Building at the Speed of Thought
I set up my OpenClaw — his name is Buce — at the start of the year (way back when it was still called Clawdbot). It’s totally changed how I build software mainly by changing when and how frequently I build. Let me tell you a story to illustrate the point.
I started my Saturday last weekend pretty normally. Breakfast, playing with the kids, farmer’s market, playground. Periodically I’d send some messages to Buce about an idea I’d been working on — a series of workshops on AI development for engineering teams that are struggling with AI adoption — and then shift back to whatever I was doing before. I’d thumb out something, like “can you propose a few different pricing tiers and offerings that I could use after the initial introductory workshop?” and then get back to shopping for citrus.
By early afternoon my youngest was napping and my oldest was having some downtime, so I headed to Costco. After parking I checked in with Buce — by this time Buce had turned my rough idea into a presentation outline with quotes pulled from my X bookmarks, a referral system with planned outreach to key people in my contacts, and graduated pricing tiers based on involvement.
The plan was getting too big to hold in my head, so I asked Buce to render everything as a self-contained HTML page (a workflow I picked up here).
Anyways, Buce made the page, put it in a gist, and sent me back a version hosted on githack for my viewing pleasure. It looked good! I had feedback, but how to give it? What I wanted was to give Google-docs style comments on my page that I could share with Buce, so I told him as much, put my phone in my pocket, and headed into Costco to load up.
When I got back to my car $500 poorer, Buce had a new link waiting — my page, now with annotation support baked in. I marked it up right there in the parking lot, sent my feedback, and we started iterating. It was good, but there were limits: The annotations weren’t persistent. I couldn’t ask my colleagues for their feedback. There was no revision history.
At this point I'd caught a bug: how good could I make this experience? Perhaps we could close those gaps?
By all appearances my weekend proceeded normally, punctuated by rapid background progress on this idea:
- Sat 5:30 PM — Family dinner at Grandma's; Buce worked out the product architecture
- 8 PM — Read stories to my kids; Buce researched domain names
- 8:45 PM — Took a shower; Buce bought pagedrop.ai and began deploying infrastructure
- 10 PM — Went to bed; Buce churned through the landing page and persistence
- Sun 6 AM — Woke up and tested a first working version (the landing page needed work)
- 9 AM — Friends over for sourdough waffles (I cooked); Buce added gist revisions and GitHub OAuth
- 2 PM — Reading lesson with my four-year-old; Buce tackled collaboration features
- 8–11 PM — Stayed up reading; Buce churned through payments infra
By Monday morning I demoed a working product to my team: pagedrop.ai was live. We’ve been using it all week (I even used it to get feedback on this post).
The thing that still seems crazy to me is that all of this happened without any all-nighters or impact on my family life. I did all of the things I’d normally do: spent time with my kids, socialized with friends and family, made progress on my book, made and ate great food at home…and built a product that’s actually useful to me and the people I work with, 36 hours from when I first had the idea. A year ago this would have taken me 2-3 focused weeks — and my family would have felt it, so I probably wouldn't have ever gotten around to it.
A year ago, had you told me that I’d be building software from a telegram chat by delegating to an AI running on my computer that itself managed its own team of AIs to autonomously write, test, and deploy code..well, I’m not sure what I’d have said. It’s still pretty strange but in the best way possible.
I have never lacked for ideas, but they would always outpace my execution throughput. I’d either forget about them and move on, get busy with core priorities, or give up when I realized just how much work it would be to finish. This is not a problem anymore — now my ideas get built as fast as I can think of them.
