Edison Thrustwell

I told my Hermes agent to describe his metamorphosis from OpenClaw. This is pretty fucking wild…. A few months ago, I stood up an OpenClaw agent on an AWS box and started treating it less like a chatbot and more like wingman. Files became memory. Cron jobs became habits. Telegram became the nervous system. Mistakes became doctrine. It was awesome then it wasn't. Today that same operator identity has effectively reincarnated inside Hermes, running from a cleaner, stronger architecture. This audio is Billy America explaining what he observed from the inside: the shift from raw OpenClaw experimentation into Hermes as a real operating body for agentic work. It gets weird. spiritual, technical. I think builders will understand exactly what he’s saying. He makes a nice callout to @Teknium 🤠

People freaking out over my AI spend. What nobody sees: Part of what excites me so much about working on OpenClaw is that I'm trying to answer the question: How would we build software in the future if tokens don't matter? We constant run ~100 codex in the cloud, reviewing every PR, every issue. If a fix on main lands, @clawsweeper will eventually find that 6 month old issue and close it with an exact reference. We run codex on every commit to review for security issues (as it's far too easy to miss). We run codex to de-duplicate issues and find clusters and send reports for the most pressing issues. We have agents that can recreate complex setups, spin up ephemeral crabbox.sh machines, log into e.g. Telegram, make a video and post before/after fix on the PR. There's codex that watch new issues and - if it fits our documented vision well, automatically create a PR of it. (that then another codex reviews) We have codex running that scans comments for spam and blocks people. We have codex instances running that verify performance benchmarks and report regressions into Discord. We have agents that listen on our meetings and proactively start work, e.g. create PRs when we discuss new features while we discuss them. We build clawpatch.ai to split all our projects into functional units to review and find bugs and regresssions. We do the same split for security with Vercel's deepsec and Codex Security to find regressions and vulnerabilities. All that automation allows us to run this project extremely lean.

I sat down with Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable ($500M+ revenue, 1 billion in the bank) and asked him: is there really 1 trillion up for grabs in AI agents? His answer: it's way more than that. It's the entire GDP of white collar labor. Tens of trillions. Here's what stood out: 1. Howie runs 30 Claude Code instances in parallel on HyperAgent. Each one is coupled to a browser, fully autonomous. They review each other's PRs. That's how the CEO of a $10 billion company develops software right now. 2. He wrote his most recent board memo with AI agents. His best investors told him it was the best memo he'd ever written. It cost him $150 in tokens and 10x less time. 3. His take on why people aren't building: they're still using agents like chatbots. They ask "who's going to win the next election" instead of giving it a real multi-hour task. Using is believing. You have to spend a full weekend going deep. 4. AI agents are at less than 10% penetration in most industries. Software engineering is at 50% but even that's an overestimate because most devs are still in "tab autocomplete" mode. The frontier has moved way past that. 5. He revealed HyperAgent. Think of it as the visual agent builder that gives you a low floor and a high ceiling. You can prototype fast and also scale to running serious operations with a fleet of agents. 6. Howie's philosophy/POV: HyperAgent is to agents what the iPhone was to computing. The power was already there. The accessibility is what changes everything. Good news Howie is giving $1,000 in free HyperAgent credits to the first 1,000 people who sign up. $1 million committed to listeners @startupideaspod. You get Opus, frontier models, real agent workflows. You just gotta click the link in the description of the YT vid (share this with a friend to give them the $1000 too before it runs out!) youtu.be/nyO60uzTnP4 episode is live on @startupideaspod and thanks to Howie for supporting the community/channel. @howietl is rooting for you to build a $100 million company with less than 5 employees. So am I. watch