Lobster Boil
by Horace Dediu
Om my God
Makes you wonder: what is really going on here? Hope and madness. Whatever the reasons, I am fascinated with the very idea of OpenClaw, how it might be foretelling a future we are not seeing yet.
OpenClaw is a free, open-source AI agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. It started as a weekend project in November 2025, originally called Clawdbot, went through a rename to Moltbot after a trademark complaint from Anthropic, and landed as OpenClaw at the end of January 2026.
You connect it to whatever AI model you prefer. It runs on your own machine. You talk to it through the messaging apps you already use, including Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, and Discord. And then it does things. Typical chatbots answer questions. It acts. It clears your inbox, makes reservations, tracks your calendar, executes tasks on your behalf while you are doing something else.
By March 2026, it had crossed 247,000 stars on GitHub. Steinberger has since been hired by OpenAI to work on personal agents, and the project has moved to a foundation. The lobster, as they say, has molted. Ironic, the movement’s Jesus has ceded control to his apostles.
The Mac Mini has become the unofficial hardware of the OpenClaw moment. People are buying the Apple desktop with a single purpose: a dedicated machine to run their agent, separate from their main computer, connected to a free or cheap open-source model. The SF Standard called the Mac Mini bro the new matcha latte guy. Oy vey!
Source: On my Om
NB: Definitely worth reading this post. Om is always good for a zeitgeist check. He and I …
…met a few times and we saw eye to eye. The Claw movement will be mainstream and I suspect it will be baked into MacOS so it can be trusted. It's brilliant but strictly early adopter lore right now. Still, selling a few million Mac Minis to run it shows Apple had the right product at the right time. (Bonus: why is a Mac chosen today for this when decades ago this was a job people would hire a PC for?)
6 comments
vhs ·
NVIDIA has already wrapped it into a secure container for enterprises. That was fast.
farshad ·
I remember in 1993(?) trying to install Unix on a PC. A decade later it was running on my Mac. A few years later on my Phone A few months later it was running my TV. ...
Same will happen with OpenClaw. AI is sustaining to computing.
farshad ·
Before that people wrapped it inside a sandbox on a Mac.
People can buy Mac minis because they are trendy but certainly don't need to do it. macOS lets you sandbox.
vhs ·
Those were the times! After much frustration with Xenix 286, I finally got a (barely used) NeXT cube in 1991 and was blown away by how far ahead it was. When Apple bought NeXT, one could see the future pretty clearly: UNIX everywhere, miniaturized and commodified.
Now, the "hardware" is virtual knowledge, and another OS is needed. Not sure it'll be OpenClaw, but at least that layer has now opened for competition.
farshad ·
UNIX was born in 1969. so it's almost a decade older than Apple. At this rate, it'll likely all of us.
deemery ·
Just about everything in computing traces back to either MULTICS or Xerox PARC :-)