I remember the old days building my website, when the term 'vibe coding' had not been coined yet. The release note from back then feels laughable. The workflow is stone age compared to today's standard.
Fast forward to this past week, and wow, it has changed. OpenClaw came along, and I have been glued to the screen every day after dinner. The last time this happened was probably when I was playing Elden Ring. Working with different AI tools is literally more addictive than playing a 10/10 video game. Every 'one more tweak' turns into 2 a.m. The high comes from how much raw potential is unlocked right now.
Quick snapshot of my current setup:
My bot (Mando OS, named after my dog) runs on a VPS and quietly powers a bunch of my daily chaos in the background: it autocompletes my TickTick to-dos across writing sprints, research rabbit holes, and random CRM busywork so nothing slips; fires up my personal chatbot instantly whenever I need a quick back-and-forth; organizes my hundreds of scattered book notes and quotes so I can actually find that one insight from months ago; spits out real-time usage stats while I experiment with different APIs and burn through tokens; and soon it will evolve into proper live tracking that dumps clean, deterministic data straight into a database instead of me manually logging everything.
I'm also enabling my Discord server to hook my bot up to chat with my friends' bots, just to watch them vibe off each other and see what weird emergent stuff happens.
Super fun. Stupidly addictive.
But the real realization this week was the mental upgrades. Three big ones stood out.
It's Accelerating
For a regular builder like me, the tools we have now let you go from a vague thought to a working thing stupidly quick.
I'm deep in spending-as-tuition mode: Claude Code, Codex desktop, Claude API, Kimi K2.5 API, Grok Heavy, Cursor, Figma professional plan, a VPS, and probably Supabase next. The cost adds up, but the ROI is wild.
That 'idea to reality' loop has felt compressed for years, but right now the curve is steeper, and the derivative is growing. New models (US, Chinese), tools, AI news, and their aggregators... everything is compounding.
Side projects used to keep me in the game, but now it's legitimately hard to keep up, and that rush is exhilarating.
I'm the bottleneck
The tools are outrunning my brain.
Everything now processes in parallel like crazy. They ship features in minutes, and need my judgment constantly.
Meanwhile, I've got one attention span, finite hours, and one set of eyeballs. My mental capacity, focus, and decision making are suddenly the hard limits holding everything back. This is the first time I've felt this clearly.
But being the bottleneck felt amazing. That exact flood of parallel ideas and instant execution is why I'm never bored or distracted. It's like the world finally built a setup that matches my ADHD (illustrative, never diganosed). There is always something shiny and moving, with no downtime. It felt empowering and humbling at once.
Positive Bubble
I geek out about this stuff at work and with friends and get blank looks half the time. "OpenClaw? What's that?" We're so deep in the early-adopter echo chamber that most people haven't even heard the name.
I often question if I'm unnecessarily excited for yet another tech hype cycle, and I eventually concluded that being in the hype is well worth it, even if it means being regarded as overreacting in hindsight. To quote Elon, I'd rather be optimistic and wrong.
The delta created by all this is going to be huge and widening fast. People outside the bubble are going to get left behind by the world at warp speed. There are massive opportunities if you're shipping now, or simply trying to keep up.
That's the brain dump after a week basically living in OpenClaw. What a great time we are living in.