Now, as you may know I’ve been suffering with AI fatigue recently. Not with the tools themselves, but with the general chit-chat about it. Over the new year period, every supplier I know has been on the telephone with their eyes gleaming.

“We’ve added AI to our product. Oh, and we are going to put the prices up too. Happy New Year, Chris.”

You see, my worry has been that I will get lazy. My success in learning Russian was held back by relying on Google Translate too much. New tools need to be used in a measured way.

But I’ve been investigating and using AI tools more in March. And I have to say they’ve got incredibly good incredibly quickly. I have been using Grok for image generation and Claude for research. In fact, I used Claude to help check examples in my book Learning Russian Verbs.

When I bought a Mac in 2007 for the first time, I had an uplifting feeling. In an instant, I could create things without having to understand every detail of the process. It came with GarageBand, iMovie, Pages, Sheets and Keynote. I could make music and films. It was possible to create something without hassle from day one. This is now my view of AI agents, but the possibilities are bigger.

One of my colleagues stumbled into the office a few weeks ago and mentioned that his life had been changed. He had discovered OpenClaw. He is using it to do research but also to get things done.

OpenClaw works directly from your computer. It behaves like any AI agent but it also integrates into your computing environment. You can talk to it via a browser or most chat applications. You can integrate it with your email and use it as a personal assistant. Last week, I bit the bullet and set up an OpenClaw on a spare machine in my garage. I’m using it with Claude, but you can use it with most AI backends.

Terrence the Clawbot, II was born last week, Terry for short. I’m going to refer to Terry as a he. For the record, my Siri personality at home is a she. I don’t know why I added the II, but Terry thinks there was another one before him. It keeps him on his toes, I guess.

I chat to Terry over Telegram, integrated using the BotFather. Terry sends me reports every morning about Tezos, space programmes, my search results and other things. Every day, Terry checks and corrects my book that is in progress. I have not given Terry access to much otherwise, but he is incredibly useful.

The interesting thing is that Terry can do some Linux server administration. My colleague managed to get his OpenClaw instance to set up a Tezos baker from scratch. He gave it a simple prompt. It went off and did it, and it worked. It output a PDF of instructions, which we spent some time refining.The backend API Claude has a lot of knowledge about Tezos, but some of it is out of date. There were some things to fix, but ultimately it worked.

Anyway, I decided to do some experiments. I fed a chapter from my book which I’m currently writing into OpenClaw. I set up a server on GCP and gave Terry a login with sudo access. Terry is working in my account on a Linux server. I asked Terry to check the chapter by using the server. The chapter gives impatient people instructions to set up a baker on a Tezos test network. He was able to set up a complete baking installation. All he asked me to do was get funds from the faucet and he waited for me to complete that part.

He pointed out some mistakes in the document, which I’ve fixed. The only thing that was a bit skew was he mentioned doing something that wasn’t necessary. Nobody is perfect, not even Terry.

I then set up another server and asked him to follow the instructions, but to use a different test network. He was able to do adapt the instructions and do it.

I then set up ten servers and asked Terry to set up nodes on each. I asked him to use a different test network. I also asked him not to generate keys, start DAL nodes or the baker. He did all ten servers without any errors.

In my next post, I will show you how (at high level) to set up OpenClaw and use it to set up a Tezos baker on a test network. Then after Easter, I will show you how to set up a Remote Signer using OpenClaw. We will use it to make the baking setup more secure.

I’m tempted to say that we don’t need Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools anymore. Our AI agents can read the manual.