I tested OpenClaw and Paperclip extensively. Here’s what I think as someone who has built businesses for ten years.
OpenClaw, Paperclip, the whole autonomous-agent category - they’re impressive but they need real constraints and direction from the team running them. You can’t depend on them to go out and build rogue. Future iterations might yield good results, but are those results aligned with your purpose, your intuition, your taste? Almost certainly not. The solution is context management, and keeping your seat in the director role.
We can learn from how clever the approach is, but taking the human element out of the picture is a clear failure. Imagine the world if everyone relied on autonomous agents to build on their own. We’ll exist in nobody’s world. No host, no real intention, no mastery to appreciate, no unspoken quality.
The point of this writeup is how to improve the process. Unlike current attempts at agentic systems, the systems I build keep real humans in the loop to practice intuition and creativity to its fullest extent without technical limitations, and without handing over the vision and key decisions to AI.
At the end of the day, just as you can’t download skills other people made and uploaded online and expect them to give you the results they advertise, you can’t rely on AI to build your vision without you. Unless you don’t have a vision and you’re only interested in putting out slop, it will be felt. You may get lucky and find a revenue stream, but people will sense the lack of intent.
Imagine importing how other organizations do work into yours. It’s not going to be right for your tech stack, your people, or your process. Skills and actions have to be vetted. You can always learn from other people’s ideas, but at the end of the day you need them intentionally designed for your use case.
I have this confidence in our humanity and our uniqueness - that we can bring our strengths and life experience to paint a picture through our work that’s uniquely ours.
The agentic systems can be our paintbrush. The ones that run free will be nobody’s vision. Haphazard creations on the massive web of slop, with no life, breath, or beauty, no matter how masterfully they may simulate reality.