Chapter 6: Assemble Your Team¶
We have learned that Bots can be LLM brains equipped with tools, physical robots sharing our space, or composites of digital and physical embodiments. They are machines that function like people.
Assembly requires a willingness to hire and fire. Just like with people, there is a cost associated with both adding and removing bots, but both actions must always be on the table. The benefits and penalties associated with hiring decisions are the similar, but the volatility of the hiring pool is magnitudes greater; Every dimension of a "good hire" is in constant disruption, with waves of new software techniques, new hardware capabilities, new vendors, and so on.
Buy Vs DIY¶
The DIY discussion revolves around control. Off-the-shelf systems allow varying amounts of configuration or customization. Worse, their policies or rails may change after you have already invested in the product and ecosystem!
To guarantee that your bots do exactly what you want, you can make the software yourself. Along these lines, consider your own "private source." Because coding has become primarily the purview of AI, building your own tools is much more accessible than it used to be. You can make the software do what you need, and you'll fully control the source code because you wrote it.
However, doing it yourself is a steeper challenge when it comes to embodiment. Making physical robots is hard. I've done it as part of the US Govt (read: lots of money) and with my animatronics startup (read: very little money). They're both hard. In fact, I got into simulations work largely because I could keep exploring ideas and building things without buying and fabricating physical parts (lots of my simulations were essentially character robots in a game engine). So while I'm going to touch on some DIY for robots, I want it to be on the foundation of this basic understanding that it's not an easy road.
Fortunately, there is a powerful alternative to buying locked-down systems: open source. Open source is the only way to really know what's going on with a computer program that you didn't write yourself. A lot of smart and good people understand that and are making efforts to grant the world the privilege of owning their bots.
There's a game I play called Blood on the Clocktower, where one group of people is good and the other evil. The good players don't know anyone's alignment (evil does, but they're outnumbered). A character called the Marionette is evil, but doesn't know it. The character might not actually be in the game, but the possibility that you, a good player, might be mistaken about your own alignment dramatically changes how you play. Even though the mechanical effect of the Marionette is minimal, its potential presence alters how everyone plays and therefore has a huge true impact.
I think of open source this way. The fact that you can walk away from big tech and their secret AI models will induce them to behave better, even if not a lot of us decide to run open source software. To be sure, big tech is not all bad when it comes to open source. Most big tech companies are leaning into open source in some capacity, such as by releasing open models.
So, consider open source. This is one of those topics where I could fill pages evangelizing something that's probably not going to shift your position much, so I'll wrap it up: You have more power if your software is free (as in freedom) and open.
Create A Bot MVP¶
Anyone working with bots can also create custom bots. The companies leading the AI revolution all want you to use their infrastructure, so they want you to perceive the greatest value with their implementation. Accordingly, they've provided quick and easy ways to assemble scaffolding (and we all know the power of good scaffolding).
OpenClaw. If you get comfortable with OpenClaw, it may be your MVP factory. You'll want to build a template for a trimmed down agent (few files, etc.) and use that as your MVP starting point.