OpenClaw creator's advice to AI builders is to be more playful and allow yourself time to improve | TechCrunch

Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral AI agent OpenClaw, who has since been hired by OpenAI, has some advice for those experimenting with AI technology, including AI agents. From his own experience, the best way to build today is to explore, be playful, and not expect to be an expert at what you do right away. “I wish I could say that I had the unified plan in the beginning, but a lot of it was just exploration,” Steinberger said. “I wanted things, and those things didn’t exist, and…let’s say, I prompted them into existence.” The developer was chatting with OpenAI’s Head of Developer Experience, Romain Huet, on the first episode of the company’s new Builders Unscripted podcast. Here, he spoke about what OpenClaw was like in its early days and how he didn’t have a plan when he got started. Steinberger explained he began by building a tool that would integrate with WhatsApp, but then set it aside for a bit and focused on other things, as he assumed the AI labs would build something like what he was working on in the near future. “I just experimented a lot. My mission was, kind of like, to have fun and inspire people,” Steinberger noted. By last November, however, the developer was surprised that no AI labs had started to build what he wanted to use. That led him to create the initial prototype of what’s now OpenClaw. “Where it really clicked was where I was at this weekend trip in Marrakesh, and I found myself using it way more because it was so convenient…there was no...