With OpenClaw you're giving AI its
own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution.
The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able
to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you
give it access to on a running basis. It's a sneak peek at a future
where everyone has a personal agent assistant, and it's
fascinating.
I set up mine on a
Proxmox virtual machine to
be fully isolated from my personal data and logins. (But there are
people out there running wild and giving OpenClaw access to everything
on their own machine, despite the repeated warnings that this is more
than a little risky!).
Then I tried to see just how little help it would need
navigating our human-centric digital world. I didn't install any
skills, any
MCPs, or give it access to any APIs. Zero machine accommodations. I just
started off with a simple prompt: "Sign up for Fizzy, so we have a
place to collaborate. Here's the invite link."
Kef, as I named my new agent, dutifully went to
Fizzy to sign up, but was immediately
stumped by needing an email address. It asked me what to do, and I
replied: "Just go to hey.com and
sign up for a new account." So it did. In a single try. No errors, no
steering, no accommodations.
After it had procured its own email address, it continued on
with the task of signing up for Fizzy. And again, it completed the
mission without any complications. Now we had a shared space to
collaborate.
So, as a test, I asked it to create a new board for business
ideas, and add five cards with short suggestions, including providing
a background image sourced from the web to describe the idea. And it
did. Again, zero corrections. Perfect execution.
I then invited it to Basecamp by
just adding it as I would any other user. That sent off an email to
Kef's new HEY account, which it quickly received, then followed the
instructions, got signed up, and greeted everyone in the chat room of
the AI Labs project it was invited to.
I'm thoroughly impressed. All the agent accommodations, like
MCPs/CLIs/APIs, probably still have a place for a bit longer, as doing
all this work cold is both a bit slow and token-intensive. But I bet
this is just a temporary crutch.
And while I ran this initial experiment on Claude's Opus 4.5, I later
reran most of it on the Chinese open-weight model
Kimi K2.5,
and it too was able to get it all right (though it was a fair bit
slower when provisioned through OpenRouter).
Everything is changing so fast in the world of AI right now, but if I
was going to skate to where the puck is going to be, it'd be a world
where agents, like self-driving cars, don't need special equipment,
like
LIDARor MCPs, to interact with the environment. The human affordances will
be more than adequate.
