With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
It’s only been a couple months. I guarantee people will be switching apps as others become the new hot thing.
We saw the same claims when Cursor was popular. Same claims when Claude Code was the current topic. Users are changing their app layer all the time and trying new things.
System of record and all.
Using openrouter+kilocode I can simply switch between different providers' models and not miss out on anything.
I continue to find it amusing that people really think corporates are really holding power. No - they are holding power granted to them by the government of the state.
Remind me why Zuck et al had to kiss the ring.
If lobbying was illegal then you might have a point here, but alas.
Perhaps the competitive moat of the future will be time critical access to data. Google likely gets new data faster than everyone else, and they could use this time arbitrage in products like news, finance, research, etc.
This is a perfect use case for a new agent to query the old agent and get the details.
You could have OpenClaw summarize and export them into a format that the new one wants.
Maybe the new agents will be designed to be compatible with OpenClaw's style.
There is no reason to believe that you're locked in to something.
Heck, that was half the pitch behind Obsidian, even if the project someday ended, markdown would remain. And switching between Obsidian and e.g. Logseq shows the ease of doing so.
The irony of systems of record is that if there is more than one, there are effectively none. Just data stuck in silos waiting for compute.
The new agents might have a feature to query your old agents for a migration.
That said, I find it really hard to believe that you've generated so much work in the past few weeks since OpenClaw launched that you could never migrate to something else. It hasn't been that long.
But if I don’t have a url for my IDE (or whatever) to call, it isn’t useful.
So I use Ollama. It’s less helpful, but ensure confidentiality and compliance.
It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
I’d suspect the moat here will be just as fragile as every other layer
You can literally ask codex to build a slim version for you overnight.
I love OpenClaw, but I really don't think there is anything that can't be cloned.
You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.
But the community not.
Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
Stories like this reinforce my bias
I think Anthropic's docs are better. Best to keep sampling from the buffet than to pick a main course yet, imo.
There's also a ton of real experiences being conveyed on social that never make it to docs. I've gotten as much value and insights from those as any documentation site.
Early adopters are some of the least sticky users. As soon as something new arrives with claims of better features, better security, or better architecture then the next new thing will become the popular topic.
For your sake, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed.
My personal approach is to start from minimal, push that as far as I can, keep the human in the loop so I know how good it actually is, then find ways that have a better overall ROI. I'm performing similar loops to clawd/ralph manually, with my attention paid.
1. Stable models
2. Stable pre- and post- context management.
As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow.
This is all before even enshittification can happen.
The practical workaround most teams land on is treating the model as a swappable component behind a thick abstraction layer. Pin to a specific model version, run evals on every new release, and only upgrade when your test suite passes. But that's expensive engineering overhead that shouldn't be necessary.
What's missing is something like semantic versioning for model behavior. If a provider could guarantee "this model will produce outputs within X similarity threshold of the previous version for your use case," you could actually build with confidence. Instead we get "we improved the model" and your carefully tuned prompts break in ways you discover from user complaints three days later.
Openclaw is so so so much more.