Did Clawdbot just open the door to AGI?
This entire weekend my social feeds have been filled with tech bros talking about Clawdbot. After scrolling past a dozen posts, I decided to watch one of them.
Usually, when someone starts yapping about vibe coding I zone out. I’m a creative and I focus more on Generative AI and how it can and will transform the arts.
However, this time the conversation went from super technical to oh this matters…A LOT. I can now see how Clawdbot is going to transform EVERYTHING that touches a computer in any capacity.
If you’re not aware of Clawdbot, it’s an AI agent that can operate your computer for you. What the tech bros on social are raving about is buying a mac mini for $599, and setting up Clawdbot on it to run autonomously on its own, with daily check-ins.
Clawdbot has PHD level knowledge on all subjects and it can operate your computer based on the instructions that you give it just like an employee would. Peter Steinberger, also known as
@steipete on x, is the creator of Clawdbot.
Clawdbot is open source so it’s free to run it. Yet you will still need to host it for about $5 - $10/month and you’ll need an AI model API (Google, Chat GPT, Claude etc…). This right here is what got the wheels spinning in my brain.
For the start up cost of $600 a month, and a recurring cost of under $100 you have a dedicated employee. This is not in 6 months from now, this is RIGHT NOW. It’s Here!
This levels the playing field between employers and employees instantly. We have been in an employers’ market for the last 3 years, and this lowers the bar so low that anyone
can start a business now for under $1000.
A guy named Chad in his studio apartment, can go buy 5 mac minis, start 5 separate businesses, see which one pops and double down on it, all for less than $3,000. On the flip side, a large company can hire a couple of employees that know how to run Clawdbots, and have them oversee 50 Clawdbots on 50 mac minis.
I’m seeing the future. A few hundred years ago, everyone owned their own business. You had the guy who was the shoe repairman in the small town, and you had the baker that made the bread, and a separate business owner that built chairs for everyone. Each person in a township was hyper specialized and you went to that craftsman. I think Clawdbot, just leveled the playing field to where corporations no longer have an unfair advantage. The near term future looks like individuals running their own agents for specialized online businesses.
So who is Peter Steinberger? From my research, Steinberger is a prominent figure in the IOS APPLE community and is known for agentic engineering. He’s based in Austria, and is very active on X and is a self proclaimed builder (as opposed to vibe coder). Peter has openly said that he came out of retirement to launch Clawdbot so that he can, as his X headline states, “Came back from retirement to mess with AI and help lobsters take over the world.”
This all sounds great, and quit utopic right? My first thoughts ran to all of the businesses I can start and run, right from my living room. I mean heck, Trust this Robot could become true to its name and be run by a Clawdbot (as of now Trust this Robot is run entirely by a human…moi).
Once I started thinking about how one individual can run their own business with a few simple check-ins a day with a Clawdbot, the wheels started turning and I also realized how gamified Clawdbots are going to become.
For better or for worse, you could get a Clawdbot and set it up to do high frequency trading in the crypto markets. Which begs the question, what does this mean for crypto? I pointed to crypto and not to the stock markets since crypto runs 24/7 and the stock market already has high frequency trading.
How about sites like Polymarket and Kalshi? You can set up a Clawdbot to bet on your behalf based on data and let it run. So how does a human who is betting on instinct fare against an autonomous agent with PHD level knowledge and access to constant real-time data?
The difference between Clawdbot and Chat GPT, Gemini or Claude is that it is proactive and not reactive. You do not need to log in and ask it a question. Instead, like an employee, you will outline the vision and the objective and it will autonomously work towards that goal.
Clawdbot stores all of your conversations and data on the computer locally, and refers back to the conversations in real-time, so you don’t have to remind it of previous requests. It is not a chatbot window, it is an active AI that is persistently working on your behalf 24/7 on a dedicated computer. How can any employee compete with a 24/7 agent?
Clawdbot is where we start to see a real tipping of power from the people who are working with AI versus the people who are not. If I can buy 5 mac minis and run 5 startups from my living room, how can John down the street compete if he refuses to work with AI…short answer…he can’t.
To be transparent, I have not set up a Clawdbot agent myself. I am in the early discovery of its existence. But, if everything I’m learning about Clawbot is true, 2026 will be the year that transforms work because of AI. How many employees at companies are going to quietly build a business in their living room with Clawdbot and then quit once it takes off? How many companies are going to hire people that are savvy in working with Clawdbot and then lay off 80 - 90 of their staff.
If Clawdbot really can do what it’s looking like it can do, my prediction is that Clawdbot is the next hype cycle of AI in 2026. If Clawdbot falls short and has a lot of challenges and errors, then Clawdbot will have been the first sign of what is to come.