mister automate

One of my best technology decisions recently was choosing not to spend time setting up OpenClaw.

Early adopters got the benefits sooner, but I think at an organizational implementation level.

My thinking was that if the idea was really that good, a more polished, user-friendly version was bound to come along.

Sure enough, ChatGPT released Dots.

Now we have proactive AI agents built right into a platform we're already using. No complicated setup or migration required.

With AI, it's easier than ever to build your own solutions. But you can spend a tremendous amount of time building something today that comes out of the box tomorrow.

And then do it all over again with the next thing.

There's certainly a time to build your own solutions. But there's also a time to let the big technology companies do the heavy lifting.

Why spend all your energy swimming just ahead of a wave that's going to catch you anyway? Ride it.

Opportunities come from people.

Not just anyone, but people who have problems.

Oh, by the way, they only come from people with problems when you are the path of least resistance between that problem and the solution.

So, if you want to attract more opportunities, learn the art of making friends and increase your capabilities.

But there's another way.

Invention. Identify and solve friction that others haven't necessarily even recognized.

Then present your solution in a way that makes people itch. That's called Sales.

Easy, right?

Having grown up with older brothers, the tendency of childhood is to get pressured into tagging along on all various high activity activities.

The cursed beauty of adulthood is the freedom and independence we enjoy.

Unfortunately, we start listening to our own decisions, which have a remarkable tendency to favor whatever requires the least amount of effort.

And slowly, the world gets smaller.

On hindsight, it's clear that some of the best memories are outings we didn't want to attend.

We were dragged into them... sometimes practically kidnapped into them.

And we leave with stories to tell our grandchildren.

As adults, we've finally earned the right to say no to everything.

And that's exactly what we do.

Alone, we rot.

Maybe it's time to stop asking ourselves whether we feel like going.

Of course we don't.

Go anyway.

And while you're at it, drag someone else along. Preferably someone who doesn't feel like going either.

They can thank you when they're telling their grandchildren.

We've gotten to a point where it's possible to not even have awareness of what your own productivity has been.

Specifically, when you have AI look at production logs from an app, write a task list for itself, execute those tasks, and test everything in a sandbox environment from end to end...

You can get to the end of a day and have no idea what was accomplished.

Now, you may argue that's not my productivity, but my AI's. Well... if I'm going to take the blame, I'll take the credit as well.

Completely hands-off isn't good. I definitely request a full understanding briefing before pushing updates to production.

But while it's in progress, you can feel completely out of the loop.

And it's an awesome feeling.

If you've never experienced this, I'd argue you haven't felt AI at its full potential.