Clawdbot Swarms and How to Use AI

My son (and business partner) has been telling me about Clawdbots, these AI-powered agents that run locally and act like highly technical personal assistants who can code, work on your computer, use the Internet, and basically do anything on a computer a human would do. He’s keeping them local on his devices and using them to organize and optimize the layout and operation of his warehouses. He’s got several Mac minis and dozens of agents he can text and give tasks to. A “swarm.” There’s a clear use case there for him. Very understandable, and he’s getting real world results out of it. It’s working.

But then I hear about all these other people running dozens of agentic swarms, with each agent spinning up its own swarm. They’re coding apps, “shipping” at 20x the speed they were previously, “optimizing".

It’s the promise of digital feudalism, with everyone a landed lord controlling swarms of Clawdserfs working for them. So here’s my question: to what end? what the fuck are they doing with all this stuff? What the fuck are they building? How is any of this improving life? I keep hearing that this is going to be life-changing, that everybody’s going to build a business, be their own boss, have a farm of AI workers cranking away in the background. Okay. What the fuck are you going to make? Who are you going to sell it to? Who’s going to buy it? What’s actually new here?

Is it just more information? More software? More coaching packages? More apps solving problems that didn’t need to exist in the first place? I don’t get it. I really don’t get it.

Evangelists point to the fact that for most of human history, we were all entrepreneurs. That this is just a return to that ancestral norm. True. But the difference is that they were building real, physical products or providing real, physical services. Woodworking. Growing crops. Tanning hides. Blacksmithing, soldiering, stonemasonry. Merchants. They were meeting physical needs, there was clear demand. Not demand that had to be manufactured or marketed into existence, but demand that existed out of physical necessity. And while digital needs and desires exist, and must and should be met, there’s gotta be a limit. At some point, just how much software can the economy absorb?

Or maybe, it’s not about selling products or contributing to the economy, it’s about optimizing your life with personalized software that meets your very specific needs. You don’t have to wait for a company to make an app that addresses some deficit in your workflow. You can make it yourself. Speak it into existence.

Okay: now what?

Great, you built an app to remind yourself to go to the dentist. Fucking fantastic. Part of the problem with the modern world is that it has already made us so distracted that we don’t keep track of basic things the way we should. We don’t remember what we used to remember because Google Calendar remembers it for us. And now you’re going to build another app that hooks into Google Calendar and calls you to remind you of the appointment it already reminded you about? And it nags you until you go?

Or you use it to generate SEO campaigns, or day trade, or create TikTok content.

Sure, that’s good for the first few months where you’re the only one doing it, or one of several hundred. Your SEO is optimized and your articles are getting “views” (whether by other agents crawling the sites or actual humans), your trades are making gains, your content is going viral, but pretty soon you’re up against a million other agentic swarms all operating under the same rules, at the same speeds, after the same objectives. Today, hedge funds compete for office space that’s near the servers so that they have a shorter fiber optic cable so that when they make a trade, it happens in 0.002 milliseconds instead of 0.005 milliseconds. It still comes down to physical reality.

And even the guys claiming to be making thousands a day with their trading agents, working the margins and finding the edges on Polymarket or in crypto… why are they telling you about it? Why are they selling courses on setting up your own trading agents? Why aren’t they quietly making money and retiring somewhere warm with a beach?

I find it all very stilly. And I’m someone who actually does use LLMs. I’m just realistic about their utility.

Okay, Sisson, but AI is here to stay, and everyone’s going to be using it. It is a powerful tool. Is there a good way to use it to enhance your life that does’t detract from your humanity?

How to Use AI without Degrading Your Soul

There are 1 million articles and guides and posts telling you how to extract the most utility out of all the latest AI tools, or telling you how to set up agents, what services to use, how to get the most inference points, how to code, how to become an SEO guru. I won’t pretend to talk about any of that stuff. This is how to retain your soul in an increasingly AI-saturated world where even skeptics like myself have to use it.

Do not personify it. Do not anthropomorphize. The LLMs are not conscious or sentient or alive, but they do a damn good job at playing the part, so even if in your mind you know that it’s just impersonating a real person, if you start treating it like one, your subconscious will begin to believe it. You’ll start leaning heavily on it, treating it like a coworker, like your team, like it’s an actual human with a life history required to give you advice and be your champion and critic. You forget that it’s just a sycophantic string of code.

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