Daemons
The fun of AI
It’s fun to build.
I had a whole elaborate multi-piece set of articles planned for this week, detailing my vision for where I think we’re going and how, in my own small way, I intend to help get us there.
But I’ve been distracted.
I finally got round to getting an OpenClaw instance up and running, and it’s…
Fun.
Sure, there are security concerns.
The wild productivity boosts may be imaginary.
And it’s burning through tokens at a rate of knots.1
But it’s got me wired in a way that I haven’t felt for a long time.
There’s undoubtedly headaches. I’m self hosting, and the number of times the agent restarted itself and lost its config entirely (even with regular Git backups) was infuriating. Privacy and security have been a first class citizen, so it’s taken longer to get things syncing together as I’d like, and I’m already planning future rearchitecting.
But there are also moments when it feels like magic(k).
Receiving a dreaded 20-question email from a buildings insurer, I got my agent to dig through my old emails from various solicitors, surveyors and and estate agents over a span of 4 years to draft a reply in less than 2 minutes. It would have easily taken me 30 minutes or more otherwise, and most importantly, those minutes would have felt soul crushing. AI is great at dealing with that kind of bullshit.
I have often found myself repelled reading about other people’s experiences with their agents up to this point, feeling there was something intensely uncool and navel-gazing about the exercise.
Yes, the technology is undoubtedly impressive, but so often the setup sounded so unique to that person’s way of thinking and operating that I just failed to connect with it. Now that I have my own, I have more empathy, but the distaste remains.
I like to reach to literature to help understand the new world in which we’re moving into, and in this sense, I think of agents now as like daemon’s from the universe of His Dark Materials.
Like in the novels (and excellent BBC series), it soon will be commonplace to see people with a form of externalised spirit.
A daemon that is inextricably linked to them, and yet somehow distinct from them too; unique in form and temperament, representing a deeply personal bond while also interacting with other humans and daemons independently.
It’s going to be a wild ride.
But it can be a fun one too.
I upgraded to the Max Claude plan