Sam McKay

Been running OpenClaw for a week and honestly it's wild how much it just handles on its own

When tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Lovable emerged, most people saw them as new products. I saw them as signals. They weren’t the end state. They were the trigger for something much bigger. They lowered the capabilities required to build software. Once that happened, experimentation exploded. Internal tools replaced vendors. Small teams started shipping what used to require departments. That’s the real shift. And I still think we’re in the early innings here. In the last year the ease for anyone to work with code has become easier and easier.

This might sound counterintuitive, but I think we’re going to see more free software, not less. When building becomes cheap, the real constraint isn’t code it’s distribution. If you can build quickly and cheaply, giving the product away becomes a rational move. You capture attention. You embed into processes. You gather data. You position yourself around the outcome. The monetisation doesn’t disappear. It just moves outward into services, optimisation, performance-based pricing, and vertical solutions. In that world, software isn’t the product. It’s the entry point. There’s plenty of new opportunities here if you look close enough.

It's amazing to think my entire day is spent using agents now. This is the future. Once you start it's hard to do anything any other way. Honestly it's better work. You feel like you're achieving more, doing more and being more productive. I sit in Claude code for 3 to 4 hour sessions and it's unreal what can be achieved in that time. I even got OpenClaw (I call mine EDNAclaw now) to create a 20 page ebook on its source code the other day. Did it in about 5 minutes. Perfectly formatted, saved to my downloads folder on my computer. Wild times.

I set up my forked version of OpenClaw properly this past week. Cron running, browser access on, APIs wired in. I’ve even rebranded it and created a new UI that I like more. But wow it’s impressive. It just wakes up, checks things, pulls data, compares it, mades decisions, logs it, moves on. It’s working on a variety of tasks for me now without me having to do anything other than review the end output. No hand-holding. It just works so seamlessly. I’m now spending most of my time not “doing” work in the traditional sense, but designing the system, connecting the pieces, setting constraints, reviewing what the agents are doing. That’s basically my job now. It all started with Claude Code but it’s evolving even more now into almost all work, not just with code, that’s what OpenClaw is signalling to me. If this becomes standard inside organisations, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t, then a lot of what we call knowledge work today turns into managing and monitoring agents. More system design.

A lot of people assume SaaS companies are going to suddenly implode. I don’t think that’s how this plays out. I think what we’ll see is slower growth, more pricing pressure, longer sales cycles, and more internal rebuilds. When a customer can spin up a “good enough” version of your product using tools like Claude Code or Cursor in weeks instead of years, the negotiation dynamic changes. They don’t need to leave you immediately. But they don’t need you in the same way anymore either.

OpenClaw might not be the end destination, but it certainly is the new direction. This is the new wave of AI to be riding for sure, and I think it's going to change a lot quite quickly, even from what we've been used to over the last few years. One of the big insights for me is how many apps this actually takes away, or lowers the need for. You just need OpenClaw, the right skills, and the right API calls. It's also so wrapped around your daily workflow because you can access it so easily across all devices. It's not that simple to set up from my experience, but it still is wildly powerful once you can get it working.⁣

Could you imagine a world where you don’t open your computer to Windows at all? You open it to ChatGPT, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, maybe OpenClaw or some other new and exciting AI equivalent. That’s the first thing you see. The first place you think. The place where you decide what happens next. Honestly, I don’t think that’s a crazy idea anymore. When I look at how I actually work now, Windows feels like something I pass through, not something I use. It boots. It loads. And then it gets out of the way. The real interaction starts somewhere else. At the same time, Microsoft is still iterating on Windows itself. New updates. New layouts. New menus. All the usual OS work. And none of it really changes where my work begins. That’s what feels different this time. Previous operating systems won because they controlled the machine. This shift isn’t about machines. It’s about intent. Questions. Planning. Decisions. What do I do next. If an AI system becomes the place where that happens, the operating system underneath doesn’t disappear. It just stops being the center of gravity. It becomes infrastructure. That’s why this feels less like a product cycle and more like the early shape of a new operating layer forming, almost accidentally (or not), in front of us. And once people get used to starting there, it’s very hard to pull them back.

There's a lot of noise about the so-called SaaS apocalypse. And in one sense, it's real. But it's being framed wrong. Software isn't collapsing. It's expanding faster than ever. What's breaking is the old SaaS business model that belonged to another pre-AI era. Classic SaaS assumed software was expensive to build and hard to replace. That assumption is gone. AI has killed the cost curve. Rebuilding a "good enough" version of most tools can take weeks. Sometimes days. When that happens, pricing power disappears. Not because the product is bad. Because scarcity is gone. The real competitor now is “free”. Internal rebuilds. Open source clones. AI agents that quietly replace half a workflow. They don't crash revenue overnight. They erode margins, slow growth, and disrupt sales cycles. The business survives, but leverage fades. That's what traditional software companies are experiencing. Some will say why vibe code and manage a software when you can just buy it. This is true. But what you aren’t considering is a new company emerging where they vibe code a replica software. Give it away for free to everyone and monetise in some other way. This is what is going to happen. Creating and managing this new form of free software becomes more like a marketing and advertising cost. BTW this opportunity is open to any business really, but being small and nimble does help in this situation. Seat-based pricing is becoming harder to justify. It made sense when productivity scaled with people. But one person with agents can do the work of many. So what exactly is a seat now? In this world, free software becomes a weapon. It captures distribution, embeds into workflows, gathers data, and drives leverage. Monetisation moves around the software, not through it. The winners ahead will own workflows, tie pricing to outcomes, and behave like systems. Software isn't disappearing. It's becoming more powerful, more invisible, and more valuable.

OpenClaw is the real deal. AI personal assistants look like they are really arriving now. openclaw.ai Spent all day yesterday setting it up and seriously impressive. And it's open source and free (currently)! I'm a huge fan of Claude Code but this just feels more personal and more connected for a number of reasons. Highly recommend spending some time and seeing what it feels like when it's fully operational and connected to WhatsApp, Telegram and more.

I've been thinking a little more meta about where AI fits in the real world. What if one of the biggest opportunities isn't in software at all, but in the physical world, sitting quietly among the products we use every day? For decades, when we needed something, we went to a device. We searched. We typed. We went to Google. The pattern was so ingrained that we stopped questioning it. We just accepted that getting answers meant pulling out our phones or sitting down at a computer. But what if that first interaction, the moment when we encounter a product or face a problem or engage with the physical world around us, is driven by voice AI instead? What if the answer is already there, built into the thing itself? That feels more natural to me. It's how humans have always communicated. And it changes a lot about how we interact with the world. No more hunting through drawers for manuals that we can't find anyway. Fewer frustrating support calls where you're stuck in hold loops. Fewer reasons to abandon what you're doing and go searching on Google in the first place. Voice AI sitting inside the physical world, embedded in the products and spaces we inhabit every day, feels like a massive shift waiting to happen.

I think the best AI strategy right now is agile, bottom-up and sometimes messy. Not many people say that, and most software vendors definitely don't want you to believe it. But it's true. The biggest gains are coming from individuals experimenting, failing, and learning fast. The real movement isn't top-down. It's the Excel power users, the analysts, the curious ones building small automations and mini apps in tools like Lovable or Claude Code. That's where change is happening. AI is an individual empowerer. I've believed for a while that the future belongs to full-stack AI professionals, people who can use AI creatively to automate, build, and solve problems directly. Buying a single ChatGPT or Copilot subscription won't transform your business. Empowering your people to experiment with AI will.

I'm starting to believe that the operating system we all know today is on the verge of a massive shift. I find myself logging into my computer and skipping straight past Windows to open an AI environment instead. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor. These are becoming my starting points. They're intent-driven and feel more like the future of computing than the desktop itself. Microsoft is clearly trying to make Copilot the new platform, but it's not obvious who will win this race. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all building their own versions of what feels like an AI-first OS. And honestly, I think that's where we're heading. If you can work, write, and create entirely inside an AI interface, do we really need traditional apps anymore? Word and Excel start to feel like relics when you can just ask an AI to do the same thing in seconds. Even how we interact is changing. Typing and clicking might soon give way to talking and prompting. It feels like we're abstracting away from the old OS layer and stepping into a new, intelligent one. At this point, it honestly feels inevitable. The shift isn't coming someday in the distant future. It's already happening, and I think most of us are just starting to notice.

Last year was all about vibe coding. I think this year will be about building your own command center for work. Tools like Claude Code are making that possible. The shift is going to be huge. Based on what I’m working on already I can tell this will change how work gets done everywhere. It will be more disruptive to established tools than anything we’ve seen. You’ll wonder why you even need Excel, PowerPoint, expensive databases, various saas and much more. This change is so big expect every big tech player to pivot to this style of new operating system very fast.

Just a small bit of insight from my own experiences with Vibe-coded apps. They've certainly become a lot more real in the enterprise DNA ecosystem and the usage has gone up once we integrated them all under the same login. This was a small change in the recent months. It's just that ease of access that has made a huge difference. Something to think about with your own internal business apps that you're building - the more integrated they can become just from a logging-on and access point of view, the more useful and used they become.

I’ve been using Claude Code in incredible ways lately. It’s becoming my command centre for work. You can write scripts to connect APIs, run things locally, even manage emails. I built a full presentation inside Claude Code without leaving it once. It’s truly disruptive.

There isn't a single person I've shown the latest capabilities of the Nano Banana Pro image model from Gemini to who hasn't said “wow that is incredible”. That usually means this is huge and I truly believe it. The infographic below was created in one prompt from a deep research test project that I worked on.

I’ve been using Nano Banana Pro creatively lately. The infographics are amazing, but it’s also great for making unique artwork. I’ve been creating my own quote posters and love how easy it is to customise and create.

I've been using Nano Banana Pro for a few weeks now and every time I do, I'm reminded of how powerful it is. The ability to generate high-quality visuals for infographics and documentation with such speed and precision is unlike anything I've used before. It's not perfect, but it's close enough that it changes how a lot of work and workflows will be done in the future. I honestly believe this will likely have a bigger impact on traditional work than ChatGPT did when it first came out. The time saved is enormous. Creating visual content and documentation feels 95 to 98 percent faster than doing it manually, and the overall quality is much higher as well. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. It's a genuine wow moment for anyone who builds or communicates with visuals. Below is an example created with a single detailed prompt.

I built two tools the other day. Both within a single day. The output from these tools will compound time savings in a huge way in coming months. Historically, the same output would have taken a long time, or wouldn't have even been possible to do without building these myself and embedding the latest AI models into them. I built a custom marketing presentation tool that creates slides from detailed prompts and reference images, using Nano Banana Pro to generate entire slides. And I also built a moderately complex financial model that evolved from a Claude Artifact to Lovable and then finally to more detailed work with Claude Code in Cursor. It hit me that the canvas we work on has already changed. The future of work won't be defined by one dominant platform or tool. It'll be defined by millions of personalized tools built by individuals and teams. Traditional SaaS is not dead, but it's going to be completely upended by this new form of doing it yourself, which is already here. Each person, team, or business can become their own software company. I've already said this many times over the last year. But this day of building highlighted it even more.