Devstars
There’s a quote you’ve probably seen floating around LinkedIn. Usually attributed to Lenin, though nobody can actually confirm he said it. It goes: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
When ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, that was the first thing I posted. Because that’s exactly what it felt like.
I’ve been working in digital for almost 30 years. I’ve seen five genuine moments where everything shifted. And most of them, I was in the room.
My first experience of the internet arrived on a floppy disk. A piece of software called Daemon. No graphical interface. Just a blinking cursor and a command prompt, and somewhere on the other end of a phone line, the rest of the world.
It sounds prehistoric now. But at the time, it felt like someone had handed you a door to a room that shouldn’t exist.
The graphical interface changed everything. Suddenly, the internet wasn’t just for people who were comfortable with command lines. Mozilla brought it into browsers. Windows brought it to the masses. You could see it. You could point and click. It became tangible.
That’s when the first wave of people started to get it — and the first wave of sceptics started telling you it wouldn’t last.
I was working at A&M Records at the time. And I remember conversations with my boss, Osmond Eralp, about why we’d want to build a website for a band. “You’re just preaching to the converted,” he’d say. Why spend money reaching people who already know you exist?
They thought the web was a fad.
A good friend of mine’s grandfather was Ralph Edwards, who had a game show on CBS Radio in the 1950s called “Truth or Consequences”. When Ralph said he was taking the show to television in Hollywood, everyone thought he’d lost his mind. The show ran for over 30 years, and they even named a town after it.
The people who called the internet a fad were smart people. They just couldn’t see past the room they were standing in.
I was working in Los Angeles when the team behind Flash came to our office to demo it. It was called Splash back then. A room full of people, genuinely excited.
I wasn’t.
The animation was impressive. But the underlying approach felt messy to me — a proprietary solution bolted onto something that should have been open. History proved that right. Flash eventually disappeared. The principle of building things properly, on solid foundations, outlasts the flashy shortcuts every time.
Still applies today, by the way.
I remember when Google arrived. You have to understand, we were used to searching and getting back a list of pages that had paid to be there, or had gamed whatever system was in front of us. Google’s PageRank changed the rules. Relevance over relationships. Quality over cash.
That’s the moment search became a real commercial channel. And it set the direction of the next 20 years of digital marketing.
End of 2022. I posted that quote and meant every word of it.
What struck me wasn’t the technology itself — it was the feeling. That unmistakable sense that the ground had shifted. The same feeling as the floppy disk, the Mozilla browser, and Google. But faster. Much faster.
Since then, there have been dozens of updates, launches, and announcements. It’s a juggernaut. And that juggernaut has basically gone into hyperspace since January.
In January, Peter Steinberger built ClawBot. It went stratospheric on GitHub — off the charts for downloads and installs — almost immediately after launch. Then Anthropic, who could have embraced it, sent a cease-and-desist. The name was too close to Claude. He renamed it Moltbot.
Then he reached out to OpenAI. And they asked if he’d be happy calling it OpenClaw.
They didn’t just license it. They brought Peter into OpenAI and gave him everything he needed to further develop it.
OpenClaw is now, in my view, one of the most exciting pieces of software I’ve worked with in my career. It’s not simple to set up — there’s command line work involved, you want to run it on a standalone machine, and you need to think carefully about security. But once it’s running, you have a system of AI agents with distinct personalities, defined skill sets, and the ability to work together, learn, and improve iteratively over time.
I’ve written about it in more depth elsewhere — if you haven’t read the My Wife Went To London piece, that’s a good place to start.
But here’s the point. This isn’t a tool. It’s a team. And the businesses that figure that out first are going to have a significant advantage over everyone else.
I’ve seen seven revolutions. This one is different.
Interested in exploring what AI agents could do for your business? Our OpenClaw AI agent platform in Jersey is the place to start. We’re based in Jersey and work with businesses across the Channel Islands and beyond. Drop us a line and let’s have a conversation.
Tell me what you’re trying to fix. Half an hour, no pitch, no slide deck.
If we’re the right fit we’ll talk about what’s next. If we’re not, I’ll point you to someone who is.
