Why every personal agent at Every died and one company agent won

Transcript

From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode.

1. 11:09

   The links in the description. I think also what happened is everyone had open claws. And for sure, like one of the coolest things was your claw became a little bit of an extension of you. Like it sort of, I remember one of the first people who, well Brandon was like a big driving force here. And then the second person who like really took it to a new level was Austin, who was at the time our head of growth.

2. 11:35

   And he had, he had like a growth claw that you could ask all growth questions to. And that was like really interesting. But I think at least my memory of what happened is then we started, we were like, oh, we're going to build a platform for anyone to make their own, their own clause, even if you're non-technical, plus one, RIP plus one. But I don't think at that point it was really company agent.

3. 11:58

   It was just like make a claw, like one click claw maker. And we tried that and we were having a lot of internal debates about Should it be one agent for everyone or an agent per person? You were very one agent for everyone. I was very like agent per person. I think you had a lot of hesitancies about the idea of building up our own platform infrastructure to support this like claw as a service thing.

4. 12:24

   And we were like, fuck it. Like, let's do it anyway. And we were like, okay. Okay. which I appreciate, but also like in retrospect was like not the best idea. And like we so we launched that in beta and I think basically found that it was there was a lot of demand, especially at that time, there was a lot of demand for it, but OpenClaw itself, it was very hard to build a platform on. It was moving so fast, and it was completely vibe-coded.

5. 12:54

   It's just hard to make the entire technical stack and then have an open-source product that's not really designed to be a platform as the thing you're serving. That was messy, and... Through that process, I think all of our claws basically died. Yeah. Because we just stopped. I remember my claw is named R2C2. And I felt like, oh yeah, I have this really attached relationship to R2C2. And then at some point, someone knocked the Mac Mini power off.

6. 13:29

   And then it disappeared. But I didn't restart it. Yeah. Because at that point, I was using codecs. And I was like, this is fine. I don't need that. And that that was like a really interesting thing for me to realize like oh. OK there's all the people in the org who don't really. We don't really want to maintain their own cause and then the people who do want to do it like eventually you kind of get tired of it if there's a better option.

7. 13:54

   And what we ended up doing is we, I think we were always starting to use like Cloud or Codex and then there are a couple of these company agents that we tried that like really sort of changed how we thought about this. So Victor being one, which was just really, really well designed. And I think at that point we started to realize, oh, like having a single company agent makes a huge difference. Yeah, there's a lot.

8. 14:19

   I mean, it even just boils down to sort of like naming, right? Remembering which agent had which expertise was annoying and hard. I remember like Austin's agent, Montaigne, right? It sort of became the gravitational center because... He built it up to be so good at the growth job that it was like, well, I could add, I'm already using it for myself, minor growth jobs. I could invest in my agent or I could just add on to Montana and everyone else.