From @openclaw, I took away two things, or rather, two things that are *really* important.
In the future, we won't need apps anymore. And we've always been building personal agents the wrong way.
Let me explain both:
Let's start with the second point. Every time we tried to build a personal agent with N8N and similar tools, we were attempting to build something that works like us but doesn't have access to all our tools. It *kind of* has a Gmail integration, it *kind of* has an OpenAI integration, but none of them could be accessed freely. That's why OpenClaw won and will continue to win: because you give it access to your actual life. My PC *is* my life. Just give it access to that, and it can do 90% of what I do manually.
Now let's get back to the first point. Agents work differently than humans. They don't use GUIs. They don't use applications. They use the terminal. They *can* use applications, but they won't work nearly as well.
So the biggest unlock I got from OpenClaw was this: every time I need something, I just turn it into a CLI. I spin up a Go project, or whatever, and ask Codex to build it. As easy as that. I have an example of my video workflow that we'll show later, and I'll probably write a whole article about it.
For example, in my video workflow, I always need to do some kind of trimming of silence spaces of silence moments because I'm fucking dyslexic! And for some videos, if I need to do it in a one-by-one ratio, I need also to remove the black bars. So what I did is super simple: I asked Droid to create a Go CLI and a skill, and now, as you can see in this video, I just ask him to do what would take me, I don't know, 20-30 minutes manually, and with tonnes of software that needs to open, needs to load, my memory gets fucked, etc.
https://github.com/OxFrancesco/VotGO
But here's the main takeaway: we probably won't need apps in the future. Why would we need MyFitnessPal or a CRM when I can just tell OpenClaw what I ate yesterday and who I met the other day, and it saves everything in a SQLite database, or whatever database I want? There's simply no need for that anymore.
It's going to be an interesting future, for sure. And I've become like Macron, so yeah, make sure you make the right choice. If you're starting a startup, take this into consideration!