jimboot

I think I finally figured out why OpenClaw is amazing and took off like wild fire and why Peter is a genius, as Altman called him. And it's actually a different way of looking at it. It's not a DeepSeek moment for agents. It's a Napster moment. And just like Napster it will eventually force the industry to change. In essence when Napster came out the entire world told the music industry we don't want to buy CDs anymore and if you don't provide us a digital download experience we are just going to take it until you do. It forced the industry to create Apple Music and eventually Spotify. Both essentially killed most music piracy by making it ubiquitous and cheap and good. But it forced change. The same will now happen to software. Here's why: In essence OpenClaw lets you take what vendors don't want to give you: Unified access to countless applications. We all want a personal assistant that can talk to freaking everything and do anything for us in the digital world. But vendors don't want this. They want you locked into their bullshit. For example, none of the messaging platforms want bots on there. None. They all have explicit policies against them and make it hard to do this. WhatsApp doesn't want you on there. Signal. Telegram's bot father is garbage. It's all designed to keep bots out. They were designed for a pre-agentic era when bot = spam. Many other things are like this. The API layers are gated, hoop-jumping bullshit. Go get an enterprise account and wait for approval and yada yada. Want access to WhatsApp? Get a business account and attach a number (what small business has a real number anymore 😂) and messages can't come from a person, etc. Google ads? It's not just an auth, it's go get a special manager account and create an enterprise key and blah blah blah. It's a horrible experience because it was all designed for corporations to control access. Now people are saying, make your app easy to access and accessible to me and my machine avatars and do it in a headless way or you will be dead. Peter hacked around all this by making everything command line in the classic Linux style and using things like an open source library that reverse engineered the web version of WhatsApp. It's all a bit house-of-cards-y because he had no choice. At my company we had a similar idea early (and failed). Basically we wanted to make the best multimodal/computer using model because then it doesn't need an API or access hoops. You just go through the human interface layer and ain't nobody going to stop you. We failed because we weren't big enough and it's really a job for the mega-labs to solve because it is a hard problem and costs a shit ton of money. Peter was much smarter. Make it all command line because that is ready now. Use any reverse engineered library or project or proxy available come Hell or high water and make it work by any means necessary even if it is hacky. In short, he signaled to the software world that they better change and change fast or we are going to do this anyway and you can't stop us. Of course some are foolishly trying. Meta is banning Claws on WhatsApp, etc. They will all try to build their own gated, controlled, enshittified version of this thing. They will fail. And eventually everyone will offer a clear, easy way to get access via API for agents or they will be gone. In essence OpenClaw gave people what they wanted, which was an app connected to everything, even when most of the vendors don't want you to have this.