Iced Tea?
Reflections on unnecessary complexity
The internet is rapidly changing. It does not matter if you are a seasoned CTO or a first-time founder, nobody has a map for this. You need to connect with people who want to figure this out. That’s why we’re here.
I have seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness. We are building new and more complicated ways to do the same shit we always did.
What are we doing here? Every week, I get the privilege of watching the smartest people I know share their personal AI stack and workflows. It is undeniably impressive and also unnecessarily complicated.
Our adherence to Chatham House rule prohibits me from sharing the details, but I can give you the gist. These people are valiantly wrangling the most cutting edge technical tools on the planet to manifest a personal technical architecture whose sole purpose seems to be to produce a… deck.
Byzantine logic meets Rube Goldberg tooling to enable Sky Mall imagination.
Astute readers will notice that I’ve already made this exact point. Even more egregiously, I am repeating an earlier punchline (down to the exaggerated ellipse). This week is less about the punchline and more about the complicated setup.
This is what I’ve seen in the last 3 months:
N8N arrows crisscrossing a screen. A weavy.ai flow turning a text prompt into a moodboard. A ChatGPT research report being converted into a questionable dashboard.
At first it is all incredibly impressive. It reminds me of the first time I heard a NotebookLM podcast based on my work. They were talking about me! They sounded so human! And then the second podcast was half as interesting.
And then I stopped listening.
Provocation of the week
Is this better or just different?
Toby has a great analogy for this moment. He shared it in a group chat we hosted about how to build web products for the post OpenClaw agentic web.
It was a good session. I can’t recall a more active group chat in our 3 year history. The reason for this is obvious: everybody knows change is coming and no one is waiting for an instruction manual.
At the same time, this urgency to build is putting us into a predicament. We are all building things because we can because the tools make it so easy to do it. But those tools already exist. And they already work fine.
The generated deck so proudly displayed is harder to edit than a fresh keynote is to draft in the app. It takes 2 minutes to generate but there is a typo on the 3rd slide. You want to replace one word. Can you edit it inline? No, you have to find and change the word in the source code.
You might be mistaking my skepticism for Luddite rejection. I’m a builder too. I know where the proverbial puck is going. I just want you to reflect on what we’re doing in this frantic phase.
I could explain the analogy Toby shared, or you can just watch it, because I think it sums it up pretty well.
Two things can be true at the same time: Doc’s machine is a ridiculous contraption that advances the capabilities of his era. How many of the town folk would kill for that ice cube on a hot day?
On the other hand, was that one cube worth the effort?
I don’t know.
Do you?
ON_Member Events
ON_IRL Events (NYC)
ON_Claw & Order
Wednesday, February 25, 6pm-8:30pm ET
Join ON_Discourse and Code and Theory for an old-school tech meetup to explore the new layer of the internet.
What happens when AI agents move from novelty to infrastructure?
Inspired by the rise of Open Claw (Formerly Clawdbot, Moltbot and recently acquired by OpenAI) and the rapid emergence of persistent agent layers, this event brings together builders, operators, and AI fanatics, for live demos and candid discussion about a simple but profound shift: the browser is no longer the primary interface, the agent is. No panels, no theatrics, just working products, open interrogation, and a serious look at how delegation, mediation, and automation are reshaping our relationship with the web.
ON_Discourse is where C-suite leaders, investors, entrepreneurs and innovators come together to challenge assumptions, sharpen ideas, and drive transformation through discourse.
ON_Claw and Order is also supported by Domain, a collaboration platform where AI and people can work together.
ON_Podcast
Dan, Toby, and Chmiel are still processing the implications of last week’s conversation with Sam and the rollout of OpenClaw — and why it’s changing the way they think about the web. This week, the team reveals what happened when they deployed their AI agent DOMA into the Signal group chat where they actually work, and why it felt less like a product demo and more like hiring a new teammate.