I completely missed the OpenClaw hype - I actually thought it looked kind of dumb at the time.
But the past week or so I've been quite enjoying using Grok Bot - which is very similar (and like OpenAI dots I guess).
It's basically a mini team of agent/bots that run on a Linux server somewhere that you can assign jobs to.
Eg, I have a support bot that uses my Gmail to answer emails, an engineer bot that writes code, and a security bot that monitors my Cloudflare and server logs for suspicious things.
I don't want to delve into the weeds of it too much here but I thought it would be cool to jot down why I'm quite intrigued by this as a solo entrepreneur/developer.
1. Working together
Grok Bot clicked for me when they worked together and fixed a bug for a customer without me (texts to my bro):
Having these bots interact with each other like this is really cool - this is the most interesting thing for me. Trivial things that you sometimes put off (e.g. fixing small bugs, or following up an email) become automatable so you can focus on bigger stuff.
2. Mobile
The idea of coding/working from my phone seemed awful to me. I dislike my phone in general. But last week on a 5 hour hike in the middle of nowhere in Wales, I was communicating with these bots to do stuff for me.
I had a really enjoyable day, and got more work done than some days where I'm sat in front of my laptop for 9 hours.
It made me realise how effort-in does not correlate to output, and made me think what work might be like when you don't have to "work" as much in a weird AI future.
3. Trying new stuff
As a 1 man startup - I've always been limited with what I can do. Things like content marketing & trying paid ads have always seemed out of reach because I don't have enough time.
I now have a marketing bot whose sole goal is to grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week.
It's started a TikTok profile, YouTube shorts channel and more. I've told it to experiment and double down on what works. It seems to kinda be working!
I would never have time in my day for this usually, and it makes me want to try more creative things like startup vlogs alongside this blog.
It's made me actually believe for the first time that a 1-man startup could actually compete with a much bigger one (not just hype). And being a 1-man startup might actually be an advantage because there's less human overhead.
4. Weird experiments
A few nights ago I instructed my project manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it whilst I was asleep - it just had to benefit the site in some way.
I wanted to see what this felt like - which sounds weird - I know.
It decided to ship a feature that alerts users before their account is about to get timed out from too many declined submissions - a pretty useful idea based on a lot of emails from support.
It went well, and worked! - waking up and seeing it felt very cool, but also a bit strange, like PromptBase could just be run by an AI agent if I really wanted.
5. Bad things
So far Grok Bot has been pretty good, the main downsides I've found are:
- It takes a while to set up and connect everything - and I'm quite locked in and have handed over a lot of data; I think that's why these AI labs are pushing these products so hard right now.
- I was hoping these bots would have some crazy moonshot ideas on how to grow PromptBase given all the context they have - so far that has not really happened - you still need to come up with ideas.
- It can sometimes feel as a human you lose understanding of what's going on in your business, you need to be careful to stay on top of this so the bots don't start running you.
6. Conclusion
This is a long post, my hand hurts from writing. I'd definitely recommend experimenting with this if you've not tried these kind of products before.
If anything, it's maybe given me a bit of an insight into the hype around always-on Agents and where things are going.
'Til next week!