I started to write about OpenClaw and got as far as “the story so far on my past attempts to do some of what this is packaging up” before realizing there’s a certain kind of writing about tech that borders on making someone spend brunch listening to a meticulous retelling of last night’s stress dream. Since this blog is as much about me jotting down a few things for future reference as it is the benefit of others, I’m glad I stopped typing so I can just drop in a limited observation:
“The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine” remains the best expression of what I keep learning with each wave of “no, it’s different this time” with this stuff: OpenClaw addresses things I was trying to cobble together for myself in a coherent, intelligent, useful way that I personally do not have the wherewithal to build for myself; but the underlying tech on which it is built still requires scaffolding, kludges, and computationally expensive workarounds, and you still end up having to do work to get it to work.
It is a definite step forward. It’s a proof of concept that is a few steps closer to what I think a lot of us imagine when we talk about the possibilities of agentic AI. I really appreciate that it is a bit more proactive in its way around proposing and implementing tools that reduce the burden on me to craft hyper-specific prompts or continuously redirect it. But you’re still doing work to get it to work.
The religious rapture with which it is being greeted is not a comment on the technology. It is a comment on the narcissism the tech industry is goading us all into with these things.
My OpenClaw instance is operating in a personal Slack account, btw. I have a few channels set up where it provides slightly different kinds of assistance depending on context and the kind of help I need. I picked Slack because the integration picture is good with several tools I use. If OpenClaw can’t solve a problem with a tool it made, or if I need to make a quick update to state on a given piece of information, it’s a /command away with the appropriate integration. As I get ready to start a bake-off on agentic AI tools at work, this is helpful validation for a few ideas I have about where Slack fits into it all.
I gave Chrome’s new “run the browser with Gemini” feature a try with a pretty mundane task: Starting from my Amazon Kindle account, find and remove the samples from my library of 400+ Kindle documents.
It was an exercise in utter misery. Amazingly bad. I made it stop after watching it “think” for two minutes just to ask me four times before it would remove the first sample, at which point it said “well, this is a bad website so it’s understandable this was not a good idea.”
I mean, who knows what Amazon’s web team has done in its quest to thwart a few common workflows people use to automate Kindle management (and de-DRMing). It probably had a point.
“Let’s see in a year!”