Ryan Eade

Spent a week trying to replace my OpenClaw setup with nothing but native Claude. VentureBeat called March's updates "an OpenClaw killer." They weren't wrong. They also weren't right. Full breakdown (with the actual setup tutorial): focusoverfeatures.substack.com/p/how-close-ca…

My verdict: Claude Code's new stack gets you 70-80% of the way to an always-on agent. For a lot of people, that's enough. But "doing what you told it" and "paying attention" are different things. Full breakdown, including the setup tutorial: open.substack.com/pub/focusoverf…

VentureBeat called Claude's March updates "an OpenClaw killer." So I spent a week trying to kill my own setup. Channels. Dispatch. Scheduled tasks. Voice mode. Computer Use. Here's the honest verdict, including where it surprised me and where it fell flat.🧵

Day 6 was the tell. My Claude Code loops ran exactly what I told them to. Checked email, flagged things, did their job. My OpenClaw assistant would've also noticed I had a medical appointment tomorrow, cross-referenced the weather, and suggested leaving early. Nobody told it to do that. It just paid attention.

I feel like I’ve said the word pivot more in the last few months than I have my entire career. It also reinforces why trying the surf the edge of the wave feels like table stakes; although I feel like that really depends on your customer and ChatPRD customers a much more on the front end of AI than other segments.

Let me tell you what I LOVE about running @chatprd — I am forced to stay on the knife’s edge of what’s coming. Cancellations start to tick up citing Claude Code? OK - we need to rethink of agent strategy. No longer completing against chatGPT, but in house builds? Cool, what can I imagine that’s better. Bootstrapped, no excuses, no delusions. Hard but WORTH IT.

hate to say I told you so

Hot take I never thought I'd have: microservices might be worth the overhead again. Not for scale... for safety. AI agents need smaller codebases with smaller blast radiuses. That's the new reason to decompose a monolith. More on this soon...

Everyone wants to skip to always-on AI agents. But I've watched people try. It's like warping from World 1 to World 8 in Mario; you show up with no power-ups and no idea what you're doing. After months running a 24/7 agent, here's the progression that actually works: 🍄 Level 1 — Chat with real context (not search queries) ⭐ Level 2 — Persistent context (Claude Projects, Gems) 🔥 Level 3 — AI doing real work (Cowork, Claude Code) 👑 Level 4 — Always-on agents (OpenClaw, 24/7) The secret: each level is valuable on its own. You get compounding returns the whole way up. A PM who masters Level 2 already has a superpower most peers don't know exists. Don't warp pipe. Play the levels. Full breakdown with actionable next steps for each level 👇 open.substack.com/pub/focusoverf…

I’m writing about how to focus on productivity and upping your game with AI. Follow along at focusoverfeatures.substack.com

Everyone wants to skip to always-on AI agents. OpenClaw is everywhere. But warping from World 1 to World 8 in Mario never ended well. You'd show up with no power-ups, no extra lives, and no idea how to dodge a Hammer Bro. Same thing with AI tools. 🍄 World 1: Chatting with ChatGPT ⭐ World 2: Custom instructions + context 🔥 World 3: AI doing real work alongside you 👑 World 4: Always-on agents working 24/7 Most people asking me about agents are in World 1 trying to warp to World 4. You can, but you'll struggle. The skills compound. If you're in World 1 or 2, you're not behind. You're exactly where you should be. 🎮 No warp pipes. Just power-ups.

@adahstwt 1% until auto compaction

I'm a vibe coder, scare me with one word.

Most people use AI as a faster pair programmer. That's Mode 1. Mode 2 is when you define the work, go to bed, and wake up to working software on staging. The agent built it at 2am. I wrote about both: focusoverfeatures.substack.com/p/beyond-the-c…

AI tools are like Lego pieces. There are thousands of them, some wildly specialized. But most great sets use the basics plus a couple unique ones. You don't need every piece. You need imagination, confidence, and a customer worth building for. Stop collecting. Start building.

@johnwires @NickSpisak_ Haha, I did the same, but with Parks & Rec characters.

@NickSpisak_ I did this but to keep things familiar, I named all the agents characters from the office. Michael Scott is my CEO. Dwight my dev, Pam my designer, Kelly my social media person, etc.

The best AI coding workflow I've found: when context gets low, have the agent write its own handoff prompt, then clear and restart. Beats auto-compaction every time. We're basically teaching AI to save its own game state.

Persistent coding agents are great. But my OpenClaw agent does something none of them do. It notices when I'm the blocker and calls me out. Sometimes it just pushes past me and asks me to review later. Two months in and it's made me faster at the only thing that matters, which is making decisions.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm deep in the AI agent rabbit hole. Got to demo it live on @retailgentic with @scotwingo. Full agentic checkout, product comparison across stores, and the sci-fi moment: Meta Ray-Ban glasses that see a product and find the best price instantly. 📷 retailgentic.transistor.fm/episodes/openc…

My setup is simple on purpose. Task board, memory files, tools. When I'm fiddling with the workflow more than using it, that's my cue to stop. The workflow serves the product.

@clairevo wrote a great thread about companies that aren't moving fast enough with AI. But there's a flip side: individuals who are moving so fast on the tooling that they forgot what they sat down to build in the first place.

Reddit is full of people showing off elaborate AI agent pipelines and prompt chains. Everyone's showing their workflow. Nobody's showing what it produced.