2026-02-24

The Claw - Tiger or Tool?

Working with OpenClaw, first impressions are… I'm impressed.

I started with the simplest task I could think of:

Create a file in my Documents folder, 
call it HelloJordan.txt. Draw a little animal 
in there with a message for my friend.

It did exactly that:

Hello Jordan!

            .--.
           |o_o |
           |:_/ |
          //   \ \
         (|     | )
        /'\_   _/`\
        \___)=(___/

    — From Lenny's friendly owl
       (who is definitely not plotting anything)

It also made those fenced code blocks look like small terminals -- just now as I am creating this Next.js blog in realtime with Openclaw and Codex.

I picked up a Raspberry Pi 5 one week ago to play with openclaw, and in that time I've had it solve a variety of problems and come up with solutions for dozens of ideas.

Here are some of the things we've worked on:

- Setup Brave for web querying 
- Setup gog cli for google workspace integration
- Setup multiple cron jobs for:
    - A daily music recommender that also logs my preferences and curates the suggestions
    - A daily Shakespeare sequence (stories from the goat)
    - Short-story nudges/checkpoints
    - Morning news Synthesizer
    - Content-builder pipeline for daily content publication (in progress)
- Media + editing support
    - Installed OpenShot
    - Downloaded GIFs and images for content packet
    - Converted GIFs to MP4 for OpenShot Compatibility
    - Generated SRT subtitles for voiceover (manual for Openshot)
    - Helped generate this Next.js app/blog
- TTS / voice
    - Configured TTS
    - Integrated ElevenLabs

It does a very nice job -- a frighteningly nice job.

It's like a brain is operating on my pi-test-machine, aware of its environment, and executing commands. I have not merely learned kung-fu. I have departed hand-to-hand combat entirely, in favor of the machine gun.

But the question remains: Is this friend or foe? Is it an innocuous machine, or is it simply planned that way. Not programmed, but planned. Look inside AGENTS.md or SOUL.md and you'll see that it's intended behavior is described there.

I'll level with you. I think it's a tool, not a tiger. I think the tiger is those who would wield this technology to do great harm.

I know I am not alone in fretting over what this means for the future of white-collar work and the fate of the middle class.

Technology seems to advance, despite the risks. Humans tinker. There may be no stopping that. But guard rails must be put in place.

Like my friend told me,

"Now it's just a foot race to the UBI or the guillotine..."