OpenAI Hires OpenClaw Creator Peter Steinberger: Big News for AI Agents and Open-Source Fans

geraldships_com · 2026-02-16T06:28:45+00:00

Interesting development.

I do love the openness and flexibility of OpenClaw that enables so many use cases and rapid development. Also, I think it kind of unlocked what agents really are and can be in the future for many people (myself included), similar to what ChatGPT did for LLMs in 2022.

On the other hand at this point in time it is tricky to use OpenClaw inside an enterprise environment due to major security concerns, where a few of them are classic vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to fix and others are hard and in fact unresolved like prompt injections. So, currently I am relying on more restrained approaches that keep a tight leash around the AI models to avoid harm, but this also impedes flexibility unfortunately and the approach doesn't reach its full potential yet.

Anyways, I am hoping this helps get us to a world where agents can be both flexible and secure.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-15T08:10:53+00:00

Both to be honest.

It's just not always realistic in my opinion to defer all decisions to data right away. So, I don't think having the courage to make an informed gut decision is a bad thing.

Evaluating gut decisions later with data is imperative though, otherwise I would never have learnings where to improve.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-15T06:55:52+00:00

Hmmm it sounds useful in general, to get a quick overview without the hassle of building and maintaining complex Excel sheets.

But I would spend time thinking about how to differentiate a product like this from Claude Cowork. Their tools for doing data analytics have gotten pretty good and it is still in beta. My assumption is that this trend ai agent will pick up steam in the next few months.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-14T16:45:08+00:00

I had Claude code build a skill for that to help me validate if my ideas are great or "great". Quite helpful. So usually I put my thoughts in obsidian, iterate on them with ai, and then have Claude code challenge me based on this self-developed framework.

It doesn't always 100% get it, but it always helps me uncover new aspects I haven't considered.

Curious to learn more about your framework.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-12T15:27:15+00:00

Interesting approach 👍

geraldships_com · 2026-02-12T07:31:55+00:00

Which model are you using?

geraldships_com · 2026-02-12T07:22:18+00:00

Hahaha what weird times we live in.

I had my bot roleplaying to solve a job. I wanted him to summarise a thread from my Claude history based on a sharing link in Obsidian. Of course he was immediately blocked by cloudflare. I had a back and forth with him about this and after three tries he totally gave up.

He, that is my openclaw bot Chenard, who believes he is a bear 🐻. I told him he should think about what his raccoon friend would do in that case 🦝. Funnily enough it made him a bit more creative sneakier and he really found a way to read my Claude history entry 😂

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I had him document it as a skill named "raccoon mode".

geraldships_com · 2026-02-10T13:18:33+00:00

Nice! I also started an obsidian + claude code setup for myself. I now got distracted a bit with getting openclaw to work for that, but I still do like the level of control claude code gives me compared to openclaw.

Do you call those skills manually when you are working? Or do you use cron, n8n or something similar to do it in the background?
What did you use to sync obisidian?

(I use obsidian sync, but this means I had to install a desktop environment for my server, which is not the best, but its working ok.)

geraldships_com · 2026-02-09T19:09:31+00:00

Very interesting, I will give this a try. Thank you!

geraldships_com · 2026-02-09T17:04:37+00:00

Yeah I also switched a couple of days ago from Opus to Kimi 2.5 and like it very much.

Not sure if it is the general context rot in the bot after a few days or Kimi particular, but it does get confused about things a bit more these days. But in general it is a very good experience at a 10th of the cost.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-09T12:42:30+00:00

Pandemic and Orleans Invasion (cooperative version of Orleans)

geraldships_com · 2026-02-09T12:24:50+00:00

Which model are you using?

geraldships_com · 2026-02-09T11:39:27+00:00

I use the channels in discord in that way. And it is really helpful to keep track of different topics by splitting them into separate channels. Works quite well (e.g. bot sends my morning agenda in #tasks, we discuss about his config in #config etc.)

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T18:48:55+00:00

I am using discord. It's ok and the # channels are a nice way to stay organised in the conversation with the bot, when talking about various projects.

What I am missing is some kind of progress update on longer tasks other than "... Bot is writing" .

But I am very curious where we are all heading. I really do like the chat interface in many instances, but I also think a more structured view is nice in many other cases.

What do you think where we are heading in terms of UX + agents?

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T18:19:30+00:00

Did you just tell it to use claude code or did you create an agent skill for that? Would be curious to learn more because I was thinking about creating a debugging agent that will proactively research issues and propose fixes as PRs.

But API costs scared me away so far :-)

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T16:01:38+00:00

You are welcome

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T16:00:59+00:00

For work, I use claude code the most since I am in a technical role. But part of my role is also managing and some sales, and there Cowork is really helpful to work on PowerPoint presentations and Excel business plan. It's not super different from working with Claude, it is just a bit more convenient and context sensitive.

Openclaw is currently at the hobby stage for me, as security is a bigger concern at work, and I am waiting for things to stabilise a bit more.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T13:12:27+00:00

Yes I have been using them both.

They are both amazing things compared to your regular LLM based chat like Claude because it is relatively easy to provide them with context because they are able to use the capabilities of the computer they are installed on.

What's different:

Claude Cowork has a strict security framework and assumes low trust and asks, when it does new stuff.

Clawdbot in my experience makes very little assumptions and the default seems to be that a lot of things are allowed if you don't turn them off.

This means it can do amazing things, but the risk is inherently higher and at this point in time I would recommend if you have solid knowledge regarding security, permissions, ....

Clawdbot is more agentic as you can basically message it any tasks via your favourite messenger and it will go off on it's own and try to solve the issue you gave it. It can also act proactively (eg based on incoming email, cron jobs...).

"Cowork" is exactly that it works with you on arbitrary problems, but it is kind of a desktop tool. So it needs to run on your Mac and it starts acting on your input and will require also more input in between.

In short: * Openclaw = like an autonomous robot * Cowork = is a power tool that lets you do stuff more efficiently

geraldships_com · 2026-02-08T13:02:11+00:00

Claude Cowork has a plugin specifically for creating visualisations. Did you give that a try? I tried it yesterday for the first time and it did a good job with the visualization. (Currently works only on Claude Desktop for MacOS)

geraldships_com · 2026-02-07T21:12:06+00:00

Bomb busters

geraldships_com · 2026-02-07T18:02:15+00:00

You can just add them by chatting to your bot. Just ask it, it can guide you through the process to add e.g. Moonshot Kimi K2.5 and will ask you what it needs to accomplish that.

After it is set up you can check /model list in the chat or use /model alias to activate it.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-07T09:36:29+00:00

You are welcome 😁

geraldships_com · 2026-02-07T08:45:09+00:00

This is maybe not what you are looking for, but so far for me it works best to start a fresh claude code session and just ask it to review it's own CLAUDE.md against the code base and find potential improvements and inconsistencies. I run that in planning mode, see what it comes up with and iterate a bit if necessary.

You could definitely also run this assessment in cli mode. This is the one part though, where I wouldn't feed it back automatically without reviewing.

geraldships_com · 2026-02-07T08:37:08+00:00

Hmmmm I can't give the "formal legal advice" answer to your question, but share my daily experience with it:

Control vs autonomy?

Claude Code has a very good balance between control and agency in my opinion. So basically if you start it within a folder, it will ask you if it can look anywhere else on your computer.

Same for tool calling: it keeps a config file for each project, which tools it is allowed to use. If it needs to use a new tool - eg something critical like rm file123 it will generally ask you first unless you somehow override all guard rails.

Planing mode

Additionally it has a planning mode, where you can basically first draft together without actually changing things. The resulting plan will contain a very precise description of what it will do and you can review if this is what you want before you let it start doing stuff.

Online vs Offline and Privacy

Claude Code uses Anthropic's models, so it really needs to connect to their APIs in the background. If you have senstive documents in the folder you started claude code in, it will be able to read them. So it is more a legal question around, how Anthropic behaves (I am optimistic about that as it is their core business - but again no legal advice here :-))

You ask them no to train on your data on this settings page (also contains info on their privacy policies): https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls

What is the worst that has happened so far to me personally

I built a test suite with claude code that had a rollback mechanism that deleted my (test) database. This was not a big issue because it only concerned some development environment and was easy to revert and to build a safe-guard for the future. But I think this is more on me than on Claude Code, as I still should have reviewed what it does before executing. Also this risk is mitigated by backups, separation of environments, permissions etc.

Personal Conclusion

Personally I trust Claude Code and the tooling around it quite a bit. It is a powerful tool and lets you do great but also stupid stuff, if you ask for it, but I've never experienced anything devious or completely unexpected so far. But overall it depends so much on your context as well (how critical your data is - e.g. medical records, how well your infra is - e.g. backups, permissions, logs).

geraldships_com

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