Yesterday, while introducing our product to a friend, I suddenly realized something.
Underlying technology is evolving rapidly—to what extent? It's changing daily. But the general public—even many white-collar professionals—are adopting these tools far slower than imagined.
Take a recent example. OpenClaw went viral, and everyone is fascinated by this technical novelty. Someone asked me: "Are you using Claude Code? Is that for helping people write code?"
I said yes.
Their first reaction was almost identical: "This sounds complicated. I'll probably never use it in my life."
Not What You Think
I demonstrated in the most intuitive way: installed in 5 minutes, just need an account to get started, as long as you can talk.
They stared at my terminal for a moment, firing off a series of questions. Is installation tedious? Will it be difficult? What problems can it solve?
I said, installation is just one line of code, 5 minutes. An account costs just a few dollars a month to get started.
They stood there stunned. "Is that so? I thought something this powerful must have complicated installation."
It doesn't.
What's even more surreal is OpenClaw itself. Online, there are 15-step, 20-step installation guides circulating that look headache-inducing. Many people complain: "Little Crayfish [OpenClaw's nickname] works great, but installation is too difficult." On Xianyu [a Chinese second-hand marketplace], services even appeared charging 500 yuan for door-to-door installation.
I demonstrated on the spot. When Claude Code is installed on your computer, you only need to say one thing—"Help me install OpenClaw on this computer."
It will figure out what OpenClaw is, where to download it, and how to deploy it. You tell it what your Feishu [Lark] App ID is, and it helps you configure and test until everything is running. You go grab a coffee, and when you return, it's deployed.
One line of code, 5 minutes. That simple.
A Meta-Capability
Someone asked me: "Does your software have out-of-the-box applications? Like text-to-image?"
I didn't answer directly. I was thinking about something else.
If we enable everyone to master an efficient AI coding tool—a coding agent—whatever you want, just have it install it for you.
Text-to-image? You say: "I want a text-to-image application, download the model and deploy it locally, so I can generate images with a sentence." It might spend an hour or two helping you download the model, deploy it, and get it running.
This capability has already transcended the concept of "applications."
It's helping every ordinary person—with extremely low barriers to entry—to truly control their computer. By "control," I mean exceeding the level of control that 90% of engineers and senior engineers possess. And your computer is connected to the internet.
So that old mindset of "I need to install an out-of-the-box application" is actually unnecessary. Whatever you need, just tell it. It will handle it for you.
What Can It Do?
Honestly, if I had to use a computer without such software now, I wouldn't know how to use it.
It can unlock 90% of your computer's capabilities that you previously never used.
You have 20 Excel files to process? Put them in a folder, hand it over, and tell it how you need them analyzed. It will invoke Python, download plugins if missing, and solve problems on its own.
Want to implement interesting network functions? It can help with all of that.
As long as the model is strong enough and fast enough, these tasks that originally required professional skills become accessible.
What Does the Future Look Like?
In the future, people will become increasingly lazy when using computers, unwilling to manually operate them. I rarely actually operate the computer myself now—at most, I open several Claude Code instances, switching between them to assign different tasks.
The way of working will change.
Before: Human → Tool → Computer.
In the future, it will likely be: Human → Agent → Computer.
What's the point of building a complex interface? It's a burden for AI, and humans don't look at it anyway. Just give instructions directly to the agent and let it execute. Done.
Software infrastructure might change. I'm not sure exactly what it will become, but the direction is probably along these lines.
The Difference Between Claude Code and OpenClaw
Many people ask me this question.
Strictly speaking, OpenClaw wraps a layer around Claude Code's capabilities. Some people call this layer the "Crayfish Layer"—I think that makes sense.
What Claude Code does: you give a vague instruction, it executes end-to-end, basically meeting expectations during the process without needing your intervention, can run for tens of minutes or even hours, and finally gives you a result.
What OpenClaw does: adds another layer on top—distributing instructions, managing results, forming long-term memory, acting like a project manager or supervisor. It can interact with you at a higher level, becoming your personal assistant.
But the premise for all this is: the underlying coding agent executes beautifully on every task, without requiring you to watch over it.
This is also why OpenClaw connected to different models is a completely different species.
Currently, there aren't many models capable of truly "executing well on a vague instruction." I've only seen Claude's Opus, and possibly Codex's latest model, capable of this. Versions connected to other models feel like toys—every execution is unreliable, making the coordination layer above even more difficult.
The reason OpenClaw stunned everyone is because it was connected to Opus. But Opus's coding plan is no longer available now—too expensive.
This is the current pain point. I don't know when it will be resolved.