"A mobile app is a slow API" (for your Agent)
I've been sitting playing with and watching the development of OpenClaw over the past months. I absolutely, wholly admit to being significantly horrified at the prospect of running Claude Code with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" turned on.
That hasn't stopped me installing, challenging, testing and marveling at the power and potential of OpenClaw. I've got it installed on a VPS, quite far away from the important stuff. But, nonetheless, I have been seeing how it can (already) offer a transformative set of experiences.
Listening to Peter Steinberger's conversations with Lex led me to the title of this post. It's not a direct quote from Peter. Instead it's a summation of a lot of his commentary from this Lex clip:
For example, Peter was talking about his prediction of AI agents replacing 80% of apps. Here's a direct quote:
Why do I need my Sonos app when my agent can speak to Sonos directly?
Both he and Lex discussed, for example, the interface to the likes of Uber Eats being managed by your AI Agent, along with the prediction(s) that apps will either be operated by agents doing the clicking and tapping, or they'll simply use an API alternative.
(Note: You just know that recently, some VC somewhere has funded the next generation of API-as-a-service services to rapidly build out API infrastructure for the likes of Uber, Uber Eats, Doordash and so on.)
Essentially what Peter was arguing is that the average mobile app is simply a slow API into some kind of data or service. With a society that's already got incredibly tired with the experience of having to open apps, you might argue that many of us are already waiting for this!
The key to it all? Conversational AI interfaces.
If you're working in Conversational AI and you haven't played with and checked out OpenClaw, I think you should stop the clocks. Stop everything and go and mess about with it to develop your own viewpoints.
Start the journey at www.openclaw.ai.
Meanwhile, congratulations to Peter who has just joined OpenAI to build out their agentic strategy. Get the popcorn.
