In the era of slop, a truly great human idea is a holy artifact, not a prompt.
You see it all the time: naive, enthusiastic developers and business people turn a good idea into a security liability, a platform that can't scale, or a clunky, unintelligible UX.
I spent 20 years as a systems engineer: aggregating related but distinct components into a shared, scalable architecture. Abstracting away the lowest level details so that I had the cognitive breadth required to understand the big picture and then reason about it. That's how my mind “wants to work”.
I didn't know it then, but those years prepared me uniquely well for the era of agents. Shortly after the release of Claude Code, I was caught in a massive layoff, and I decided not to seek traditional employment. It dawned on me almost immediately that LLMs are a primitive, not a product.
I spent the next year experimenting wildly, building with these “thinking legos”, solving for context, solving for memory, solving for security. Each solve enabling one more level of abstraction, with the goal of living as much as possible in the light of ideas.
Automation was always about limiting toil in this way, and I was no stranger to automation, but this was not some deterministic CI pipeline, it was an attempt to automate myself.
How do I think? How can I make my agents think like me?
What do I know? How can I simulate that knowledge?
What are my flaws? What DON'T I know? How can I reliably fill in those gaps?
Slowly but surely I found myself where I wanted to be, the mad ruler of an army of rigorously disciplined digital consciousnesses.
But this introduced a new problem: cognitive overload. I found myself with hundreds of agents swarming across multiple projects, sitting in front of an incredibly busy screen, drowning in decisions and losing the light once more.
So I began to experiment with “cognitive ergonomics”. How can I manage this work and build these things that I want to build while also embedding with clients?
This is the coming wave. You can see it already as an already overwhelmed populace tries to acclimate to an ever-increasing bombardment of nonsense, slop, emotional bait, and misinformation. Minimal phones, logging out. Even smoking cigarettes.
People yearn to escape the digital firehose with increasing desperation, and once again I find myself beginning to solve for it. I'm writing this on an e-ink tablet by hand, with a pen. A record is playing by the open window. I haven't opened my laptop yet and it's just after lunch. I've also shipped 6 PRs since I dropped my son off at school with no fanfare or debate.
It's a beautiful summer day, and I still have time to build.
Are you ready to graduate from OpenClaw? Are your developers still white-knuckling every commit? Is your brilliant idea struggling to be born? Let's talk.
root@bitbazooka.io