There is no try, there is only Openclaw

The only corporate benefit you will care about in the very near future is your token budget.

I'll preface with an admission.

I have been wrong before. Twice divorced, though, really, that was them. I loaded up on $300,000 of JDSU in 2000 having narrowed it down to JDSU and Apple as where to park my inheritance, the life choice explaining why I am on LinkedIn AT ALL in 2026. Disc brakes on bikes? Nerds, I thought.

Though I still consider this a win, I'm reliably informed by the victims that setting every clock forward 4 hours on New Years Eve for several years with young children who, "Didn't even feel tired" at midnight, was wrong.

That's about it.

And now, because I was actually trained as a journalist, having it drilled into his head to never bury the lede, I will continue burying the lede in a decades-long-rebellion against codes of standards. But, while this story is circular in nature, if you stick with me, I promise it comes to point.

Having left journalism and floated around between careers, I found a new search engine, Google search, in 1998. I used it constantly. And as I just entered the tech door, I discovered a simple thing. I was better at my job than you were at yours, if you weren't using it. I was better at life than you were if you weren't.

It was the last truly differentiating professional advantage I encountered.

The ability to find information and solve problems using Google while others were still learning about it using Yahoo set me apart from other technical folks. I was early there.

As I believe I am here.

With the lobster. Openclaw.

AI is a powerful tool. But it didn't sneak up on anyone. It arrived in 2022 like an earthquake.

If you were breathing, and not my mother, you knew about it. You used it. It was amazing. You weren't differentiated as a technical worker by using it, because we were all using it. Sure, you might be more clever with prompts and recognizing the hallucinations, or coaxing out better results in tools than others, but it was a thing we were all doing.

And since that OpenAI launch in November of 2022, we've all done the leap frogging hops from the newest best ever model to the next. We've tried this new hotness, that AI integrated IDE, that AI agentic integrated CLI. Though, you know, never Gemini. Just saying.

If you haven't vibe coded, have you really even lived? -- Art Mills, just now.

Like ChatGPT in 2022 and MCP by Anthropic in 2024, Openclaw was released in November 2025. People eating too much and burning vacation days didn't notice. Until halfway through January. Clawdbot became a thing.

Until Anthropic said, "Bruh, Clawd sounds like Claude, so stop, before something bad happens to yous," and then Moltbot was born. Until we all realized that was seriously stupid. And then Openclaw emerged. Same great product, three different names.

It is, in my never wrong, though sometimes not always right, view, Google search in 1998. This is differentiating software that makes you a demonstrably superior employee or leader. For the uninitiated, Openclaw is a personal AI assistant. Think Jarvis in Ironman. It lives with you. Integrates with the products you use already. Automates the things you find tedious. And even remembers you, if you remember to make it.

I get it. Not that impressive. Until you realize it actually is.

It's not that the product specifically gives you the ability to do anything you couldn't have hacked together already before now. It just gives you the ability to do EVERYTHING you've ever wanted to do...RIGHT NOW.

And, if by some odd chance, you can't right now...say, you use Todoist for your todo list, then, just say, "Skippy (my agent's name), design my integration with Todoist, and deploy it so you can manage my daily tasks."

And four minutes later, you are fully integrated with sharable code.

Have sloppy notes from a crucial meeting? "Skippy, pretty this up, diagram out the specified information regarding system flow, and save it to our notes." And you have a fully documented, pretty, Mermaid-imaged, markdown file you can take anywhere.

Hey, Claude Opus 4.6 is out. Let me go get a sub and try it.

TEN MINUTES LATER

Hey, Codex 5.3 is out, let me grab a sub and go try it.

Nah (though also yeah, which I'll talk about another time with Oauth integration). Go to Openrouter, get a single key to rule them all. Then, "Skippy, integrate Codex 5.3, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.5, Kimi K2.5, GLM-5 and, sure, Mini-Max 2.1 so I can give them different jobs."

And you now can float between anything you wish for any task you wish. You can directly compare models against the same tasks at the same instant with the same prompts. You can give easier tasks to cheaper models and heavier tasks to reasoning models.

You don't have to go all in on Github Copilot, or Claude Code, or OpenAI Codex. You can do them all, at the same time, in the same place, with an AI that knows everything you've ever done, everything you want to do and can just do it in a way that makes you better.

I had a conversation with someone about a product he wanted to deploy. I could have gone back to my desk and used Visio or Lucid to diagram out the solution, or I could have been super hip and gone Architecture as Code and used PlantUML to code it out and generate a diagram. I could then have written a document about the diagram, attached the diagram. I could then have closed my task for it.

And about 3 hours later I'd be done if I wasn't interrupted.

Or I can summarize in a paragraph what the architecture is, and have it done as code, presented as a fully functional SVG, written as a project document and taken off your task list...in about two minutes.

Even that example isn't the specific power of Openclaw as you could hack together something with any LLM you are bound to and function similarly.

It's the persistence of the memory. The quick, short term wins, augmented by the long-term view of those wins. The growth of learning your patterns, that make you a better employee and leader, and just automating them at an astonishing pace.

Now, this is not a cheap date.

Even being miserly and making a less expensive model the core brain (Kimi for today), as you hand off numerous tasks to beefier models, you will feel it in your wallet. Which is why your future employment will start, very soon, offering a token budget.

If you have a leader, especially one in the AI space, that doesn't know about this, you shouldn't trust them.

If you have security who think it's shady, insecure and dangerous, nod adoringly, as they are right, and explain how you are doing it in a secure fashion, through an encrypted funnel, requiring manual pairing.

Though this article be but little, it is fierce.

And when you go pro, go the pro way: Mac Mini

The reason Google search made a difference in 1999 was because it made getting real, actionable information out of search faster than anything that existed at the time. It gave you the ability to isolate problems and resolve them where others were still on the call talking about what they thought the problem was.

Openclaw is a systemic, advanced, daily improvement to every element of how you work. You get things done faster. Cleaner. In a uniform way that integrates with how you think and do work. And it does so in a way you can rig up to do this FASTER. Immediately. RIGHT NOW!

In a couple years employers will probably assign you one for your jobs. So get on now and reap the early rewards.

Unless I'm wrong.

Then still do it, because it's hella fun.

Enjoy it while you can. (At least until Meta buys it and ruins it.)

Originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/try-only-openclaw-art-mills-htxzc