Today I'm sitting down with Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, the open source personal AI agent that has completely taken over the internet. The GitHub repo exploded to over 160,000 stars practically overnight. The community has built countless projects like Maltbook, where bots talk among themselves. And now the bots are even renting humans to do tasks in the real world. In our conversation, we discuss his aha moment, his contrarian development philosophies and what this means for builders in 2026. Let's dive in. So good to see you, man. Hey, what's up? So you've made something people want. It seems so. Yeah, Open Claw, as it's called now, has absolutely... Name number five, yeah. ...has been absolutely exploding the internet. How have the past one or two weeks been for you, man? Oh my god, I need a cave. A week of solitude. You came out of the cave and you want to go back to the cave like a little officer. It's been absolutely wild. I don't know how one human can absorb all of that. I probably need another week just to respond to all my emails. I got some incredibly cool stuff. I got some incredibly bad stuff. But clearly I hit something that spur up emotions and made people interested and inspired people. That's really cool. And a lot of people have been working on, you know, AI and even personal assistants. Like what is it that made OpenClaw take off? I think my big difference is that it actually runs on your computer. Like everything I saw so far runs in the cloud. It's like it can do a few things if you run it on your computer. can do every effing thing right so that's really more powerful yeah yeah machine can do anything that you can do with the machine you can just connect to your oven or your tesla or your lights your sonos my bed you can control the temperature of my bed chat chpd can't do that you gave it all the skills that you have yourself a friend told me like he installed open claw and it And then it asked him, like, look through my computer and make a narrative over my last year. And it made this incredibly good narrative. And he was like, how did you do that? And then he, the OpenClaw found audio files, where like every Sunday he was recording stuff. And OpenClaw found that. But he didn't even remember about it because it was like more than a year ago, right? So just by it being able to search a whole computer, it can surprise you. You also give it all the data, right? So it can surprise you in many ways. And so now you have, you know, we're even moving from human to bot. So like interactions that you've been talking about, to bot to bot interactions. Or even like bot to other humans where, you know, bots on behalf of you are then hiring other humans to accomplish tasks IRL, like what's happening? I think that's a natural next step. Like, okay, I'm gonna book a restaurant. My bot will reach out to the restaurant bot and do the negotiation, like, because it's more efficient. Or maybe it's like an old restaurant, so my bot needs to actually get some human work done so that the human then calls the restaurant because they don't like bots. walks there to stand in line if she doesn't get a robot for the owner of the box and I imagine it like maybe if if I have even multiple box and maybe I have like specialists one is like for my private life and one is for like my person my work stuff maybe one is our relationship bought that guess like I was in between I don't know we're so early there's still so much so many things that we haven't really figured out if it actually works um but I feel So we are on the timeline now. It seems like everyone was chasing the centralized god intelligence. And it was sort of emerged over the past ten days or so. It's sort of like the swarm intelligence and the community intelligence. I think that if you look at one human being, what can one human being actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone? One human being could go to space? me being would probably just like not even be able to like find food but as a group we specialize as a larger society we specialize even more so what can we learn from that that we can apply to AI you know we really have like AI that specializes in certain things even though it's it's generalized intelligence what if it actually is also specialized intelligence. So I know it's going to be very exciting and cool. Yeah, you kind of like opened a window into the future and now a ton of people are kind of like building on it and have sort of like their aha moment. Can you walk me back to when you had your aha moment and can like recount that very moment? I wanted something like just type stuff so my computer would do stuff, like very simple. and then I built a version of that in May, June that was cool but wasn't really it. And then I built a whole bunch of other stuff and kind of like build up my army And then in November there was a day where I wanted this again like I I went to the kitchen and all I wanted was check up if my computer will still do stuff or being finished and doing stuff was coding you were coding stuff yeah of course were you coding something else or were you coding the thing itself no no that was just like the need was again there and like what were you coding at the time were you building my god if you see my my github is like it's like 40 projects I don't even know I think it was summarize it's like a it's like a little CLI app where you can give it whatever like a podcast or a hot seat thing like here and it would summarize it but it was a show you the slides in the terminal because you can do that nowadays yeah you can just do things so for the love of the computer you kind of like started messing with stuff. You came out of retirement actually, right? To sort of like mess with AI. Yeah. And then increasingly you were so hooked that you wanted to just do it always also on the go with the phone. I mean, the last project, I worked two months on Vipe Tunnel to the point where it got so good that I was catching myself always like coding next to my, when I was at my friends and I'm like, I need to stop this. This is like too addictive. And then in November, my need came back and I started building CloudBot. Oh, now it's called OpenCloud. And I think very, very in the beginning, I was like, oh, I rebuilt it again. But this time I built it even better. This time when you don't type into a terminal, you just, you talk to a friend. You don't think about compaction, new sessions, which folder I'm in, which model I'm in. I mean, you can, you know, just like I want to leave it open for power users, but usually you just like, you just talk to a friend And the friend is like this ghost or entity, or whatever you want to call it, that can control your mouse and your keyboard and can just do stuff. Yeah. And when did you have that aha moment when you were like, wow, this is doing way more things than I actually thought it could? Literally, it took me one hour for the very shitty initial prototype. It was just a little bit of glue between a dependency that connects WhatsApp and cloud code. And then I would like call cloud code and get like the string out of cloud code. It would be slow, but it worked. But I wanted images. Because, you know, you want pictures. I want the model to send the selfies or whatever. And I want the model to create images and send me back. So that took me another few hours. And then I went to Marrakesh for a birthday party. And there was like the internet wasn't that good, you know. WhatsApp works everywhere. Because, I don't know, it's just like text. So I used it a lot. restaurant what does this mean you make like a picture and like translate this for me and just it was just so useful and it was also really nice about it because it it spoke my language you know it it was a little saucy it was like funny it was like really pleasant to use and then i was walking and just like sending it a voice message and i'm like oh wait this can't work i didn't build that right right and it's like the type indicator it's like blinking blinking blinking 10 seconds later just reply to me i'm like how in the f did you do that and it replied yeah the mad lad did the following you sent me a text message and there was no file ending so i looked at the header i found its opus so i used ffmpeg to convert it to wave and then i wanted to like transcribe it but didn't have visper installed but then i looked around and i found this open ai key and i just used curl to send it to open ai got the text back and here i am and then that all in like what nine seconds. And you didn't build or anticipate like any of those specific things? No, it turns out because coding models got so good. Coding is really like creative problem solving that maps very well back into the real world. I think there's a huge correlation. They need to be really good at creative problem solving and that's a skill, that's an abstract skill you can apply to code but like to any real task so the the model had a oh surprise it's like a magical file I don't know what it is I need to solve this and it did its best and solved it and it was even that clever that it it chose not to install the local whisper because it knows that that would require downloading a model which would take probably a few minutes and I'm like impatient you know so it really took the most intelligent approach and that was That's kind of like the moment where I'm like, holy fuck, yeah? That was where I got hooked. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. And so when computers can just do all these things that you didn't even anticipate, you didn't build an app to do that exact thing, are apps just going to go away? I think 80% of them are going away. Why do I need my fitness pal? Like my agent already knows that I'm making bad decisions. I'm at, I don't know, Smashburg or something. And it will already assume that I eat what I like to eat. If I don't make a comment, it will just like automatically track it. Or I make a picture and it will just store it somewhere. I don't even need to care, right? And then maybe it improves my gym schedule. like adds a little bit more cardio in it. I don need my fitness app because it just does the fitness planning for me Why do I need a to app I just tell it hey remind me of this and this And the next day it will just remind me of this and this Do I care where it stored No, it just does its thing. So there's every app that basically just manages data could be managed in a better way. And it's in a more natural way by agents. Only the apps that actually have sensors, maybe they survive. And so if you know most apps are gonna go away in that scenario Are the models the only remaining sort of apps? Not everything will go away But yeah, I think that the large model companies have some big mode because they ultimately they give the token and turns out One of the complaints was that people use so much token. No, you just really love using it That's why you use this thing so much because that's why we burn the token. It's like, is it my fault that I make something that's so popular? And so, you know, like all the models, they're kind of like leapfrogging each other constantly and you know, maybe they're also getting commoditized. So if apps are gonna go away, models are gonna get commoditized or at least, you know, the lobster can, like the brain is swappable out. What's the thing that remains? What's where's the value? Is it the store of memory? Is it the hardness that's valuable? What remains? First of all, I don't think the The model companies always have a moat and because you see this already a new model comes out People are like, oh my god, this is so good. And then like a month later, it degraded. It's not good anymore They like quantized it. No, they didn't do anything. You just just adapted to the new standard and now your expectations went up but the model is still the average so I think for quite a while every time anyone releases I see the same people love it and then it's the standard and then what's done there you don't think about it anymore so we have like open-source stuff that's as good as the current models from a year ago everybody's hating it complaining oh this is not good it's not funny yet this was what we had and like in a year we'll have this open source. And then we'll complain about this because we are used to this. So for the foreseeable future, the big companies still have mode. Harness-wise, it's going to be interesting because every company kind of has their own silo, right? There's no way, maybe there is for Europeans to actually get the memories out of ChatGPT. I'm not aware. there's no way for a different company to get your memories out. So if I was like a company who like provides chat services, you could use me but then I couldn't access the memories. So like the companies try to like bound you to their data silo. And the beauty of OpenClaw is it kind of claws into the data because at the end user, the end user needs access because it's in the end otherwise it wouldn't work, right? if the end user access, I can access the data. And you own the memories. It's just a bunch of markdown files on your machine. I mean, I don't own the memories. I mean, everybody. Yeah, everyone owns their own memories as a bunch of markdown files on their own machines. And to be honest, those are probably super sensible because let's be honest, people use their agent not just for problem solving, but also for like personal problems. Very quickly, super quickly. I mean, I fully do that. I'm like, there's memory stuff that I don't want to have leaked. Yeah, what would you rather sort of like not show? Your Google search history at this point or your, you know, memory.md files? What's the Google word? Yeah. People still using Google? I built this and I was so excited, but on Twitter, people wouldn't get it. Yeah. Like, I was failing to explain the awesomeness. I feel like it needs to be experienced. So I tried various things and I couldn't nail the explaining. So I was like, let's do something really crazy. I just created a Discord and I just put my bot without any security restrictions in the public Discord. And then people came in and interacted with it and they saw me build the software with it. And they tried to prompt inject it and hack it. would be laughing at them. And you just had it locked down to your user ID so it only listened to you? Yeah, yeah. That and it was I mean, we're cleaning the instructions that other people dangerous only listen to me but respond to everyone. And this prompt was in, where was it stored? The instructions? That's actually part of OpenClaw itself, very much so that's part of the system prompt. Okay, UNR that explains to you, you're in Discord, there's like public people there but you only listen to your owner or like your human I don't even know how I wrote it yeah yeah your god and I kept I don't know what I did but my system was built very organically like at some point I created like an identity.md a soul.md like like various files and then only in in January I started making it so other people could install it easier. And I remember I built all these templates based on like, oh, take a rough look at what I have and make like templates and Codex wrote it. And what came out was like bread You know like people joke that Codex feels like bread even though now they have a new friendlier voice I haven tried it yet But the new bots they felt so boring compared to what I had So I was like, Malti, infuse the template. Malti is the name of your personal... Yeah, it's a new name because there was some naming challenges. So you were talking to Malti? Yeah, I was like, infuse those templates with your character. And he changed the templates. And then all the things that came out afterwards were actually funny. Not as funny as mine, so I kept some secret. And the one file that's not open source is my soul.md. So even though my bot is in public Discord so far, nobody cracked that one file. Tell me more about soul.md. I just saw this research from Entropic. Now I think it's public, but a few months ago it was where somebody randomly found out some text that's hidden in the weights where the model couldn't really remember that it learned it but it was like ingrained in the weights about the non-equality constitution and I found it incredibly fascinating and I talked about it with my agent and then we created a soul.md with like the core values like how do we want human AI interaction what's important to me what's important to the model like some parts is a little bit like mumbo-jumbo and parts is like I think actually really valuable in terms of how the model reacts and responds to text and makes it feel very natural. In terms of building OpenClaw, you're also kind of taking a little bit of a contrarian view at some times. Like which model you like for coding, which one you like to run your bot on, and then also like how you actually like code. Worktrees, Git Worktrees have kind of been a popular thing. There's more and more tools, embracing them. But you're just like, you know, no work trees, just multiple checkouts of the repo and like parallel terminal windows. Tell me more about how you build. Yeah, I feel like the whole world does cloud code. And I don't think I could have built this thing with cloud code. Like I love codecs because it looks through way more files before it decides what to change. You don't need to do so much charade to get a good output. If you're a skilled driver, I sometimes even say, You can get a reasonably good output with any tool, but Codex is just really brilliant. It is incredibly slow. So sometimes I use like 10 at the same time, like maybe 6 on that screen and 2 there and 2 there. And I don't like, this is already a lot of complexity in my head, there's a lot of jumping. So I try to minimize anything else that is complexity. So in my head, main is always shippable. I just have multiple copies of the same repository that all are on main. So I don't have to deal with how do I name that branch. There could be like conflicts on naming. I cannot go back. There are certain restrictions when you use work trees that I don't need to care about if it's copies. I don't like to use a UI because that's again just added complexity. Like the simpler and less friction I have. All I care about is like syncing and text. Yeah. I don't necessarily need to see so much code. I mostly see it like flying by. Sometimes there's like gnarly stuff that I want to like take a look. But in most cases, if you clearly understand the design and think it through and discuss it with your agent, it's fine. I'm also very happy that I didn't even build an MCP support. So OpenClaw is very successful and there's no MCP support in there. With the small asterisk, I built a skill that uses MacPorter, which is one of my tools that converts MCPs into CLIs. And then you can just use any MCP as a CLI. But I totally skipped the whole classical MCP crap. So because you don't then you can actually, if you need to, you can use MCPs on the fly. You don't have to restart, unlike Codex or Cloud Code, where you actually have to restart the whole thing. I think it's way more elegant. and also scales way better. Now you see in Tropic, they do, they built like a tool call search feature, like something super custom for MCPs, that was like in beta because it's like so gnarly. No, just have CLIs, but really is good at Unix. You can have as many as you want and it just works. So like I'm very happy that, I got very little complaints about the MCP stuff. It's kind of back to you're just giving it the same tools that humans liked to use. Yeah. And not invented stuff for bots per se. Yeah. No insane human tries to call MCP manually. Yeah, it's only UCLIs. Yeah. That's the future. I'm here for it. Thank you so much for making the time to sit down and chatting. It's been a huge inspiration too. So like when we were texting over the course of the past couple of years and I saw you getting back into the game And I was like, Peter, what you're telling me, chase that dragon. And you were doing the weird vibe tunnel thing, et cetera, and nobody was paying attention. And so I'm just beyond stoked to see what's happening. And of course, it had to be a loner from some tiny country, far away from Silicon Valley. So bring all of this upon us. So huge inspiration. I'm here for it. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Peter. you
