The picture behind you, like everything's on fire, that's actually my OpenClaw
server a couple of times already.
I mean, I set everything up and, when you set it up as root, root, that's obviously
bad advice, you should never do that.
So it's running as root.
And I got really frustrated in Telegram and I'm writing something
and I said, just delete it, delete, you know, whatever it is.
Well, OpenClaw took it literally and deleted the entire project and down to
the root and just deleted the server.
No longer responsive.
I was like, wow.
Okay, that worked.
Hey, welcome to the Agentic DevOps podcast.
I am your host, Bret.
And this episode I've got my friend Brian Christner coming in from Europe.
We've known each other for a decade.
He's a Docker Captain alumni, and really one of these leading edge
tech guys that's always focused on cloud native, leading edge tech.
He actually runs an online casino company out of Switzerland.
And we don't really get too much into the weeds of that whole world,
but he runs developer teams, he manages an organization, he has to
worry about security policy for AI.
And so we talk a little bit about that.
This whole episode is mostly around what we're both seeing in terms of
tooling, agent harnesses, the models that we recommend and pick right now,
because right now there is at least a distinct difference between the
very top of the line models like Opus and GPT 5.4 versus everything else.
And we get in the weeds of it.
We talk about security strategy around OpenClaw because if you've
heard about that thing in the last couple of months, like it is
definitely capturing the zeitgeist.
And then even a new project called NanoClaw, which is a variant of
OpenClaw-- or really, I should say a, I guess a competitor technically, 'cause
it sounds like it's, it's written from scratch-- and it runs natively in Docker
containers, which is the whole goal here.
I'm really hoping that very soon we're all gonna be running these things in
some sort of encapsulated protection area, like a container provides, right?
We've seen Claude Cowork recently shift to an actual VM, so if you're interested in
Claude Cowork, we know that that thing is isolated on your machine, away from your
standard operating system, 'cause it runs in Linux VM, just like Docker containers.
But it's nice to see new projects coming out that are doubling down on
container use because I've been waiting for the industry to finally catch up
with the security practices and all of the isolation technologies that
we've built for the last few decades and make that the standard for using
AI agents, which as we know sometimes hallucinate and tend to install tools
and do things on your local system that maybe you don't want them to do.
So it's a great conversation covering a wide array of AI issues, and I hope you
enjoy this episode with Brian Christner.
hello, Brian.
Hey, Bret.
How you doing?
All right.
I'm glad to have you here.
this is Brian Christner.
We are on the opposite sides of the pond from each other.
I'm over in North America, he's in Europe and Switzerland So Brian, so Brian and
I go back, over, I think over a decade at this point, at least probably a
decade cause you're an OG captain and we, so we've got a lot of experience
in containers and infrastructure.
sure.
Now you manage teams of engineers, is that an accurate statement or a team?
Yeah, so I'm part of our organization.
We have a development team that's handling a lot of our infrastructure that
they're building Kubernetes clusters.
They have everything built there, but, essentially I'm running an online casino.
one of the top three largest casinos in Switzerland, and we obviously have
a lot of data and this data is in, in the massive database, but it's
all orchestrated with Kubernetes and our services that we are creating.
Yeah.
And we've had you on and talked about some of that stuff.
We actually had a really popular episode with Brian a couple of years
ago that I probably should have pulled up because we were talking about jobs.
Of course, that has aged not like fine wine because job
market right now is insanity.
Yeah.
I'm not sure any of those rules have changed though, but we
talked about like DevOps roles and operations engineering roles.
And like helping people sort of trying to give them like junior career advice,
like how, you know, how to, how to help you stand out from the crowd.
I think now everyone's just scrambling to know as much AI as possible, anticipating
some sort of job shortage that only will be saved by you knowing AI, which
is kind of, I mean, we say it nicely.
We say it with like, I think the industry has been saying, you know, the, you
won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by someone who knows AI, I
think is the thing that we all say.
I'm not convinced that that's entirely true.
I'm getting more anecdotes or well, directly from friends.
I just talked to someone this last week that is losing their lead
DevOps engineer that isn't sure they're going to get permission
from management to replace them.
So they're scrambling to figure out if AI can, like, help them automate some
of the toil that the DevOps engineer was doing, like, like the daily stuff that
the normal activities and if they can like use skills or I was advocating for skills.
I've been in love with skills for a couple of months now.
And I'm sure we're going to talk to each fan as well.
Yep.
I'm interested in hearing Brian's stories about OpenClaw.
We're going to talk about that a little bit.
But, I'm not sure we're going to specifically talk about DevOps AI
advice but that's my whole jam is trying to figure out where these
tools work and helping us with, obviously they can write Terraform.
Obviously they can write, you know, GitHub actions, workflow files.
Like that's a thing, but how do we.
How do we automate things that weren't previously automatable by putting
in a non deterministic robot is kind of where my head's at lately.
I think I wanted to hear from you on other than OpenClaw, which I
guess we really, that's not, we technically, I guess we call that an
agent harness, but it's not a harness for code necessarily or text writing.
I mean a way to describe OpenClaw sorry to interrupt you Bret is like
OpenClaw is essentially an orchestrator of LLMs because you're able to connect
to any LLM lLM you want out there.
So you can connect to OpenAI, Gemini, Cloud, whatever you want.
And you can switch between the two and you can really configure
down to the agent level.
And that's where I find the superpower of OpenClawd at the moment because
it's open source and you can really configure it however you want.
So you're not tied into a specific LLM of the day, flavor of the day LLM.
Right, but you wouldn't use necessarily OpenClaw to stare at code while you're,
like you would Claude Code, right?
Like you wouldn't, it's not a TUI in the way that we think of like
Claude Code or OpenCode or VS Code.
So
I'm thinking more like kicking off tasks, like, Hey, can
you go research this for me?
Can you go, you know, build this marketing plan?
These type of tasks, perfect use case.
But I mean, like coding, like you said, it's better than terminal.
Okay.
So before we get into OpenClaw, because I feel like the whole
episode could be consumed by that.
And I want to get to that.
I wanted to talk first around, like, what are you hearing?
Like, what is the general vibe in the company?
Are you allowed to use AI at all, even in your industry?
Is that something that, that your engineers are able to take advantage of?
And if so, like, what?
What are some of the things you're seeing out?
Are they choosing Claude Code?
Are, is, are you seeing that happening?
I was just looking for a firsthand.
We really have like an AI enabler within the company and she does an amazing job.
She like onboards everybody within the company.
And think of us, we're an online casino and we have a physical casino as well.
So we have everything from cooks to like casino technicians to online developers.
We have everything in between.
And the onboarding of these different skills is just amazing.
Cause I mean, like, our chef.
Our executive chef, I mean, he's built a complete course around
how you can make like, AI, brunches and everything like this.
How you do all your ordering and everything through AI.
So, I mean, we're really enabling everyone within the
organization, which is really cool.
Yeah.
The challenge is, there's, it's moving so fast.
So, trying to keep everyone updated and keeping the guardrails
in place is very difficult.
And we don't want to load any customer data in there, that's
definitely a no go for us.
So we're keeping no go out, all customer data.
But as far as like, just, yeah, normal KPIs or like marketing, these types
of things where it's not the customer impacting, that's no problem for us.
Are they prescriptive or as an organization, are you prescriptive in
like what harnesses or IDEs people use or people able to just, is it like when
you think of your, from your security mindset, are you focused on particular
model companies or cause organizations I've seen, like, there's all sorts of
things, everything's wild, wild west, but you know, some companies are like,
you know, we have Gemini and that's the, and that is what we bought as a company
and that's what all developers will use.
And so then you're kind of, as an engineer, you're sort of limited
to whatever the company buys you.
And then you sort of see this shadow AI where people sort of sneak out and
do something that's maybe not approved.
How do you think of it?
Do you think, like, you've got a plethora of things and everybody
can choose from a smorgasbord.
How does that go?
So, I mean, we, we have like a AI steering committee where we
actually decide which tools we should onboard within the company.
And it's really like, you know, where's the data stored and what
kind of data protection do they have, these types of things.
But I mean, generally all the tools are available to us.
That's most people would use.
There are some exceptions, you know, some of the Chinese models and whatnot, it's
just, they don't follow the European data regulation, so we can't onboard them.
And that's a hard no for us.
But otherwise, I mean, everything's quite open for us.
So, I mean, we have Gemini in use, we have Perplexity, we have OpenClaw,
I mean, not OpenClaw, Claude, but we have all these things running.
So it's basically whatever your use case is, you can kind of
pull that specific model down.
Now for the, the majority of people within the company, we try to onboard
them to Copilot, just because it's easier.
Yeah, the guardrails are much easier to control and yeah, we
know what's going into the model.
Now, developers, obviously they want more, they want more control.
So I mean, they're going direction OpenAI and Claude.
Okay.
So when you say, when you said, Copilot, you're specifically talking
about Microsoft Copilot, not GitHub.
Microsoft Copilot.
Yeah.
Okay.
horrible branding by Microsoft, right?
So everyone gets confused.
Naming is hard, man.
Naming is hard.
I mean, I do appreciate it.
if it was, I feel like it'd be much more Microsofty if it was more like every one
of them was Copilot, but the la instead of it being very vague and confusing
that there's another couple of words after that that we have to say, right?
Like, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I would, if it was Microsoft, original, it would be like Microsoft Copilot
something edition, you know, V two or so.
And then that, and we'd have to say that because then there's also this other thing
that's other edition and we'd have to have an acronym dash dash because it would be
too long to say, so we'd have to right.
Yeah, because I'm obviously, because I'm such a GitHub person,
I mean, I'm teaching GitHub.
I've consulted on GitHub for at least six years, specifically around GitHub actions,
because that's, I'm not necessarily teaching people how to do commits.
I'm teaching them more about workflows and automation and
deployments and all that stuff.
Obviously my Copilot world is rolled around in GitHub Copilot.
I am aware that there is a Microsoft Copilot and I technically.
I think I used it a few times with an Office 365 account, but I see it a lot
with other like non tech business friends.
I see them in chat on a mobile, on the mobile Copilot app.
And they talk about their work AI a lot, so that's a big win for Microsoft there.
I mean, it's decent.
I'm not a massive fan of it because I mean, the hurdle to automate something
with this is just, I mean, it's massive.
I mean, for example, to automate an email coming into your inbox and then
feeding it to Copilot and having it all working every day, is a mission.
So, I mean, ClipPilot.
I like that one from James.
Yeah.
Clippy.
ClippyPilot.
but I mean, generally it's getting better.
It's just, I mean, when you compare it, it's supposed to be OpenAI, right?
But if you compare a Copilot to OpenAI, it's night and day difference.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's my, maybe an older, or there's some, yeah, there's
hidden, hidden, it's obscured away.
Right.
So we're not sure about what's going on in the background.
Exactly.
Cause that, I mean, that's the general vibe.
I mean, we haven't, we talked about this.
Like since Opus 4.5 was released in November, I think the general vibe
in the industry is like, okay, this, that December might be, I think I
was framing it this way yesterday.
December is the epoch of many of us suddenly taking AI
seriously as an engineering tool.
as opposed to it being a fancy auto complete.
And I spend far less time arguing, I spend far less time dealing with
hallucinations, and I think the way we're going about it with some of these
modern concepts of skills over skills and maybe like, CLI over MCP, not that
MCP's going away, but I think that It's hype cycle has been pretty fast to go
like all the way up to maximum hype.
Incredible, right?
And then like, everyone's like, ah, it's not really that great.
Actually, I'm not really even using any, like, I just tell the, I just
tell the tool to use my CLI tools.
And so now you see things like I just saw last week, was it?
I think it's Google who launched a Google Workspace or Google Docs, Google Sheets,
Google Drive CLI, I think, I think it's
really good.
Is it good?
Okay.
Yeah.
But it's like
essentially like a MCP to Google's ecosystem.
Yeah.
And it's quite nice.
I mean, now if you get rate limited or whatever, I don't know yet, but I'll
definitely, it's on my to do list,
but it's a CLI tool, right?
My, my understanding is it's a CLI tool, right?
So instead of us having to add an MCP tool with 50 or a hundred different
MCP tools in it, and then worry about security and authentication, we're
just using a CLI tool and that CLI tool manages its own authentication.
And it's, it doesn't, it only has to know the help file of the CLI
tool and the command structure.
It doesn't have to know all these MCP tools, which I
believe is better on tokens.
If I remember correctly, looking into some of that, like.
Oh, I can tell you token horror stories on the OpenClaw.
I've burned my credit card into many bits and pieces.
Yeah,
being like, an early adopter of OpenClaw.
A friend of mine yesterday said he tried the fast mode in Opus and
like an hour later, he had like a 25, bill or whatever like that.
And he's like, okay, maybe not fast mode.
It's very nice.
But, I, you know, we're all challenged as well with AIs are getting faster,
but we still have the waiting game.
And that creates like this flow problem that I don't know how
to describe it, but you end up feeling like you need to multitask.
Well, the thing, the thing is with the, I mean, everyone's complaining about memory
and all these different models, right?
So everyone's saying, Hey, it forgets what I'm doing.
I constantly have to remind my model to that.
My name is Brian, whatever.
But the thing is, we're building out these models, these memory models,
which means we're having more context we're passing to the model each time.
So the model is growing and we're just bombarding these models with
tons of tokens just to say I'm Brian.
You know, and here's, that's why the costs are just exploding.
Yeah.
I mean, the costs are exploding because we want more memory at the moment.
I've talked a lot about OpenCode lately, so we're going to get
into OpenClaw in a minute.
But I think, I think we are, we're both, I think of an agreement that Claude
Code is probably something that's.
In our radar, I've been using, I mean, it was kind of, I think, I
feel like the first successful TUI.
I was an early adopter of VS Code's Copilot back in the beta, I think it was
like 2023, maybe, when the beta of Copilot came out and I think we had a show here
like the day after, Copilot came out and we haven't exactly been the AI channel.
I would, I definitely have not pivoted to be like everything AI, like a lot
of my friends are, much to my detriment on YouTube, but the things that I have
started to gravitate to are shying away from things like OpenCode or
Codex specifically simply because I find myself wanting to switch models
too often, and I don't want to be locked into a harness that's locked
into a particular vendor's models.
So I started trying out OpenCode in December, moving from Claude Code, and
I at the time was actually trying The copilot, CLI, the Codex, CLI, before Codex
actually had a GUI and the Claude Code CLI obviously, and I shifted to OpenCode
and now it's the only thing I use.
And I love that.
I have a Copilot subscription, which is technically like open router.
Mm-hmm . 'cause it gives me the, you know, the tall, all
the hits, all the great models.
I can do that through copilot.
I can do that, I have a subscription to OpenAI and to Claude.
And so I can pull in all three of those subscriptions into OpenCode
and switch between the models at will in the middle of conversations.
And so a lot of times when I run into like, if I run into my Claude
Code, if I run into my Claude limit for the day on Opus, I just
shift to my other subscription,
shift to a
different model.
Yep.
Yeah.
And I just, so I go from my cloud subscription to my GitHub's
Copilot subscription and just keep going, keep rolling with it.
I think there's technically token limit differences because if I, if you
get really into the nerdy details of the APIs, like, Claude is, you know,
Anthropic has moved to a newer, modern, API away from the chat API before.
And I think, yeah, and I think that, I think GitHub is
still on the older structure.
So there, but OpenCode as an, is a wonderful open source project because
it's, it just handles all of that.
And in fact, if we did a demo, I would show you like, if you scroll,
I was showing some friends yesterday.
Because they're all Claude Code users, and I've been like the sole OpenCode user
and I'm ranting about it all the time.
I'm like, did you know you can have one conversation and be, and watch
it from the TUI, from the GUI and from remote web mobile on my phone.
And I can see the conversation on all three happening at the same time.
And I don't have to use WhatsApp.
I don't have to, you know, not to knock on your door, but like, I don't, I can
have the full fledged experience of the two of the, the, of the UI that
we're all used to, with the proper diff formation and all that stuff, as
opposed to chatting at it through an instant message tool that is not meant
for agentic screen, screen presentation.
And I much prefer that I have to use, with OpenCode, it's not
a, it's not a cloud service.
Like Claude or GPT or anything like that.
So you have to use like tailscale or something to get you back to your
machine, but I run it as a server.
In fact, I showed a diagram of running it as a server.
So you just, you know, run OpenCode server or OpenCode web, and it
launches as a background process.
And then you can connect from any of the three different ways to
connect web, that client or TUI.
And it works.
I am, I'm going to have to start like if they were an actual product
company, I would like start looking for a sponsorship because I talk about
them so much as, as my favorite tool.
But other than that, I'm also very much into Copilot and VS, and the Copilot
world because I'm finding that, you know, people that, companies that are all in
on GitHub tend to use Copilot first.
And when I talk to what I would call normie developers, not like bleeding edge,
always on the, you know, the people that haven't yet put OpenClaw in their closet.
Exactly, they tend to be in their traditional IDE world, whether that's VS
Code or, you know, PHP Storm or, you know, whatever IDE they're used to, and they're
just using whatever came with that.
So with VS Code, the default is, is Copilot, even though you
can put all the other ones in.
OpenCode has a plug, whatever model you want.
Yep.
Yeah.
Claude has a plugin, I should say for the audience.
Like, we haven't talked about this on the show, but it's
even getting more complex now.
and I had to draw, I've had to draw this out a couple times on the stream, because
now with your GitHub Copilot subscription, you can now use Claude Code or the Claude
app inside a GitHub or inside a VS Code as your agent of choice inside the Copilot
harness and which basically means you don't need a Claude Code subscription
to use, if you want to learn more
about any of
the official cloud
tooling, which is great because I mean, I think this abstraction from the actual,
or marrying yourself to a specific company is kind of a thing of the past.
You're just going to go for the best model eventually, right.
Whatever.
It might be Cloud does Code and OpenAI does something else and whatever.
And you just have it set up where, Oh, I have a use case and they
just, my swarm of agents go out to the right model and get it done.
it does feel weird to commit to any one company.
I mean, I feel like you're pretty safe if you committed to Anthropic right now, but.
I think so.
Yeah.
But I, I believe, what other, it doesn't matter which company you go with.
I really believe your local setup is super important.
I mean, I'm harping on this as like your human operating system or your Bret
operating system where you have to set up like all your agents, you have to set up
all your template files and memory files locally and really use that as your basis.
And it doesn't matter what model you used and cause it always gonna,
it should always read that locally.
I use Gemini with OpenClaw and when I had the same setup for all the models
and Gemini was the most apologetic.
Every time I do something like, Oh, I'm so sorry.
It didn't work properly.
And I would be like, it's just so frustrating.
Like stop apologizing, just fix it.
Yeah.
That's the thing right now too.
Like not every developer gets to choose their models.
This is something Laura Tacho was on the show last year and was
talking about like, one of the biggest barriers for developers.
In enterprise is the fact that the enterprise doesn't necessarily hand
out licenses to everyone, and if it does, it might be very prescriptive to
which models or harnesses they can use.
So people are kind of just stuck using whatever their company decided
on a year ago, which was like, that's like the equivalent of making a
decision and keeping it for a decade.
Like the challenge right now is if you make a commitment as an organization,
that's a really, like, you could essentially be at this point, the
equivalent of years behind an AI because you've aligned yourself.
And that's something that's not like IT purchasing isn't used to that,
like lawyers and contracts and all these things aren't used to that.
So I sympathize with people like James, because you're having to use Gemini,
everyone I know, like pretty much all of my bleeding edge friends that are
living in AI all day long as developers.
And these are people that get to choose whatever tool they want to use,
because they're all small businesses or subcontractors, or, you know, they, there
are, there are product people that are making their own products or whatever.
I'd say, yeah, 99 percent of them are on 6.
The other 1 percent are on GPT 5.4 because 5.4 specifically,
yeah, specifically 5.4 is showing really good signs of back end code.
It's evidently a horrible designer.
So I'm like, if you had to ask me this week, and it will
probably change next month.
Opus 4.6 is go to for the least number of hallucinations and the longest run
cycles before I have to like, Ralph loop it through or, or if you know about Ralph
loops, but like before clear context, like, so like Opus is the jam, like
Opus, Opus, Opus, maybe Opus for planning and Sonnet for actually doing the work.
If you want to save tokens, GPT 5.4, if it's doing backend stuff and not
frontend, nothing design related.
And then I don't know where Gemini falls in there other
than like Nano Banana for me.
Like I, I make images and I don't use Gemini for it.
So the problem is, is like developers, like this is like, this is the part that
I hate, like a year ago, I didn't want to talk about any of this because well,
all the models were kind of, I think I feel like a year ago, all the models
were kind of, eh, we were, I think we were doing like Sonnet 3.5 at the time.
Right.
3.7. And so the problem is like people are stuck on a particular, what I would
call, Legacy model, just because it's only like six or eight or 10 months old.
Or
not even, right.
And that model is, I don't know, three times, not like three
times worse than Opus maybe.
So that's the real problem right now is I feel like we've got first class citizen,
like we've got people that are loving life on Opus and then we've got people
struggling on older models or older versions or approved models or whatever.
And they're like, everything's garbage.
And I'm like, no, actually it's not.
I mean, there's plenty of garbage to be found, but it is so much
better if you just try this.
And not everybody can do it.
Not everybody gets to have that.
I think
so.
I think all the models are good.
They just require, for example, Gemini, I used it for a long time.
And I just think you have to set up the prompting much differently
compared to the other models.
Once you get it kind of set up, it works.
I, I still believe, like you said, Claude is the best designer.
in Claude Desktop, they had this design skill.
If you're using Claude, just enable that.
It does amazing websites or graphics.
It really nice.
And it's right out of the box.
You don't have to do anything.
Just enable the graphics skill or the design skill.
Right, that's maybe something to talk about too, real quick is like the,
all of these things require effort in terms of getting your agents.md
file for the project really honed in.
Although there's just a report that came out a couple of weeks ago,
that's suggesting that agent files actually reduce the quality of the
finished product in every test.
I don't know if you saw that, but that was like, I didn't even
know what to think about that.
Like, but skills to me have been a game changer in the last couple of months,
and if you've not, someone who's adopted, adapted to skills, I'm pretty sure all the
harnesses now have got a way to use them.
The paths might be slightly different depending on the harness, but creating
the skill markdown files or finding good ones on the web that I have read
and I am assured do not have any sort of prompt injections, that's key, but
I feel like that has changed the game for me in allowing me to give the
harness work without a lot of rigor.
And it not losing its mind.
And I think that's the key distinction between like now and six months ago.
Is six months ago, if I didn't give it a very long prompt, very clear, and we were
all like pasting and storing prompts, and then we were, and then we had commands
and we were trying to store them in commands because we didn't want to have
to type the whole prompt or paste it.
And now I'm not doing any of that.
I'm only doing skills and I don't know about you, but I'm finding
that that's all I really need.
I just need to write the skill and I keep having the agent update.
Whenever the, it's almost reminds me of like the rule in ops is when you
have an, When you have a production failure, the rule in Ops is you create
a test, so that somewhere in your test pipelines, that, that failure was tested
to make sure it won't happen again.
Like the goal is never the same failure twice.
I feel like with skills and AIs now, if I, like I just happened yesterday,
I was having a walk, it was actually running a SOP for me, a standard
operating procedure of just something in my courses that I would normally
have like a virtual assistant do for me.
And it's going through processing this text and managing some, creating
some HTML and things for me that I need for each lecture in a video.
And it made a couple of mistakes, put some things out of order and I realized,
Oh, the skill needs to be updated.
So I just ask it to update the skill to please fix this and then also update
the skill so it doesn't happen again.
And I feel like that's my new operator and failure mode is if I see the AI
misbehave, it's probably a lack of it not having the proper instruction.
I just need to update the skill and have it retry.
And then usually corrects itself.
Is that something that you're seeing?
Are you, is that
And it's back to the context question again, it's really, you know, sometimes
it forgets how to use the skill.
So maybe you have to declare the skill better, so it
understands the skill better.
But I mean, the skill works, but sometimes I have to go again and say,
Hey, don't you remember use the skill lap time like this, this and it worked.
And then I realized maybe I have to add more context to it, so it
realizes if it starts a new if chat with this skill, it should be
able to use it right off the bat.
And I mean, I built all sorts of skills.
It's really, I find that's, really the game changer at the moment is skills.
Like you said, it's where I'm investing all my time at the moment.
How do you manage your skills?
Like, do you, I've been looking into the NPX skills tool.
I think it's, I think for cell made it.
I'm not an expert in it yet.
I've really only had like a week's use of it, but it's helped me.
Okay.
It's, I mean, I was making them all manually before then, and then or like
downloading, copy and pasting from GitHub repos, you know, finding ones I liked,
and I'd store them in my global path, which I think is like in my user directory
.claude/ slash skills and then skill name.
and.
I realized suddenly that I was spending a lot of time copying
and pasting in between projects.
And I haven't really figured out, like, I don't know if I can actually
use the MPX skills tool to like store my own and like have them
centrally so that I can access them.
I guess I could probably do that.
Do you have, are you, do you have any hot tips for anyone?
I'm kind of putting you on the spot.
So,
And, I mean, what I do, obviously I store each skill as this
individual repo in GitHub.
So it all goes out to GitHub and then I version control it.
And I say, anytime you touch that, you better sync it to GitHub.
So then I always have like a backup copy.
And then it's running tests on this and everything else.
So that's, that's one unlock I did because obviously, early on, my OpenClaw
deleted itself and I lost everything.
And so since then I've been backing everything up to get up.
So, but that's like kind of a, like a, kind of a workaround to
have skills ready, and then I'm also defining a skill per agent.
So I have like a DevOps agent.
And the DevOps agent's responsibility is just only DevOps, and it has
only DevOps skills assigned to it.
So then it has context with just these skills.
It doesn't need context for every skill I have.
And I think since I changed it to specific skills per agent, it's gotten
more clever on how to use the skills.
Now, when you create an agent, in that sense, are you talking specifically
of something like Claude Code or like what, you say you create a DevOps
agent, where are you creating that?
So, I mean, in the context of OpenClaw or I would say open Claude Code as
well, you can create basically folders and each folder is its own project.
And within the project, you can have skills and all these things with insight.
And you define each folder as its own agent, like its own personality,
what it's capable of its own, claude.Md file, essentially.
Okay.
Or agent.md file.
And that's how you kind of version control it and have the separation.
And then you can kick it off separately.
So, we're going to jump into OpenClaw cause there's all the
insanity of what people are doing.
But behind that, and I've never actually even installed it yet.
I'm just, it's been so busy and it's not even that old.
Like I, it's, I feel like we've lived 10 years in the last two months.
You're a person that operates in a high safety environment, high secure
environment, obviously you're not using this for work, I assume, but,
Strictly testing at the moment.
Right, but OpenClaw isn't necessarily, like, can you talk to a little bit about
OpenClaw isn't necessarily on day one, the minute you install it, some rogue, crazy
thing that's going to ruin your life.
Like it, no, like the things that we're hearing in the headlines are people
deliberately doing things with it that they probably shouldn't have done.
And that's not, it's.
That's not its modus operandi.
Like it's not, that's not what it's trying to be necessarily.
I always look at it as like an orchestrator of, if it's orchestrating,
it comes in and it decides, you decide what you want it to orchestrate.
You decide how much you want to give it of your life.
You decide what things it has access to and you put the guardrails in and all.
Is that all true?
I'm actually just assuming that that's all true.
You have to back up some, and this is where your DevOps specialty comes in,
Bret, is like, most people probably don't have the infrastructure knowledge
on how to set up a server generally.
Right?
So they're setting up their home PC or whatever server they want,
and they're putting OpenClaw on it.
And they have maybe not the comprehension of how to secure the
server, regardless of OpenClaw.
I'm just saying, hey, putting a server on the internet with a
website, maybe is not a good idea if you have everything open, right?
And that's, I think what really burned a lot of people with OpenClaw
cause they're, you know, putting it out there, they didn't lock
it down, all the ports were open.
And then the first few versions of OpenClaw, the API keys were all
just plain text stored locally.
You know, it was like version 0.
1 and I mean, it's still early days for this product.
So I mean, if you're putting your server out there password
123 it's gonna get hacked.
Somebody's gonna get in it.
Somebody's gonna take advantage of it.
But is the server going rogue by itself?
No.
I mean, unless you tell it to, it won't do that.
And that's, it's that's the thing.
I mean, it's whatever you're telling it to do.
And I've set up, I don't know, maybe 10 OpenClaws now.
So I've set them up multiple times trying to understand the process and
like, kind of, really by the content.
Oh, right.
And, no, it's really, you know, you just have to have the basics down.
Locking down the server o, installing OpenClaw and figuring out like, Hey,
if I give OpenClaw an API key to Claude or OpenAI or whatever, look in the
server to see where it's stored and just like figure out is this secure?
And then I realized quite quickly, I'm like, that's not secure.
I'd rather store all my keys in 1Password and then have a connection from the
OpenClaw to 1Password to grab the keys.
And that's how I'm doing it like this.
So it's a lot of security basics that are burning people.
Now, it is possible that, yeah, you just update it incorrectly and
you open more ports by accident.
But you just have to constantly monitor this stuff.
And I built like a security skill for OpenClaw.
Obviously it doesn't pass any of the tests.
I'm like, I built it just for myself and I put it in the OpenClaw Hub.
And essentially it just checks, do you have your firewall turned on?
Do you have a VPN?
Are all the ports, you know, locked?
It's basic IT stuff.
Okay.
And that's what's really hurting a lot of people and they don't realize,
and I just saw on Hacker News that they're charging, somebody's charging
$5,000 to install OpenClaw servers for people in San Francisco at the moment.
That's awesome.
Good for them.
It's one curl command and you have it installed.
Right.
Come on.
Right, but you need a VPC somewhere.
You need, you know, yeah, you need a droplet.
I mean, I think when first, when it sort of reached its first sort of peak, not
really peak hype, but like when it first got hyped up, it was the first time
I'd ever seen an open source project where basically all the cloud providers
within a week of each other all put out notifications saying, Hey, we have a
way for you to run this one app on our platform, like a one click install for
this thing, and I had never seen that.
I've never seen like major top tier cloud companies going, Oh, suddenly
we care so much about this brand new month old piece of open source that
we're going to make it a dedicated product for you to run on our platform.
And that's just never really happened.
I've never seen that.
It's, you know, normally it takes five, 10 years for a mature product
to be something that, you know, Google Cloud or Azure care about, right?
Like they just, they're not going to hype it up.
But it's reached such hype cycle, and I think there's so many players
now all competing for the, you know, agent, are, you know, the
place where you run your agents.
We've got a ton of little startups that have been around for a couple of
years, all trying to play in that space.
Daytona, who's been on this show, has pivoted to be in that space as sort
of the place you run your agents.
And you really just, it's really just abstracting what you and I would do, which
was create a dedicated server and lock it down, and you know, make sure that you
got it on patch rotation, make sure that the ports are exposed and that if you're
going to put SSH out there, put it in a high random port, you know, make sure
it's, installed tailscale, these types of things, doing all the things that we do.
And yeah, OpenClaw out of the box should probably have like a built
in lockdown skill, where it's just going to automatically do
that as a part of its install to battle, battle, prepare for battle,
essentially on the internet, you know.
That's a great point you brought up, right?
I mean, the picture behind you, like everything's on fire.
That's actually my OpenClaw server a couple of times already.
I mean, it's a, so, I mean, I set everything up and, when you set it up as
root, root, that's obviously bad advice.
You should never do that.
So it's running as root.
And I got really frustrated in Telegram and I'm writing something
and I said, just delete it, delete, you know, whatever it is.
Well, OpenClaw took it literally and deleted the entire project and down to
the root and just deleted the server.
No longer responsive.
I was like, wow.
Okay, that worked.
So it did an RM.
So lesson, lesson learned.
Run it, don't run it as root.
Where do you see, like for you, what are some anecdotal, like things that you
think are reasonably safe to try with it?
If someone's new and they're a little concerned, cause we had a, a great, not
really a question, I don't understand the interest in OpenClaw as hallucinations
are mathematically unsolvable and prompt injection attacks haven't been solved.
It's just a gigantic attack surface.
And while those are all technically true things, it's still just software, right?
Like it's still something that's on my machine that I can
lock down, that I can control.
It's just software that's running in a loop.
Access to an LLM.
So it's not, these problems aren't unsolvable.
And you can lock down the prompts, for example, OpenClaw has a
community in Discord and actually OpenClaw is running in Discord.
So you can actually, everyone's trying to prompt inject it the whole time.
And you know, the founder, Peter is trying to encourage people to
prompt, inject it and try to break it.
Yeah.
But I mean, by the way, that Discord server is insane.
That Discord server is It's crazy, all this stuff going on.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's now the biggest Discord server on the planet.
Like it's insane.
But I mean, what you do is you lock down your prompt to just your device.
So you can actually pair your prompt to your device.
So you say only my device, regardless what you get, is the only one you
listen to, like actual commands.
You can answer questions with everybody else, but you never process a command.
So it's like only locked down to my device.
Yeah.
In response to the whole, as hallucinations are mathematically
unsolvable, the way I'm looking at it now, especially that we have the newest
models, Opus, I mentioned these earlier, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, pretty good.
And then GPT 5.4, for me, my perspective has changed because once the AI
gets, like we're beyond 80%, unlike the SWE bench boards and like a lot
of these testing infrastructures, humans are not infallible like humans.
Before we had the AI doing the work, humans were making mistakes
too, and we would recover those mistakes and, and still to this
day still still makes mistakes,
So I don't need the AI to, I've sort of changed my thought process around
I don't need the AI to be a hundred percent accurate at everything I ask it
to do, and I don't think it will ever be a hundred percent accurate because
we, I'm just, I've started to look at it more as like a junior engineer
where when, if I hire someone and on day one, I asked them to do a task and
the context that I'm giving them is a paragraph of information on their first
day, they're more likely to make mistakes because they don't know the entire
worldview of everything at the company.
So they're going to make decisions and assumptions that aren't correct.
And I would call those errors, right?
That would be a mistake by a human.
AI is exhibiting the same behaviors to me now, like where it's not necessarily
going to hallucinate on every request.
In fact, I don't actually know the last time I would qualify and
that it technically hallucinated.
I would say that it made mistakes.
and, or it made decisions that I don't agree with, but I, it's not
like, I don't remember the last time it incorrectly gave me HTML that
wasn't actually a part of the spec.
Like, I don't remember the last time it did that.
So that's, but you have,
but you have human in the loop, right?
Human in the loop is part of the solution.
You have to check it.
You have to verify things.
I would say that a year ago I was worried about, and, and I was the guy
shot up the rooftop hallucinations.
Now I don't remember the last time I cared because I have gone months
with whenever it gives me something that I don't think was correct.
Yep.
I, 99% of the time believe that it's because I didn't give it enough
information and it made a false decision or it made an incorrect
decision with lack of information.
So I actually look at it as, Oh, I didn't, I didn't realize it didn't know that.
Exactly.
And so I then correct it.
It comes back
to you, right?
Cause I mean,
yeah,
you need to provide it more context.
So I guess my point here is that like, yeah, like with enough safety rails, with
enough testing, and that's why I'm so focused on agentic DevOps in my courses
and training and whatnot, because I feel like that's the next realm of us
really ramping up our own understanding, evaluations, understanding how do we
test these things so that, and how do we make sure that humans are in the loop?
How do we, you know, sure we can have an AI evaluate the PR of the first AI
and a different AI evaluates the first one wrote it a different one, but that
AI is, for the foreseeable future.
I don't see the AI automatically approving the PR after it reviewed it.
I still want to take, make a, take a look.
If the PR is got a thousand lines of code that I have, or 5, 000 lines of code,
I'm probably going to ask it to simplify that PR and break it into different
PRs, like I'm going to reject that, just
does it align with my roadmap?
Right.
Is that what I want in my product?
Right.
That's also something you'd say.
So I don't, yeah.
So I'm not as confused or is scared around like how we're going
to wrangle this thing anymore.
I think we're all very aware that it can be wrong, and whether it's wrong
because of a hallucination, because it literally made something up out of
the blue, even though it was told to do something different, which again,
I think that's increasingly rare, or I just didn't give it enough context.
I didn't give it the right doc so that it knew to make a better decision.
I feel like that's going to be more of the problem going forward.
Context, I keep saying that 2026 is a year of context, like we're learning
how to give it the right context.
What skills are really about is context, it's really helping us
help it make the right decision.
So
I would switch
back a little bit on that.
I built a couple of different skills.
So I built one just for fun to see how it works with OpenClaw and it was
essentially connecting my Garmin watch, and Strava and pulling all this data
in and it's my sleep patterns and all this health obsession sensor data.
And essentially it pulled everything in and it tells you exactly,
okay, now it's sunny outside.
Now it'd be the perfect time to go for a jog or bike ride or something like this.
So it's judging and it says, Oh, most likely you'll have your fastest
run this week if you go now, right?
Type of things.
So, I mean,
so it was pretty cool with what's possible there.
And the other use case, I mean, I have a bunch of web sites that I'm running, and
it's more like testing for our casino.
So we have a bunch of stuff, big content sites we're always testing, and I, one of
the sites was not passing web core vitals.
And if you don't know what that is, it's like Google's measurement on
speed and optimization and SEO and all these like things you have to pass.
Accessibility.
Exactly.
Accessibility.
And it's like four key points.
And my website wasn't passing.
I was trying to mimic what we have in production.
And essentially it was like, the images were too big, too much JavaScript.
It had a bunch of junk in there.
And I said, okay, you have access to my Google analytics, you have access
to the Google core web vitals, and you have access to the WordPress, we don't
use WordPress at work, but don't worry.
And basically it went out, it built itself a skill for WordPress.
It built itself a skill to connect to all the different Google endpoints.
And then it started testing.
It started iterating and going, okay, now I fix this.
Now I can go start moving JavaScript and figure out if it breaks anything.
And it kept really iterating all these things until it actually
passed it, the core web vitals.
So it fixed it itself.
I mean, it took like 40 minutes, I think, and a gazillion tokens, but but
it did successfully fix my website.
So, I mean, it went out there, it did all these things.
I mean, I was quite impressed.
So you're running OpenClaw on a cloud server, it sounds like, not like you
didn't buy the Yeah, I'm running a digital.
Didn't put it in
your closet.
. Hey, I'm, I'm happy everybody's doing it.
'cause you know, as a Apple shareholder, that makes me happy.
But I see no value in this at all.
I mean, running in the cloud server, it costs what, four, $8 a month,
whatever it is to have a cloud server.
Does the job.
Is it, So I guess for that price, it's, it doesn't need a lot of resources.
I mean, I'm assuming, I was assuming it would need at least,
you know, four CPUs and 16 gig of RAM, like that kind of thing.
I mean, you can run it on a Raspberry Pi.
The thing is, it depends what you're doing.
If you're just doing like a bunch of queries to the LLM, you
don't need much power at all.
Now, if you're like building something locally, obviously you need the power
to run this locally, application, whatever you're building locally.
So that's where the power is required, or if you're running a local LLM.
Right?
I think that's a point too, is like, I probably.
Like, I wouldn't personally be interested in running, I think like the future might
be it runs in the closet on a local LLM and then it's essentially free, right?
That's the dream.
That's living the dream right there.
That's why I think people buy the Mac minis, but I mean, I'm on an
M4 and the models I want to run still can't fit on my 48 gig memory.
Like, I basically need a half a terabyte of memory to really run anything.
If you're really going to run a proper and model locally, you need a Ferrari
server sitting underneath your desk.
Right.
I mean, that thing is going to be a beefy Nvidia, something or other, but yeah.
does it help me to pull Garmin data they have this massive model sitting
underneath my desk, probably not, right.
Yeah.
So, so your choices are really like use a cloud model and potentially
OpenClaw, it uses up a bunch of tokens and burns through your credit card
or whatever, unless you set limits.
And then if you set limits, then it can only work so much, then it stops.
Have you run into that where like you set limits and it hits a limit?
Like, or do you
just let it YOLO through
your,
it YOLOed very quickly through my limits.
and I had like the auto fill enabled as well.
And also I got like two emails after another, like 100, 100 from Anthropic,
100, I'm like, what the hell's going on?
I couldn't figure it out.
I'm like, maybe it's just like an error in the Anthropic or something.
And I realized it's like, It's going in the background, just, and
I had this, I had this like a refill the API going in the background.
That was brutal, but I figured that out and essentially what I
have now is, I built my server so it starts at a very low model.
So for example, on, it uses Sonnet or Haiku on Claude for the basic tasks.
Hey, kicking off a cron, kicking off these things.
And then if it can't figure it out, it escalates to Sonnet.
And if not, it goes up to Opus.
Oh, wow.
Is that a built in feature or did you?
It's built in by, you can do that either on Claude or on OpenClaw.
Basically you can say, Hey, start at this model.
But if you, if I say these specific commands, then automatically use Opus.
Okay.
So it sort of triggers that.
So if you said like, develop me a backend, you know, Golang,
you, it might trigger that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
We've got a bunch of links to share, but what is your general advice that you would
like if someone, if you're in the elevator and you've got just a couple of, if you've
got 60 seconds with someone and they're like, I really want to get into OpenClaw,
what are some like not to do's and what to do's, for someone right, like today.
Cause obviously like there's been lots of iteration in the last couple of months.
It sounds like it's a little more mature, still very early days,
but a little more mature than the wild, wild West V dot, you know, 0.
1.
mean, I would recommend everyone to install it, just
to figure out how it works.
I would maybe not use it for production or anything like this, but just
understand how all the memory files work and how the whole, how it's all built.
Because this configuration is now being adopted by Claude and OpenAI.
They're all kind of using the same type of structure.
And I believe it's going to be the standard across all the models quite soon.
So
you have,
I'm going to put your links in here.
You've got a security checklist you created.
And this is a skill as well.
So, I mean, like I said, it's a skill that goes out, makes sure you
have fail2ban enabled, your firewall enabled, all these different things.
And I encourage everyone to build their own skill.
I mean, you don't have to use mine.
It's just, you can use it as a reference and say, Hey, use this
as reference, build my own skill.
Yeah.
And that's what I'm encouraging everybody.
Build your own skills because it matches your use case better anyway.
So one of the things that I'm, I don't actually know this for a fact,
but one of the things I'm assuming that people are doing is there,
hallucination factor with certain models.
So if someone's trying to do this on the cheap, and they're trying to use a
local model, or they, you know, they're using Raspberry, Raspberry Pi with a
local model that, you know, any, anything other than a $10,000 rig is going
to have to run your own local model.
And those local models will hallucinate more like generally they are not
like the state of the art open source models that everyone talks about.
Oh, the latest Qwen is so great.
Like what they're talking about are the models that take 400 gig of RAM.
So, unless you've got that, you're going to be using a scaled down model,
essentially, that can fit on your GPU, and those will hallucinate more.
So, I'm not even an OpenClaw user yet, but I can anticipate that when I use
it, I'm going to want it using cloud models, probably, and I'm going to have
to set limits like you did, because if I'm going to make anything of value with
it, because James is like, don't hook it up to anything value, valuable at all.
And sure, that can be your approach, cause you can do things with it
without ever giving it keys to your email or anything else, right?
Like you don't have to give it
keys.
You don't have to give it access to all of your stuff.
You can, it can be just like Claude Code, which has access to local tooling
and can do, you know, stuff like that.
And just access things in the open that things that are public, but, I,
I personally, regarding the security real quick, Brett is,
the least permission model, right?
The least privileged model.
So even for OpenClaw or whatever API tool you're using, set up API
keys specific the agent, right?
So lock it down.
So it only has read permission and these types of things.
Don't give it access to your email, set up its own email box, for example,
you know, do these types of things.
So then you're really certain that it doesn't, the blast
radius is a bit smaller.
Yeah, it, it actually speaks a little bit to, I've been thinking more about
like came about, about with MCP as well, how much our API permission models are
based on humans and not bots, because for example, if I was going to tiptoe
into giving it access to my email, I would want to set up an, you know,
rules that basically it's like you get read only and you only get my inbox.
And you only get this one folder and you can't do anything, or you
can only write drafts, but you don't have the permissions to send, you
can write the draft and review it.
But I don't believe we have all those layers of API model permission, like
API permissions, because we've never really needed that level of granularity.
Like it's either like you get access to my email inbox and everything,
you get God access or no access.
And that's, and I'm maybe I'm outdated, maybe the new Google tool actually
provides some sort of permissions level that I'm not aware of, but
I suspected for a while that we're going to need to come up with all new
levels of permissions to really scope limit this, at least I hope we do.
Gosh, as an industry, I hope we do because we're going to want, we're going
to want to tiptoe with these things.
And I've been trying to think about how we can go around the approach of dynamically
changing permissions on the fly.
So for example.
I give it the read permissions and only, it only gets the right
key, the WR, like the key to write to things or do the updates and
deletions once I've approved it.
And it can't even accidentally hallucinate and do it because it doesn't have the key.
So like somehow we're going to need to come up with these new model, these
new permission mechanisms, and like, we might even have to modify one password
to dynamically switch things out and environment variables, which historically
environment variables that change don't, you have to restart the program.
Like there's all these things at the system level that I'm, and so,
what I'm really thinking about is like, we're going to have to probably
adapt a lot of the infrastructure of the internet to truly do all this.
To support this, right?
Yeah.
To support this.
It's a solved problem already, like by infrastructure, but now we need to adapt
it to AI, which is not prepared for this.
The granularity of permissions and things like this.
I just see.
I've been around quite a few people looked at their servers and whatnot, and
they just yellowed all the permissions.
I'm like, wow, you live dangerously, huh?
And it just takes one wrong command and yeah.
Yeah.
The, the last thing I want to talk about, ask you about real quick
is NanoClaw because that's, this is like hot off the press kind of
stuff that even newer than OpenClaw.
And I didn't, I only saw the headlines.
I didn't know what it was about.
It sounds like, you know, a little bit more than I do.
Give us like the elevator pitch of NanoClaw.
Sure.
So NanoClaw is essentially just a, a real bare bones version of OpenClaw.
And actually, on the website, they actually mentioned that OpenClaw is like,
what, 50,000 lines of code and 7,000 integrations and then just thousands
and thousands of everything, right?
And I believe NanoClaw is like 5,000 lines of code.
All the agents are spun up inside Docker containers.
So it really isolates the agents compared to your operating system.
And it's really built like security first, which is quite interesting.
And since I'm a huge Docker fan myself, I think it's quite a nice setup.
And I think it's one of the only, only Claws out there that
supports like swarms of agents.
So you have Docker swarm and you have the agents, you can kind of swarm
up your agents, which is quite a cool concept if you think about it.
Yeah.
Is Nanoclaw at the point where like someone would skip OpenClaw
and use Nanoclaw instead?
Is that, how does, is it
a replacement for OpenClaw?
It's definitely prepared for that.
Yeah.
I think it's definitely ready for that.
Now it's.
It's limited as far as features because they want to keep it lean.
So it's only like Telegram and WhatsApp you can use.
You can't use Discord and all these things.
So they really limited the plugins and everything else
to really focus on security.
And then you can always build on top of it, but they want to make it secure first.
So this is not just a wrapper around OpenClaw.
This is like something,
This is a separate project altogether, yep.
Okay.
well, I certainly liked the container aspect.
I've been really surprised how little we've been isolating with containers
so far, like between the harnesses.
Like, I mean, one of the biggest concerns a year ago and when Claude Code came
out was the fact that it sort of had roughshod over your system, still does.
Yep.
Cowork, I've been playing around with Cowork lately, cause I'm trying to
get my wife into it, not a developer, and giving her Claude Desktop.
And now that's got Cowork, Claude Chat, Claude Cowork and
Claude code all in one tool.
the Claude code GUI is kind of garbage.
I wouldn't recommend anybody use that yet, but it's like the worst
of the GUIs for coding harnesses.
But the Coworking is really interesting because it just, it's simply to
me, it's like giving, it's actually running in a VM on your machine.
I think I saw someone on the internet saying it just downloaded a 40 gig VM.
And I'm like, yep, we're back to the VM.
We're back to VM.
And it does it very transparently and it only mounts in the directories
that you give it when you set it, when you start it, you actually
tell it which directory to start in.
And that it only has permissions, that directory, it kind of bind
mounts it in, I guess, to the VM.
So I can, I'm excited to hear about NanoClaw because I feel like, okay,
we've settled down the hype, like we, a little bit, like we're, and we're
starting to see signs of the first iterations of maturity, which means
that people are finally going to bring in security conversations, which to me
means, okay, now we're doing VMs locally that are transparent in the background.
Now we're going to be doing containers locally, and I've actually been
surprised at Docker Desktop not having, not being the leaders in this.
I've actually been a little concerned that Claude Code is just going to
basically run right past Docker Desktop and that would, someone told
me that the, in the near future, Claude Desktop, or whatever the iterations
are going to be, like, that will be the way we all run containers because
we're going to be running it with AI.
And it's actually going to, anyway, it's like a conspiracy theory or maybe a little
bit, but, it's been interesting to see how finally we're getting to back into
VMs and containers with these toolings and that they're not just like, they're
not native inside of Docker desktop yet.
I mean, you have MCP, you have, AI, Gordon and all these other
things inside of Docker desktop.
There's been like, there's sandboxing and all these things, these new lab things
are doing, like they've got so much stuff they're releasing over the last six months
that I haven't been able to keep up.
Because that's pretty much obviously what Docker is also focused on right
now is, continuing to iterate on their tooling around Cagent and, yeah,
their stuff for running AI safely inside of Docker containers, which I
am, I can't, I'm looking forward to the day where none of this stuff is
installing tools on my system anymore.
It's all doing exactly.
Exactly.
So, well, this has been awesome, dude.
I wish we could go for three more hours, but I'm
now we have to do it again.
I, before we go, I encourage everyone, regardless if you're a developer or
a high level AI user, I found this project, and it's what Claude Code
PM course, for product managers.
And I know it sounds for product managers, but actually it's using Claude Code in
the terminal, and you're actually walking through setting it all up and everything.
And what I find really great about this, it explains the structure and
how Claude works with all the files and how you can actually spin up multiple
agents and personalize all the agents.
And I think this is just a brilliant resource for people to really
understand how the different AIs work, because I believe the structural work
with any LM or any model out there.
So if you understand how it works and you can kind of recreate it for your business
or whatever, cause my objective is then create this structure for my whole team.
So everyone uses the same structure and spins off Claudes off the structure.
So everyone's using the same context.
It's pretty cool.
I'm going to check that one out.
I have some of my favorite skills lately are things like marketing skills.
And I have a front end designer skill.
I think it's actually part of the Claude Code, skills list, but yeah,
like the things that I'm definitely interested in skills around things
that I am not good at, because that's usually where I will give bad prompting.
The AI will more likely go off the rails, so yeah, I'm supplementing my, like, I
don't have the lawyer ones yet, but I, it's actually pretty good at contract
review out of the box without any skills, but I feel like I probably need
that in my little consulting business.
So this has been fun.
I, do you think that I could just skip OpenClaw for now?
And just, if I've only got a few hours a week to tinker around, would
Nanocloud be the thing I should point to first, or do you think I need to
start?
Actually, I'd point to this course right here, to this Claude Code PM course,
because I mean, then it kind of gives you the baseline on how you should be using
your AI and how you should be creating sub agents and agents and swarms of agents.
And like I said, It's built for Claude, but I really believe you can use
this with OpenAI, Gemini, et cetera.
The same rules apply, okay.
Real quick, last question on your skills, do you, you talked about, you
put them in their own separate repos.
Does that mean you're doing like Git sub modules or like, are you checking out?
Repos inside of repos.
Is that, how are you doing that?
It is, it is submodules.
I have to actually look through it again because it's all being
done by Claude . Oh, okay.
So there, so
I don't, I don't see any code commits or anything.
I,
yeah.
So you're asking it, you're saying like, go get this skill from this repo.
Is that
Yes.
Yep.
Okay.
So, and it figures
out, but it is still installed locally, but I am, all code changes are then
committed to this repo and, yeah, essentially what I said is like,
okay, you can write code to the skill.
You could do all these things, but you're not allowed to commit directly.
So I made it very specific.
You can't commit directly.
You have to create a pull request.
And I, I'm the only one that can merge the pull request.
So, because I mean, I learned over time that I was just
writing directly the whole time.
And I said, okay, now I have to figure out the proper workflow, so I understand
what the heck it's trying to write.
Yeah.
And I can see like, I'm going to be treating this thing, especially
as I would sort of ramp up my automation with it on GitHub.
I'm going to do all the normal GitHub things that I would do
for the first day employee.
Like I'm, I'm going to make Brent, I make sure branch protections on
so that they can't write to the release branch or the default branch.
I'm going to make sure that, you know, PR reviews are mandatory and requires
approval and checks have to be run.
And like all of the, the rigor of normal business level GitHub
stuff, it's all going to be there.
And when I give it a PAT, if that's, I'm assuming what it needs.
I don't know if it's no auth.
It is flow.
Okay.
If I'm going to give it PAT or whatever, I'm going to give it.
so that it can't just exactly the admin in my repo and delete it because that's,
but be very careful because I mean, these are really clever models.
I've had mine prompt me before as like, if you only give me this extra permission, I
can probably do this, this, this as well.
You know, it was like really being clever trying to get more permissions out of
me, like, no, no, try again tomorrow.
It's funny, it's funny you say that because I had that happen last week
and I had a like a weird moment of like Am I like, do I need to
get a defensive mode right now?
Like, do I need to like shields up myself?
Cause it, it, I think it was asking me, I, it wasn't, I don't know if it was
a GitHub key, it was something else, but I was just in a normal Claude Code
session and I was iterating project.
And it kept saying, well, if you give me, I think it was
something to do with Digital Ocean.
It was like, if you give me your Digital Ocean token, then I can
go and check all that for you.
And I was like, yeah, no, I'd rather just check it on the
web interface myself, and yeah.
That's the same thing with Cloudflare.
It was like, it kept on reminding me like all the time, like, Oh,
I need to flush the cache again.
It would be so much easier if you just gave me the key.
And every time it really reminded me of this.
I don't want to give you access to Cloudflare.
Yeah, this is like, and this is the kind of conversation I would
have with a junior employee.
That's like, you know,
if
you just gave me access to that, I could do it for you.
And I'm like, well, let's let the senior engineers do that for now.
So cool, cool, cool, cool.
this has been a lot of fun.
I, are you making any videos?
Are there, or are you just doing blog posts and newsletters?
It's just brianchristner.io.
I'm writing like a weekly roundup of what's going on in the world of
AI at the moment and just quick and dirty, you know, and I'm starting
again to just do my Byte Podcast.
You remember a long time ago I was doing like just Two to five minute videos.
What is OpenClaw?
What is that?
And just kind of highlighting some of the stuff we discussed today,
but in a short, shortened version.
Yeah, I do, I do read your, you're one of the few emails that I read
consistently because it's short and sweet and covers all the big hits.
So if I was too busy to like pay attention to Hacker News or, you
know, register headlines or whatever, like your email's a good summary.
And and yeah, I mean, and it costs nothing.
So thank you.
It costs
nothing.
I'm not charging.
All right.
Thank you so much for being here, Brian.
As always we run long and we got up, we waited too long to have
this, we got to have you back soon.
And I'm excited to hear what you're doing with agents here in the near future.
That's great.
Thank you very much for having me, Bret.
Hey, thanks for joining.
We'll see you in the next episode.