Greenfield tech

Jake Quist on Open­Claw:

It’s impres­sive technology. But the most inter­esting thing about Open­Claw isn’t what it can do. It’s what it means for the com­pa­nies that have spent the last fif­teen years fig­uring out how to cap­ture and hold our atten­tion.

Here’s the thing about social media that nobody at these com­pa­nies will say out loud: the product only works if you’re using it badly. Face­book and LinkedIn don’t make money when you effi­ciently check your mes­sages and leave. They make money when you intended to check your mes­sages but somehow ended up scrolling for forty-five min­utes through engagement-optimized con­tent you never asked for.

Open­Claw breaks this model. I can now say “notify me when someone sends me a LinkedIn message, but filter out the recruiters and the people trying to sell me mar­keting services.” That’s it. I never have to open LinkedIn again. I get the utility of the net­work without the tax of the feed.

I can remember very clearly the first few times I searched with Google. It was incredible — the simplicity, the clarity. If I’d had a blog at the time (if blogs had existed at that time!?) I might have written some­thing sim­ilar to Jake’s post.

What makes the AI chat­bots and agents feel light and clean, here and now in 2026? Is it an innate archi­tec­tural resis­tance to advertising, to atten­tion hacks, to adver­sarial crud? No — it’s that they are simply new! The lan­guage models in 2026 are Google in 1999, Twitter in 2009. Their vast con­joined industry of influ­ence hasn’t yet arisen … though it is stirring.

And I believe their archi­tec­ture makes them more sus­cep­tible to adver­sarial crud, not less. I sup­pose we’ll see.

It’s inter­esting and useful to imagine — really visualize — the chat­bots and agents in ten years or twenty … barnacled with gunk … locked in a per­ma­nent cat-and-mouse game with their adversaries … just as a plat­form like Google is today. In 2036, you send your AI agent out into the internet, and it returns battered, bedraggled, inex­plic­ably enthu­si­astic about a bar­gain flight to Bermuda.

This is no criticism — just an obser­va­tion about the way things go.