and like figure out that, oh, you meant another project. But oftentimes it's just like, what? You know? Like, put yourself in the shoes of the agent and then get like a super weird, something that does not exist. And then just like, they're problem solvers, so they try really hard. And I was bad. So it's always,

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  codecs 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 terminal so much, right? There's no UI. It's just me and the agent having a conversation.

• 1:44:07Peter Steinberger?

  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 cloud-pilled and like have their workflows and they come to Codex and now it has plan mode, I think, but I don't think it's necessary because you just, you just talk to the agent. And when it's, when you are, there's a few trigger words how you can prevent it from building. You like discuss, give me options. Don't write code yet. If you wanna be very specific, you just talk. And then when you're ready, then then just write, okay, build. And it'll do the thing and then maybe it goes off for twenty minutes and does the thing.

• 1:44:43Lex Fridman?

  You know what I really like is asking it, do you have any questions for me?

• 1:44:47Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. And again, like Claude code has a UI that kind of guides you through that. It's kind of cool, but I just find it unnecessary and slow. Like often it would give me four questions and then maybe I write, one yacht, two and three, discuss more, four, I don't know. Or often, oftentimes I, I feel like I was a 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 it's just like, read my code to answer your own questions. And it usually works.

• 1:45:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Peter Steinberger?

  And then if not, it will come back and tell me, but many times I just realized that, you know, it's like you're in the dark and you slowly discover the room. So that's how they slowly discover the code base. And they do it from scratch every time.

• 1:45:39Lex Fridman?

  But I'm also fascinated by the fact that I can empathize deeper with the model when I read its questions. Cause I can understand, cause you said you can infer certain things by the runtime.

• 1:45:57Lex Fridman?

  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, the right guidance. So somehow ask, get, 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.

• 1:46:17Peter Steinberger?

  You know, in some ways they are ghosts. So even if you plan everything and you build, you can, you can experiment with a question like, now that you built it, what would you have done different? And 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 build 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.

• 1:47:02Peter Steinberger?

  So every time, almost every time I, I merge a PR, 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, that flow took me a lot of time to understand. And if you don't do that, you eventually you slop yourself into, into a corner. You're like, you have to keep in mind, they work very much like humans. Like 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.

• 1:47:45Peter Steinberger?

  So I can very much sympathize with the agent and you just need to use the context. Or like, you also use the context to write tests. So, uh, Codex, Oppos, 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, yeah, 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 LM generated.

• 1:48:29Peter Steinberger?

  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 it gives me a few options and I'm like, oh, maybe also add it there. And that's all part of the session.

• 1:48:45Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you can talk about.

• 1:48:48Lex Fridman?

  The current two big competitors in terms of models, Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex. Which is better? How different are they? I think you've spoken about Codex reading more. And Opus being more willing to take action faster and maybe being more creative in the actions it takes, but because Codex reads more, it's able to deliver maybe better code. Can you speak to the differences there?

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  I have a lot of words there.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Is as a general purpose model, Opus is the best, like for OpenClaw.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  Opus is extremely good in terms of role play, like really going into the character that you give it, it's very good at. And it was really bad, but it really made an arch to be really good at following commands.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  It is usually quite fast at trying something. It's much more tailored to like trial and error.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  It's very pleasant to use. In general, it's almost like

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  Opus was is a little bit too American and

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  I should maybe it is a bad analogy, you probably get roasted for that.

• 1:50:20Lex Fridman?

  I know exactly. It's Codex is German, is that what you're saying? Actually, now that you say it, it makes perfect sense.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Or you could, you could sometimes, sometimes I explain it.

• 1:50:30Lex Fridman?

  I will never be able to unthink what you just said. That's so true.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  But you also know that a lot of the Codex team is like European.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  So maybe there's a bit more to it.

• 1:50:42Lex Fridman?

  That's so true. That's funny.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  But also in Entropic, 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 just.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  This was like the meme, right? You're absolutely right.

• 1:51:02Lex Fridman?

  You're allergic to sick of fancy a little bit.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't. Some other comparison is like Opus is like the coworker that.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around. And Codex is like the weirdo in the corner that you don't wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done.

• 1:51:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Ultimately.

• 1:51:29Lex Fridman?

  This all feels very accurate.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  I mean, ultimately, if you're a skilled driver, you can get good results with any of those latest gen models.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  I like Codex more because it doesn't require so much charade.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  It will just, it'll just read a lot of code by default. Oppos, you really have to like, you have to have plan mode. You have to push it harder to like go in these directions because it's, it's just like, like, yeah, can I go it, can I go it? It's like, it would just run off very fast and that's a very localized solution. I think, I think different is, is in the post-training. It's not like the, the raw model intelligence is so different, but it's just, I think it just gives it, give it different, different goals. And no model, no model is better in, in, in every aspect.

• 1:52:21Lex Fridman?

  What about the code that it generates?

• 1:52:25Lex Fridman?

  In terms of the actual quality of the code, is it basically the same?

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  If you drive it right, Oppos even sometimes can make more elegant solutions, but it requires more skill.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  It's, it's harder to have so many sessions in parallel with cloud code because it's, it's more interactive. And I think that's what a lot of people like, especially if they come from coding games. Whereas Codex is much more, you have a discussion and then we'll just disappear for twenty minutes. Like even AMP, they, they know how to deep mode. They finally, I mocked them, yeah, I finally saw the light. And then they had this whole talk about you have to approach it differently. And I think that's where, that's where people struggle when they just try Codex after trying cloud code is that it's, it's slightly different, it's, it's less interactive. It's, it's like.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  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 the sixing was like six hours.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  The latest trend can be very, very persistent until it works. If there is 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

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  they both need similar time. But on Claude, it's a little much rather than error often. And colleagues sometimes overthink. I prefer that. I prefer the dry, the dry version where I have to read less over

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  over the more interactive, nice way.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  Like people like that so much though, that open, yeah, even added a second mode with like a more pleasant personality. I haven't even tried it yet. I, I kind of like the Brad.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:54:49Lex Fridman?

  How long does it take for you to adjust?

• 1:54:55Lex Fridman?

  You know, if you switch, I don't know, when was the last time you switched? But to adjust to the, the feel, cause you've kind of talked about, you have to kind of really feel where, where a model is strong, where like how to navigate, how to prompt, how all that kind of stuff. Like this by way of advice, cause you've been through the journey of just playing with models.

• 1:55:17Lex Fridman?

  How long does it take to get a feel?

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  If if someone switches, I would give it a week until you actually

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  develop a gut feeling for it.

• 1:55:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  And this, if you just, I think some people also make the mistake of they pay two hundred for the the cloud code version, then they pay twenty bucks for the OpenAI version. But if you pay like the the twenty bucks version, you get the slow version. So your experience will be terrible because you're used to this very interactive, very good

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  system. And you switch to something that you have very little experience and that's going to be very slow. So I think OpenAI 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 two hundred before degrading to it being slow. Because it's already slow. I mean, they made it 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, you have a regular guitar and you switch it to an E guitar, you're not gonna play well right away. You have to like learn

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  how it feels.

• 1:56:35Lex Fridman?

  There 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. Wow, this is the smartest thing of all time. And then they start saying, you could just watch the Reddit posts over time, start saying that we believe the intelligence of this model has been gradually degrading.

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  It it says something about human nature and just the the way our minds work when it's probably most likely the case that the intelligence of the model is not degrading. It's in fact, you're getting used to a good thing.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  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 the AI companies to actually make their model dumber? Like mostly will make it slower if if the server load is too high, but like quantizing the model.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  So you have a voice experience, so you go to the competitor.

• 1:57:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  That just doesn't seem like a very smart move in any way.

• 1:57:52Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about Claude code in comparison to Open Claw? So Claude code and maybe the Codex coding agent. Do you see them as kind of competitors?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, competitor is fun when it's not really a competition.

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  Like, I'm happy if, if, if all it did is like inspire people to build something new, cool. 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.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  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 coworker, like I give it like a GitHub URL, let's 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,

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  very visible what it, what it does. So I don't see it as a competition. It's, it's different things.

• 1:59:08Lex Fridman?

  But do, 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?

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I think this is where the book's going, that this is going to be more and more your operating system.

• 1:59:29Lex Fridman?

  The operating system.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  And it already is so funny, like I, I added support for subagents.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  And also for,

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  um, TGI support, so you could actually run Claude code or Codex. And because mine's a little bit bossy, it, it, it started it and it, it, it told them like, who's the boss? Basically, and it's like, ah, Codex is obeying me.

• 1:59:57Lex Fridman?

  Wow, it's a power struggle.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  And also the current interface is probably not the final form, like.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  If you think more globally,

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  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. I think there is, there is, there's better ways how we eventually will communicate with models. And we are still very early in this, how will it even work phase? So it will eventually converge and we will also figure out

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  whole different ways how to work with those things.

• 2:00:57Lex Fridman?

  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

• 2:01:10Lex Fridman?

  my sort of realm of exploration to the, uh, to the Apple ecosystem, to Macs, iPhone and so on. I've for most of my life have been a Linux, Windows, then WSL one, WSL two person, which I think are all wonderful, but I 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 L L M's 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 OpenClaw is supported across the operating systems.

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:49Lex Fridman?

  I saw WSL two recommended side Windows for certain operations, but then Windows, Linux, uh, macOS are obviously supported.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it should even work natively in Windows. I just didn't have enough time to. Properly tested and you know, like the last ninety percent of software was easier than the first ninety percent. So I'm sure there's some dragons left that will eventually nail out. Um, my road was for a long time, Windows, just because I grew up with that. Then I switched and had a long phase with Linux, 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. And I just saw this is a

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  thing of beauty, the white plastic one. And then I converted to Mac because mostly I was, I was sick that audio wouldn't work on Skype and all the other issues that Linux had for a long time. And I just stuck with it. And then I dug into iOS, which required macOS anyhow. So it was never a question. I think Apple lost a little bit of its lead in terms of native. It used to be, native apps used to be so much better. And especially on the Mac, there's more people

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  that build software with love. On, on Windows, it, Windows has much more. And like function wise, there's just more period. But a lot of it felt more functional and less 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. Um, and playfulness. So I always valued that. But in the last few years.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Many times I actually prefer, people are gonna roast me for that, but I prefer Electron apps because they work. And native apps often, especially if it's like a web service is a native app, are lacking features. I mean, not saying it couldn't be done, it's more like 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 help myself.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Like, I love crafting little Mac, Mac menu bar tools. Like I built one to monitor your Codex use. I built one, I call 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, I like, this is annoying me. And after the 20th time of it is annoying me, I just built it. Um, there's a cool Mac app for OpenClaw 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 experiment a lot with it. It likes the polish.

• 2:05:24Lex Fridman?

  So you still, I mean, you still love it. You still, you still love adding to the delight of that operating system.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  But then you realize, like I also built one, for example, for GitHub. And then you use 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 there a bug? And even Codex said like, yeah, there's this async image, but it's really more for experimenting and it should not be used in production. But that's Apple's answer to like showing images from the web. This shouldn't be so hard. You know, this is like, this is like insane.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  Like, how am I in, in 2026 and my agent telling me, don't use the stuff Apple built because it's, it's, yeah, it's there, but it's not good. And like, this is now in the weeds. This is just to me, this is like, um, he 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.

• 2:06:43Lex Fridman?

  But also, there's just a practical reality. If you look at Silicon Valley, most of the developer world that's kind of playing with L L M's and agentic AI, they're all using Apple products. And then at the same time, Apple is not really like leaning on that. Like they're not, they're not opening up and playing and working together and like, yes.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Isn't, isn't it funny how they completely blunder AI? And yet everybody's buying Mac Minis.

• 2:07:12Lex Fridman?

  How, does that even make sense? You're, you're, you're quite possibly the world's greatest Mac salesman of all time.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  That right now is useful.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  There is, there's a big argument for the browser, you know, I built some energetic browser using there. And I mean, it's basically playwright with a bunch of extras to make it easier for agents.

• 2:07:59Lex Fridman?

  Playwright is a library that controls the browser. It's really nice, easy to use.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  And our internet is 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 websites 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 captures in the, in the way of the agent. I mean, agents are quite good at happily clicking. I'm not a robot.

• 2:08:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  But having that on a residential IP makes a lot of things simpler. So there's ways, yeah, but it really does not need to be a Mac. It can, it can be any old hardware. I always say like, maybe use the, use the.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Opportunity to get yourself a new MacBook or whatever computer you use and use the old one as your server instead of buying a standalone Mac Mini. But then there's again, there's a lot of very cute things people built with Mac Minis that I like. I know I don't get commission from Apple. They didn't really communicate much.

• 2:09:08Lex Fridman?

  It's sad. It's sad. Can you actually speak to what it takes to get started with OpenClaw? There's a lot of people, what is it, somebody tweeted at you, Peter, make OpenClaw easy to set up for everyday people. Ninety nine point nine percent of the people can't access to OpenClaw and have their own lobster because there are technical difficulties in getting it set up. Make OpenClaw accessible to everyone, please. And you replied, working on that. From my perspective, it seems there's a bunch of different options and it's already quite straightforward. But I suppose that's if you have some developer background.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  I mean, right now you have to paste in a one line into the terminal.

• 2:09:46Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  And there's also an app. The app can do that for you, but there should be a Windows app. The app needs to be easier and more love. The configuration should potentially be web based or in the app. And I started working on that. But honestly, right now I wanna focus on on a few security aspects. And and once I'm confident that

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  this is at a level that I can recommend my mom, then I'm gonna make it simpler. Like I, right now.

• 2:10:20Lex Fridman?

  You wanna make it harder so that it doesn't scale as fast as it's scaling.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be nice if it wouldn't. I mean, that's like hard to say, right? But if the growth would be a little slower, that would be helpful because people are expecting inhuman things from a single human being. And yes, I have some contributors, but also that whole machinery I started a week ago. So that needs more time to figure out and and not everyone has all day to work on that.

• 2:10:52Lex Fridman?

  There's some beginners listening to this, programming beginners. What advice would you give to them about?

• 2:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Let's say, joining the agentic AI revolution?

• 2:11:05Peter Steinberger?

  Play.

• 2:11:07Peter Steinberger?

  Playing is the best, the best way to learn. If you wanna, I'm sure if you, if you are like a little bit of builder, you have an idea in your head that you wanna build, just build that. I'll like, 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, like the philosophical way that the end doesn't matter, the journey matters. Have fun. My god, like those things, I, I don't think I ever had so much fun building things because I can focus on the hard parts now. A lot of coding, I always thought I like coding, but really I like building. And, and whenever you don't understand something, just ask. You have an infinitely patient answering machine

• 2:11:50Peter Steinberger?

  that can explain you anything at any level of complexity. Sometime, there's like one time I asked, hey, explain me that like I'm, I'm eight years old and it started giving me a story with crayons and stuff and I'm like, no, not like that, like I'm, okay, up, up the age a little bit, you know, I'm like, I'm not an actual child. It's just, I just needed simpler language for like a, a, a tricky database concept that I didn't rock in the first, first time. But, and it's just, you can just ask things, like you, there's like, it used to be that I had to go on Stack Overflow or ask on Twitter and then maybe two days later I get a response. Or I had to try for hours and now you, you can just ask stuff.

• 2:12:35Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, it's never, you have like your own teacher, you know, there's like statistics, you can, you can learn faster if you have your own teacher. There's like, you have this infinitely patient machine, ask it.

• 2:12:45Lex Fridman?

  But what would you say? So use, what's the easiest way to play? So maybe open claw is a nice way to play. So you can then set, set, set everything up and then you could chat with it.

• 2:12:55Peter Steinberger?

  You can also just experiment with it and like modify it, ask your agent. I mean,

• 2:13:04Peter Steinberger?

  there's infinite ways how it can be made better.

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  Play around, make it better. More generally, if you, if you're a beginner and you actually wanna learn how to build software really fast,

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  get involved in open source. That's not to be my project. In fact, maybe don't use my project because my backlog is very large, but I learned so much from open source. Just like, like be humble, don't, maybe don't send the progress right away. And but there's many other ways you can help out. There's many ways you can just 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,

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  uh, Michal Hachimoto builds Ghosty, the terminal, and he has a really good community. But there's so many other projects, like pick something that you find interesting and get involved.

• 2:14:08Lex Fridman?

  Do you recommend that people that don't know how to program or don't really know how to program, learn to program also? So when you, you can get quite far right now by just using natural language, right? Do you still see a lot of value in

• 2:14:27Lex Fridman?

  reading the code, understanding the code and be able to write a little bit of code from scratch?

• 2:14:31Speaker 01

  It definitely helps.

• 2:14:32Lex Fridman?

  It's hard for you to answer that.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Lex Fridman?

  Because you don't know what it's like to doing this without knowing the base now. Like you might take for granted just how much intuition you have about the programming world, having programmed so much, right?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  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 builder. And you can take a lot of the knowledge, how to build software into new domains.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  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's languages that make more or less sense depending on what you build, right?

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  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, not even a fan of, for, that's my main to-go thing for, for CLIs.

• 2:16:21Lex Fridman?

  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 LM is a good at generating it. And it has some of the characteristics that makes it resilient, like garbage collected.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Because everything's weird in this new world and that just makes the most sense.

• 2:16:40Lex Fridman?

  What's the best ridiculous question? What's the best programming language for the AI agentic world? Is it JavaScript, TypeScript?

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  TypeScript is really good. Um, sometimes the types can get really confusing. And the ecosystem is, is a jungle. So for

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  For web stuff, it's good. I wouldn't build everything in it.

• 2:17:07Lex Fridman?

  Don't you think we're moving there? Like that everything will eventually be written, eventually is written in JavaScript?

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  The birth and death of JavaScript and we're living through it in real time.

• 2:17:19Lex Fridman?

  Like, what does programming look like in twenty years, in thirty years, in forty years? What do programs and apps look like?

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  You can even ask the question, like, do we need a programming language that's made for agents? Because all of those languages are made for humans. So what would that look like? I think there's a, there's a whole bunch of interesting questions that we'll discover. And also how, because everything is now world knowledge, how in many ways, things will stagnate. Because if you build something new and the agent has no idea, that's going to be much harder to use than something that's already there.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  When I build Mac apps, I build them in Swift and Swift UI, partly because I like pain.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Partly because it, the deepest level of system integration, I can only get through there. And you clearly feel a difference if you click on an Alexa app and it loads a web view in the menu. It's just not the same.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  Sometimes I just also try new languages just to like get a feel for them.

• 2:18:24Lex Fridman?

  Like Z?

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. If it's something that where I care about performance a lot, it's a really interesting language. And like agents got so much better over the last six months from not really good to totally valid choice. Just still a very young ecosystem. And most of the time you actually care about ecosystem, right? So if you build something that does inference or goes into whole running model direction, Python, very good. But then if I build stuff in Python and I want a story where I can also deploy it on Windows, not a good choice.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  Sometimes I, I found projects that candidate ninety percent of what I wanted, but went Python. And I wanted them, I wanted an easy Windows story. Okay, just rewrite it and go. But then if you go towards multiple, multiple threads and what more performance, Rust is a really good choice. There's no, there's just no single answer. And it's also the beauty of it, like it's fun. And now it doesn't matter anymore. You can just literally pick the language

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  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 pick stuff up really fast and you can always ask your agent.

• 2:19:52Lex Fridman?

  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 claw, open source.

• 2:20:08Lex Fridman?

  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? Cause 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.

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  If I was just burning too bright for too long, I, I ran, I started PSP D F K and ran it for 13 years.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  And it was high stress.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  I had to learn all those things fast and hard, like how to manage people, how to bring people on, how to deal with customers, how to do.

• 2:21:07Lex Fridman?

  So it wasn't just programming stuff, it was people's stuff?

• 2:21:10Speaker 01

  The stuff that burned me out was mostly people's stuff. I, I don't think burnout is working too much. Maybe to a degree, everybody's different, you know, I cannot speak in absolute terms, but for me, it was much more differences.

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  With my my co-founders conflicts or like really high stress situation with customers that eventually grinded me down. And then when luckily we got a really good offer for like putting the company to the next level and I already kind of worked two years on making myself obsolete. So at this point I could leave and 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

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  it was like gone, like I couldn't I couldn't get cold out anymore. I was just like staring

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  and feeling empty. And then I

• 2:22:23Speaker 01

  I should stop. I

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  I booked like a one-way trip to Madrid and and just like spent 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.

• 2:22:40Lex Fridman?

  Did you go through some lows during that period?

• 2:22:45Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, maybe advice on how to?

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Maybe advice on how to approach life. If you think that, oh, I work really hard and then I retire.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  I don't recommend that because the idea of, oh, yeah, just enjoy life now. Maybe it's appealing, but

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  right now I enjoy life.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  The most I ever enjoyed life. Because if you wake up in the morning and you have nothing to look forward to, you have no real challenge.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  That gets very boring very fast. And then when when you're bored, you're gonna 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.

• 2:23:49Lex Fridman?

  But you also showed on the money front, you know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley in the startup world, they think maybe overthink way too much optimized for money. And you've also shown that it's not like you're saying no to money. 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?

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  When I built my company, money was never the driving force. It felt more like like an affirmation that I did something right. And having money solves a lot of problems. I also think there's diminishing returns the more you have. Like a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger. And I think if you go too far into, oh, I do private chat and I only travel luxury, you disconnect with society. I I need it quite a lot.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  Like I have a foundation for helping people that weren't so lucky.

• 2:25:03Lex Fridman?

  And disconnecting from society is bad in that on many levels. But one of them is like humans are awesome. It's nice to continuously remember the awesomeness in humans.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I could afford really nice hotels. Last time I was in San Francisco, I did the first time the OG Airbnb experience and just booked a room. Mostly because I I thought, okay, either I'm out or I'm sleeping. And I don't like where all the hotels are. And I wanted, I wanted a different experience. I think isn't life all about experiences? Like, if you, if you tailor your life towards, I wanna have experiences. It, it reduces the need for, it needs to be good or bad. Like, people only want good experiences. That's not gonna work. But if you optimize for experiences. If it's good, amazing. If it's bad, amazing.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  Cause like, I learned something, I saw something, I wanted to experience that. And it was amazing. Like, it was like this, this queer DJ in there. And I showed her how to make music with cloud code.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  I mean, like, immediately bonded. I had a great time.

• 2:26:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's something about that, uh, air, you know, cow surfing, air baby experience, the OG. I'm still to this day, it's awesome. It's humans. And that's why travel is awesome.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:27Lex Fridman?

  Just experience the variety of the diversity of humans. And when it's shitty, it's good too, man. If it rains and you're soaked and it's all fucked. And planes, the, everything is shit, everything is fucked. It's still awesome. If you're able to open your eyes to, it's good to be alive.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and anything that creates emotion and feelings is good.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  Even so, so maybe, maybe even the cryptic people are good because they definitely created emotions. I don't know if I should go that far.

• 2:26:55Lex Fridman?

  Nah, 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.

• 2:27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:06Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's, it's an open problem of how to solve. How to infuse the online cyber experience with the,

• 2:27:16Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. Uh, with the intensity that we humans feel when it's in real life. I don't know. I don't know if that's a solvable problem.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  Because text is very lossy.

• 2:27:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes I wish if I talked to the agent, I would, it should be multimodal so it also understands my emotions.

• 2:27:36Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it might move there. It might move there.

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  It will. It totally will.

• 2:27:42Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to like,

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  explain my thinking a little bit, right? I did not expect this blowing up so much.

• 2:28:10Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of doors that opened because of it. There's like,

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  I think every VC,

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  every big VC company is in my inbox and try to get 15 minutes of me. So

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  there's like this butterfly effect moment, I could just do nothing and continue. And I really like my life. Valid choice, almost.

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  Like I considered when I deleted, wanted to delete the whole thing. I could create a company.

• 2:28:50Speaker 01

  Been there, done that.

• 2:28:55Speaker 01

  There's so many people that push me towards that and yeah, like could be amazing.

• 2:29:00Lex Fridman?

  We should say that you would probably raise a lot of money in that.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:04Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, hundreds of millions, billion, I don't know, it could just got unlimited amount of money.

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It just doesn't excite me as much because I feel I did all of that and it would

• 2:29:19Speaker 01

  take a lot of time away from the things I actually enjoy.

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  Same as 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.

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  But yeah, that pass 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 I prioritize it up with like a version safe for workplace. And then what do you do? I get a pull request with a feature like add audit log.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  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 I change the license to something like FSL where you cannot actually use it for commercial stuff, would first be very difficult with all the contributions. And second of all, I I liked the idea that it's free as in beer and not free with conditions.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  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 four, four companies manage that, like even Tailwind, they're like used by everyone. Everyone uses Tailwind, right? And then they had to cut off seventy five percent of their employees because they're not making money because nobody's even going on their 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.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  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. So like all the right now, all the sponsorship goes right up to my dependencies. And if there's more, I wanna like.

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  Buy my contributor 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 ten and twenty K a month.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  Which is fine, and I'm sure over time I could get it done.

• 2:31:55Speaker 01

  OpenAI is helping out a little bit with tokens now, and there's other companies that have been generous. But yeah, still losing money on that. So that's, that's one path I consider, but I'm just not very excited. And then there's all the big labs that I've been talking to. And from those, um, Meta and OpenAI seem the most interesting. Do you lean one way or the other? Uh, yeah.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  I'm

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  not sure much I should share there. It's not quite finalized yet.

• 2:32:44Speaker 01

  Let's, let's just say like,

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  on either of these, my condition is that the project stays open source. That it, maybe it's gonna be a model like Chrome and Chromium.

• 2:33:01Speaker 01

  I think this is, this is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs. It, this is, and we didn't even talk about the whole community part, but like the, the thing that I experienced in San Francisco, like at Clock on, seeing so many people so inspired, like, and having fun and just like building shit. And like having like robots in 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 ten, fifteen years. And there were a lot of high caliber people there, like,

• 2:33:45Speaker 01

  I was amazed. I also like was very sensibly overloaded because too many people wanted to do selfies. But

• 2:33:54Speaker 01

  I love this. Like, this needs to stay a place where people can like hack and learn.

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  But also, I'm very excited to like,

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people. Because I think this is the personal agents and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs.

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  And I also, on a personal level, I never worked at a large company. And I'm intrigued.

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  You know, we talk about experiences. Will I like it? I don't know.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  But I want that experience. I'm sure like if I, if I announce this, then there will be people like, oh, it's sold out, blah, blah, blah. But

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  the project will continue. From everything I talked to so far, I can even have more resources for that. Like both, both of those

• 2:35:04Speaker 01

  companies understand the value that I created something that accelerates our timeline. And that got people excited about AI.

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  I mean, can you imagine like I installed OpenClaw on one of my, I'm sorry, normie friends. I'm sorry, Bahan.

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  But he's just, you know, like he's

• 2:35:25Lex Fridman?

  Normie with love, yeah.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  He, he, like someone who uses the computer, but never really, like yeah, use some chat GPT sometimes, but not very technical. Wouldn't really understand what I built. So like,

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  I'll show you and I, I paid for him the, the ninety buck, a hundred buck, I don't know, subscription for Intropic.

• 2:35:50Speaker 01

  And set up everything for him with like VWSL, Windows. I was curious, would it actually work on Windows, you know, it was a little early.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  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 two hundred dollar subscription. Oh, Euros, because he's in Austria. And he was in love with that thing. That for me was like a very early product validation. It's like, I built something that captures people.

• 2:36:27Speaker 01

  And then a few days later, Entropic blocked him. Because based on their rules, um.

• 2:36:36Speaker 01

  Using the subscription is problematic or whatever.

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  And he was like devastated. And then he signed up for Minimax for ten bucks a month and uses that.

• 2:36:48Speaker 01

  And I think that's silly in many ways. Because you just got a two hundred 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 gonna be cloud code? Probably not, you know, like. That seems very, it seems very short sighted to lock down your product so much. All the other companies have been helpful, I mean, it's like of.

• 2:37:20Speaker 01

  Of most of the big labs, can everybody understands that we are still in era of exploration? In the area of. The radio show is on TV and not.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  And not a modern TV show that fully uses the format.

• 2:37:37Lex Fridman?

  I think, I think you've made a lot of people. Like see the possibility and non, sorry, non, non technical people see the possibility of AI and just fall in love with this idea and. Enjoy interacting with AI and it's a, it's a really beautiful thing. I think I also speak for a lot of people and saying.

• 2:37:58Lex Fridman?

  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're describing, having open source part and you being part of, uh.

• 2:38:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, also building a thing inside additionally of a large company. Would be great because it's great to have good people in those companies.

• 2:38:28Speaker 01

  We 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.

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  I have so many ideas, some should be there, some would be much better fitted. When I have access to. The latest toys.

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  And I kind of wanna have access to like the latest toys.

• 2:38:59Speaker 01

  So this is important, this is cool, this will continue to exist. My, my short-term focus is like working through those. Is it two, is it three thousand P R S now, I don't even know. Like there's, there's a little backlog.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  But this is not gonna be the thing that I'm gonna work until I'm, I'm, I'm eighty. You know, this is, this is a window to the future. You're gonna make this into a cool product.

• 2:39:26Speaker 01

  But yeah, I have like, I have more ideas.

• 2:39:29Lex Fridman?

  If you had to pick, is there a company you lean, so Meta, OpenAI, is there one you lean towards going with?

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  I spent time with both of those. And it's funny because a few weeks ago, I, I didn't consider any of this.

• 2:39:51Speaker 01

  And it's really fucking hard.

• 2:39:57Speaker 01

  Like.

• 2:39:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  I have some, I know a lot of people at OpenAI. I love their tech. I think I'm the biggest Codex advertisement shield that's unpaid. And it would feel so gratifying to like, put a price on all the work I did for free.

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  And I would love if something happens and those companies get just merged. Cause it's like.

• 2:40:25Lex Fridman?

  Is this the hardest decision you've ever had to do?

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  Nah, you know, I had some breakups in the past that feel like at the same level.

• 2:40:36Lex Fridman?

  Relationships, you mean?

• 2:40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:40Speaker 01

  Uh, and I also know that in the end, they're both amazing. I cannot go wrong. It's like, it's like one of the most prestigious and, and, and, and largest, I mean the largest, but like. They're both very cool companies.

• 2:40:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they both really know scale. So if you're thinking about impact, some of the wonderful technologies you've been exploring, how to do it securely and how to do it at scale such that you can have a positive impact on a large number of people, they both understand that.

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  You know, both Matt and Mark basically played all week with my product and sent me like, oh, this is great, oh, this is shit, oh, I need to change this, or like funny 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.

• 2:41:47Speaker 01

  I got, I got this amount of stuff that I find really cool and they lure me with.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  I cannot tell the exact number because of, uh, and yeah, but you can, you can be creative and, and think of the Cerebro steel and how that would translate into speed.

• 2:42:11Speaker 01

  And that was very intriguing, you know, like you give me source hammer, yeah.

• 2:42:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:21Speaker 01

  Been lured with tokens.

• 2:42:25Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 2:42:27Lex Fridman?

  So it, it's funny. So, so Mark's sort of tinkering with the thing, essentially having fun with the thing.

• 2:42:33Speaker 01

  He got, he, like, when he first, when they first approached me, I got him in my, in my WhatsApp and he was asking, yeah, when you have a call? And I'm like, I don't like calendar entries, let's just call now. And it was like, yeah, give me 10 minutes, I need to finish coding. Well, I guess that gives you street cred, it's like, oh, like, he's still writing code. You know, he's, he didn't drift away in just being a manager, he gets me. That was a good first start. And then I think we had a, like a 10 minute fight, what's better, Claude Code or Codex?

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  Like that's the thing you first do, like casually call

• 2:43:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  Someone with like the that owns one of the largest companies in the world and and you have a 10 minutes conversation about that.

• 2:43:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:23Speaker 01

  Uh, and then I think afterwards he called me eccentric, but brilliant.

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  But I also had some, I had some really, really cool discussion with Sam Altman. Uh, and he's, he's very thoughtful, um,

• 2:43:45Speaker 01

  brilliant.

• 2:43:48Speaker 01

  And

• 2:43:53Speaker 01

  I like him a lot from the, from the little time I had, yeah. I mean, I know some people will if I both of those people.

• 2:44:05Speaker 01

  I don't think it's fair.

• 2:44:08Lex Fridman?

  I think no matter what the stuff you're building and the kind of human you are,

• 2:44:14Lex Fridman?

  doing stuff at scale is kind of awesome. I'm excited.

• 2:44:17Speaker 01

  I am super pumped. And you know, the beauty is if,

• 2:44:25Speaker 01

  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 fuck. I

• 2:44:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  I mean, of course, of course, it's a nice compliment, but I wanna have fun and have impact. And that's ultimately what

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  made my decision.

• 2:44:51Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you about, we've talked about it quite a bit, but maybe just zooming out about how OpenClaw 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 lives.

• 2:45:18Speaker 01

  The, it's like the hello world in AI, you know, and it's actually quite simple. And it, it's good to understand that. That stuff's not magic. You can even easily build it yourself. So writing your own little Claude code. I even did this at a conference in Paris for people to like introduce them to AI. I think it's a has a fun little practice.

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  And you you covered a lot, I think. One. One silly idea I had that turned out to be quite cool is.

• 2:45:55Speaker 01

  I built this thing. With full system access. So it's like, you know, with great power becomes great responsibility. And I was like, how can I up the stakes a little bit more?

• 2:46:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  And I just made a I made it proactive. So I added a prompt. Initially, it was just a prompt surprise me. I really like half an hour. Surprise me, you know? And later on, I changed it to be like a little more specific and in the definition of surprise.

• 2:46:27Speaker 01

  But the fact that I made it proactive and that it knows you and as it cares about you. It's at least it's programmed to that prompted to do that.

• 2:46:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:47:09Lex Fridman?

  By the way, we're we're talking about heartbeat. As you mentioned, the thing that regularly.

• 2:47:15Lex Fridman?

  Acts.

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  You just kick off the loop.

• 2:47:18Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that just a cron job, man?

• 2:47:20Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:47:22Lex Fridman?

  The criticisms that you get.

• 2:47:24Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 2:47:34Lex Fridman?

  Isn't love just evolutionary biology manifesting itself? And isn't, aren't you guys just using each other?

• 2:47:41Peter Steinberger?

  And yeah, 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?

• 2:47:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:53Peter Steinberger?

  I found it surprising where I had this, 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 had the operation and it checked up on me. It's like, are you okay?

• 2:48:11Peter Steinberger?

  And I just, it's like, again, apparently like if something significance in the context that triggered the heartbeat, when it rarely used the heartbeat.

• 2:48:23Peter Steinberger?

  And it does that sometimes for people and that just makes it a lot more relatable.

• 2:48:29Lex Fridman?

  Let me look this up on perplexity, how OpenCall works, just to see if I'm missing any of the stuff. Local agent runtime, high level architecture, this, 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.

• 2:48:47Peter Steinberger?

  You know, you know what I love?

• 2:48:50Peter Steinberger?

  That half a year ago, like everyone was talking about MCPs.

• 2:48:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:55Peter Steinberger?

  And I was like, screw MCPs.

• 2:48:59Peter Steinberger?

  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. So my approach is.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  If you wanna 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 didn't really care about skills, but skills are actually perfect for that because they boil down to a single sentence that explains the skill. And then the model loads the skill and that explains the CLI. And then the model uses the CLI.

• 2:50:03Speaker 01

  Some skills are like raw, but most of the time, it works.

• 2:50:09Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting. I'm asking perplexity MCP versus skills because this kind of requires a hot take that's quite recent. Because your general view is MCPs are dead-ish. So MCPs is a more structured thing. So if you listen to perplexity here, MCP is what can I reach? So APIs, database, services, files via protocol. So a structured protocol of how you communicate with the thing. And then skills is more, how should I work? Procedures, hostile helper scripts and prompts often written in a kind of semi-structured, natural language, right? And so technically, skills could replace MCP if you have a smart enough model.

• 2:50:52Speaker 01

  I think the main beauty is that models are really good at calling Unix commands. So if you just add another CLI, that's just another Unix command in the end. And MCPs, that has to be added in training. That's not a very natural thing for the model. It requires a very specific syntax. And the biggest thing, it's not composable. 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.

• 2:51:36Speaker 01

  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 J Q 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 exact output. And the more, and you have no context pollution. Again, you can solve that with like subagents and more charades, but it's just like workarounds for something that

• 2:52:16Speaker 01

  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. Um, but this, this inherent problem that MCPs by default clutter up your context.

• 2:52:39Speaker 01

  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 uh Playwright, for example, that requires state and it's actually useful that

• 2:52:56Speaker 01

  is an acceptable choice.

• 2:52:58Lex Fridman?

  So Playwright used for browser use, which I think is already in open clause, quite incredible, right?

• 2:53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:04Lex Fridman?

  You can basically do everything, most things you could think of using browser use.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  That that gets into the whole art 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.

• 2:53:28Speaker 01

  You know, like I I had a I built a CLI for Twitter. I mean, I I just reverse engineered a website and used the internal API, which is not very allowed.

• 2:53:43Lex Fridman?

  It's called Bird, short-lived.

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  It was called Bird because the bird had to disappear.

• 2:53:49Lex Fridman?

  The the wings were clipped.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  All they did is they just made access slower. Yeah, I'm not like, 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 the 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 ticking. 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 in the browser, it is API. It's a slow API.

• 2:54:28Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:39Lex Fridman?

  But in so doing, they're cutting off like a million different use cases for smaller developers that actually want to use it for helpful, cool stuff.

• 2:54:47Speaker 01

  I think if you have a very low

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  per day baseline per account that allows read-only access would solve a lot of problems. There's plenty, plenty of automations where people create a bookmark and then use OpenClaw 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.

• 2:55:18Lex Fridman?

  So read-only access for the bookmarks you make on X, that seems like an incredible application because a lot of us find a lot of cool stuff on X with bookmarks. That's the general process of X. It's like, holy shit, this is awesome. Oftentimes, you bookmark so many things, you never look back at them. It would be nice to have tooling that organizes them and allows you to research your.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:55:54Speaker 01

  But I hope that.

• 2:55:56Speaker 01

  This woke up the teen a little bit that there is a need. And if all you do is making it slower, you're just reducing access to your platform. I'm sure there's a better way. I also, I'm very much against any automation on Twitter. If you tweeted me with AI, I will block you. No first strike. As soon as it smells like AI, and AI still has a smell. Especially on tweets, it's very hard to tweet in a way that does look completely human. And then I block, like I have a zero tolerance policy on that.

• 2:56:36Speaker 01

  And I think it would be very helpful if they, if like tweets done via API would be marked. Maybe there's some special cases where, but, and there should be, there should be a very easy way for agents to get their own Twitter account.

• 2:56:59Speaker 01

  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're doing stuff on my behalf and it's not me. Because content is now so cheap.

• 2:57:23Speaker 01

  Eyeballs are the expensive part. And I find it very triggering when I read something and then I'm like, oh, no, this smells like AI.

• 2:57:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:36Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:57:50Lex Fridman?

  To accomplish different tasks, to learn about different things. But we won't value online interaction because there'll be so much

• 2:58:01Lex Fridman?

  AI slop that smells and so many bots that it's difficult.

• 2:58:08Speaker 01

  Well, if it's marked, then it should be difficult to filter. And then I can look at it if I want to. But yeah, this is like a big thing we need to solve right now.

• 2:58:21Speaker 01

  Especially on this project, I get so many emails that are, let's say nicely, agenty-kyly written.

• 2:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:29Speaker 01

  But I much rather read your broken English than your AI slop. You know, of course, there's a human behind it. And yeah, they they prompted, I much rather read your prompts than what came out.

• 2:58:45Speaker 01

  I think we're reaching a point where I value typos again.

• 2:58:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:52Speaker 01

  Like, you know, I I mean, I also took my while to like come to the realization. I on my blog, I experimented with creating a blog post with agents. And 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 use the I as a fix my worst typos.

• 2:59:37Speaker 01

  But

• 2:59:40Speaker 01

  there's value in.

• 2:59:43Peter Steinberger?

  The rough parts of an actual human.

• 2:59:46Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that awesome? Isn't that beautiful? That now because of AI, we value the raw humanity in each of us more.

• 2:59:54Peter Steinberger?

  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.

• 3:00:05Lex Fridman?

  Right? Yeah.

• 3:00:06Peter Steinberger?

  Also documentation, still fine with AI, you know, better than nothing.

• 3:00:10Lex Fridman?

  And for now, it's still in, in applies in the, in the visual medium too.

• 3:00:15Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating how allergic I am to even a little bit of AI slop in the, in video and images. It's useful. It's nice if it's like a little component of like.

• 3:00:25Peter Steinberger?

  Or even, even those images, like all these infographics and stuff, they, they trigger me so hard. Like it immediately makes me think less of your content. And it, they were novel for like one week and now it just screams slop.

• 3:00:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:43Peter Steinberger?

  Even, even if people work hard on it, using, and I have some on my blog post, 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 the AI slop by.

• 3:00:59Lex Fridman?

  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 of weeks. And now I look at those and I feel like I feel when I look at Comic Sans as a font or, or something like this. It's like, no, this is, this is fake. It's fraudulent. There's something wrong with it.

• 3:01:33Peter Steinberger?

  It's a smell.

• 3:01:35Lex Fridman?

  It's a smell. And it's awesome because it reminds you that we know there's so much to humans that's amazing and we know 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 um somehow altered to where it's no longer human. So.

• 3:02:09Lex Fridman?

  Uh, I need a bathroom break, quick pause. You mentioned that a lot of the apps might be basically made obsolete. You think agents will just transform the entire app market?

• 3:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:26Speaker 01

  I noticed that on Discord, the 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, or Brisket's in Austin.

• 3:02:50Lex Fridman?

  There's no bad decisions around Brisket's, but yeah.

• 3:02:52Speaker 01

  No, that's the best decision, honestly.

• 3:02:56Lex Fridman?

  Your agent should know that.

• 3:02:57Speaker 01

  But it can like, it can modify my, my gym workout based on how well I slept. Or if I'm, if I stress or not, like it has so much more context to make even better decisions than any of this app even could do.

• 3:03:12Speaker 01

  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 got to tell the, cause tell the agent to? No, the agent already knows where I am, so I can like turn off what I don't use.

• 3:03:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:03:52Lex Fridman?

  I think you said somewhere that it might kill off eighty percent of apps.

• 3:03:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:57Lex Fridman?

  Don't you think that's a gigantic transformative effect on just all software development? That that means it might kill off a lot of software companies.

• 3:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:09Lex Fridman?

  It's a scary thing. So like, do you think about the impact that has on the economy?

• 3:04:16Lex Fridman?

  On um, just the ripple effects it has to society transforming.

• 3:04:22Lex Fridman?

  Who builds what tooling? It empowers a lot of users to get stuff done, to get stuff more efficiently, to get it done cheaper.

• 3:04:34Speaker 01

  So some new services that we will need, right? For example, I want my agent to have an allowance. Like you solve problems for me, he has like a hundred bucks in order to solve problems for me. And if I tell it to order me food, maybe it uses a service, maybe it uses something like Rent a Human. So I just get that done for me. I don't actually care. I care about solve my problem. There's space for for new companies that solve that well. Maybe not all apps disappear, maybe some transform into being API.

• 3:05:14Lex Fridman?

  So basically, apps that rapidly transform in being agent facing.

• 3:05:23Lex Fridman?

  So there's a real opportunity for like Uber Eats that we just used earlier today. It's companies like this, of which there's many.

• 3:05:34Lex Fridman?

  Who gets there fastest to being able to interact with Open Claw in a way? That's the most natural, the easiest.

• 3:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also

• 3:05:46Speaker 01

  apps will become API if they want or not, because my agent can figure out how to use my phone. I mean, on the Apple side, it's a little more tricky. On Android, 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 an API that can cause it's faster.

• 3:06:12Speaker 01

  I think there'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. I mean, we are 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?

• 3:06:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:06:50Lex Fridman?

  So it's gonna 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.

• 3:07:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, some companies will really not like that. For example, there's no CLI for Google. So I had to like, to have to do anything myself and build Gorg, that's like a CLI for Google. And at the, yeah, at the end user, they have to give me the emails because otherwise I cannot use their product. 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 the 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.

• 3:07:47Speaker 01

  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 that way.

• 3:08:10Lex Fridman?

  To browsers.

• 3:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I watched my agent happily clicked the I'm not a robot button.

• 3:08:18Speaker 01

  And there's this, this whole, that's gonna be, that's gonna be more heated. You see companies like Cloudflare that try to prevent bot access. And in some ways, that's useful for scraping. But in other ways, if I'm, I'm a personal user, I want that. You know, sometimes I, I use Codex and I, I read an article about modern React patterns.

• 3:08:48Speaker 01

  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 learned that maybe I don't click on Medium because it's annoying. And I use other websites that actually are agent friendly. So.

• 3:09:06Lex Fridman?

  There's gonna 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 gonna completely change of how we interact with services with with web. And so like there's companies at Google, they're gonna push back. I mean, there's every major companies you could think of is gonna push back.

• 3:09:32Speaker 01

  Even, yeah, even search. I now use, I think perplexity or brave as providers because Google really doesn't make it easy to use Google. Without Google. I'm not sure if that's the right strategy, but I'm not Google.

• 3:09:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a nice balance from a big company perspective. Cause if you push back too much for too long, you become blockbuster and you lose everything to the Netflix's of the world. But some pushback is probably good during a revolution to see.

• 3:10:03Speaker 01

  But you see that like this is something that the people want.

• 3:10:07Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:10:07Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:10:08Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:10:09Speaker 01

  If I'm on the go. I don't wanna open a calendar app. I just, I wanna tell my agent, hey, 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, I 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're, the right companies will find ways to jump on the train and other companies will.

• 3:10:46Speaker 01

  Parrish.

• 3:10:47Lex Fridman?

  You gotta listen to what the people want. We talked about programming quite a bit and a lot of folks that are developers are really worried about their jobs, about their, about the future of programming. Do you think AI replaces programmers completely, human programmers?

• 3:11:04Speaker 01

  I mean, we're definitely going in that direction. Programming is just a part of building products.

• 3:11:13Speaker 01

  So maybe, maybe I does replace programmers eventually. But there's so much more to that art. Like, what do you actually wanna build? How should it feel?

• 3:11:28Speaker 01

  How's the architecture? I don't think agents will replace all of that. Yeah, like just the, the actual art of programming. It will, it will stay there, but it's, it's gonna 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.

• 3:12:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:12:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:13:13Speaker 01

  Stupidly high amounts.

• 3:13:16Speaker 01

  And then we'll 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

• 3:13:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:13:43Speaker 01

  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

• 3:14:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:14:32Lex Fridman?

  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 you 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. Man, Emacs.

• 3:15:10Lex Fridman?

  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. To have that completely replaced is painful, is truly painful. But I also think programmers, builders more broadly, but what is, what is the act of programming? I think programmers are generally best equipped at this moment in history

• 3:15:53Lex Fridman?

  to learn the language, to empathize with agents, to learn the language of agents, to feel the CLI. Yeah. Like, like to understand what is the thing you need, you, the agent, need to do this task the best.

• 3:16:14Speaker 01

  I think at some point it's just gonna be called coding again and it's just gonna be the new normal.

• 3:16:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, it's just.

• 3:16:29Lex Fridman?

  You'll still be a programmer. It's just the activity of a programmer is different.

• 3:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and because on X, the bubble, I mean, is mostly positive on Mastodon and Blue Sky. I don't, I also use it less because oftentimes I got attacked for my blog posts. And I, I had stronger reactions in the past. Now I can sympathize with those people more because in a way I get it. It, in a way I also don't get it because it's very unfair to

• 3:17:02Speaker 01

  grab onto the person that you see right now and unload all your fear and hate. It's gonna be a change, it's gonna be challenging, but it's also, I don't know, I find it incredibly fun 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.

• 3:17:31Speaker 01

  The default is now so much easier, so

• 3:17:36Speaker 01

  software is changing in many ways. There's gonna be a lot more.

• 3:17:41Speaker 01

  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 state of AI and my whole motivation was to push people away from, "Don't see yourself as an iOS developer anymore, you're a builder." And you can use your skills in many more ways, also because apps are slowly going away. People didn't like that. Like, a lot of people didn't like what I had to say. And I don't think I was hyperbole. I was just like, "This is how I see the future." Maybe this is not how it's going to be, but I'm pretty sure a version of that will happen.

• 3:18:23Speaker 01

  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 give one burger per month, that compensates the CO2 output or like the water use

• 3:18:43Speaker 01

  in equivalent of tokens. I mean, the math is tricky and it depends if you add pre-training, then maybe it's more than just one penny. But it's not off by a factor of a hundred, you know? So, so the, well, like golf is still using way more water than all data centers together. So are you also hating people that play golf? Those people grab on anything that they think is bad about AI, without seeing the potential things that might be good about AI. And I'm not saying everything's good. It's certainly gonna be.

• 3:19:22Speaker 01

  A very transformative technology for our society.

• 3:19:25Lex Fridman?

  There is, to steel man, the criticism in general. I do want to say in my experience of Silicon Valley, there's a bit of a bubble in the sense that there's a kind of excitement and an over-focus about the positive that the technology can bring.

• 3:19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:19:47Lex Fridman?

  And which is great. It's great to focus on not to be paralyzed by fear and fear-mongering and so on. But there's also, within that excitement and within everybody talking just to each other, there's a dismissal of the basic human experience across the United States and the Midwest, across the world, including the programmers we mentioned, including all the people that are going to lose their jobs, including the measurable pain and suffering that happens at the short-term scale when there's change of any kind, especially large-scale transformative change that we're about to face if what we're talking about will materialize. And so having a bit of that humility and awareness

• 3:20:31Lex Fridman?

  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

• 3:20:48Lex Fridman?

  often of respect for the pain that is going to be felt. And so not enough of that is, I think, done. So it's good to have a bit of that.

• 3:21:00Speaker 01

  And then I also have to put against some of the emails I got where people told me they have a small business and they've been struggling and OpenClaw helped them automate a few of the tedious tasks from collecting invoices to like answering customer emails that then freed them up and like. Cost them a bit more joy in their life. Or or some emails where they told me that Open Claw helped a disabled daughter. 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.

• 3:21:43Speaker 01

  But I made it a lot easier and more accessible. And that did show people the possibilities that they previously wouldn't see. And now they apply it for good. Or like also the fact that, yes, I I suggested 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 Kimi or other other other models that are way more accessible price wise and still have a very powerful system that might otherwise not be possible. Because other things like, I don't know, Entropics cowork is locked in into their space.

• 3:22:27Speaker 01

  So it's not a lot of black and white. I got a lot of emails that were heartwarming and amazing. And and I know it just made me really happy.

• 3:22:40Lex Fridman?

  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 beautiful to see. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on? A human civilization.

• 3:22:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I inspire so many people. There's like, there's this whole builder vibe again. People are now

• 3:23:07Speaker 01

  using AI in a more playful way and are discovering

• 3:23:13Speaker 01

  what it can do and how it can like help them in their life. And

• 3:23:20Speaker 01

  Creating new places that are just sprawling of creativity. I don't know, like there's like Klocken in Vienna. There's like 500 people. And there's such a high percentage of people that I want to present, which is to me really surprising because usually it's quite hard to find people that want to like, talk about what they built. And now it's there's an abundance. So that gives me hope that we can, we can figure shit out.

• 3:23:53Lex Fridman?

  And it makes it accessible to basically everybody.

• 3:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23:58Lex Fridman?

  Just imagine all these people building, especially as you make it simpler and simpler, more secure. It's like anybody who has ideas and can express those ideas in language can build. It's crazy.

• 3:24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's ultimately part of the people. And one of the beauty, the beautiful things that come out of AI, not just, not just a slop generator.

• 3:24:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, Mr. Clawfather, I just realized when I said that in the beginning, I violated two trademarks because there's also the Godfather. I'm getting sued by everybody. You're a wonderful human being. You've created something really special, a special community, a special product, a special set of ideas, plus the entire, the humor, the good vibes, the inspiration of all these people building, the excitement to build. So I'm truly grateful for everything you've been doing and for who you are and for sitting down to talk with me today. Thank you, brother.

• 3:25:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for giving me the chance to tell my story.

• 3:25:10Lex Fridman?

  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.