Multiplayer AI will revolutionize the way we work | OpenClaw Foundation’s Vincent Koc

Andrew (0:02)

Welcome back to Dev Interrupted, brought to you by LinearB. Your engineers are faster with agents, but passing work between those agents still hits barriers, even things like copy paste. My guest today, Vincent Koc, chief architect of the OpenClaw Foundation, shows us a better path, multiplayer AI.

His team built the multi-user OpenClaw experience with OpenClaw itself, using it as a collaborative surface. And in doing so, they discovered how teammates and their agents can work side by side. Their agents stay aware of everything happening across the project, but Vincent says the missing piece is always still the why. Feeding that kind of context into agentic work and measuring what agents ship is a big part of what we build here at LinearB in Dev Interrupted. But do you know where your why lives? Let's find out in my conversation with Vincent.

Today, we're going to open the hood on the capabilities of OpenClaw, but also zoom in on the implications this has for leaders within pre-existing, pretty mature, large engineering teams, engineering teams that have engineers, which by the way are heavily leveraging and utilizing OpenClaw and OpenClaw-like technology. What are the kinds of things that they need to be understanding to stay on top of the way that their engineering org is evolving? And I can't think of anyone better to dive into this with because you have so much insight into how folks are using this tool as such a major driver of it yourself. So, Vincent, welcome to Dev Interrupted. We're really excited to have you here.

Vincent Koc (1:40)

Likewise, thanks for having me on the show.

Andrew (1:42)

Amazing. Well, I want to start off by, first off, congratulating you on OpenClaw 2.0, a major improvement and achievement as well to the entire code base in terms of the features that have been available. We've talked about it a bit on the show because a really exciting part about OpenClaw, at least for us here at Dev Interrupted and some of the folks that have chimed in, is really about the shared collaboration-driven experience. This has been the real hunger, I think, of engineers that have been experimenting with AIs since the beginning of the year, since Gastown, let the world on fire, and people realize that, yeah, be, okay, great. Well, you're saying beads, my producer might as well come off and you can just be like, this conversation is over because I say beads in every conversation and everyone thinks I'm a crazy person. I actually was just recently at Lead Dev, I was giving a talk there and the talk was about why Ms. Frizzle would be a great SRE, and really it was actually just like a hidden lesson in how to use beads.

Vincent Koc (2:44)

A lot of it, absolutely.

Andrew (2:45)

To just make everything possible over time. So beads are a fundamental part of what make this possible. They're primitive, right? As Steve Yegge in our articles has talked about this extensively, Chris Sells is out there building with this as well. But OpenClaw, we've argued on the show, many have talked about is also its own kind of primitive. That's what's so exciting about the OpenClaw experience and the way that it grows and it conforms to your domain expertise. So what has that been like for you to develop and build something that honestly has such wide usage?

Obviously, it has such a big perspective.

Vincent Koc (3:23)

I think for my personal experience, it's been kind of interesting because I've worked on large-scale enterprise work from airlines, banking. I'm talking huge reach, but this just felt different. I've worked on open source as well. But it's just the velocity of everything. I think I remember one stage, we're at GTC NVIDIA last year or this year. This year feels like last year. That's the same I'm saying like even I'm getting it twisted. Like just a few months ago. And Jensen is saying, oh, that's like the biggest thing since the Internet or computing. I can't remember the exact words, don't quote me on it. But it's just the levels of insanity just kept increasing and increasing. I had like rap artists talking about this stuff on X. I had C suites of like major Fortune 100 companies, like sending me messages of like issues they're having.

It just kind of exploded. And like it was definitely a hype moment there. I think there was definitely a hype cycle. But for the first time, it felt like agents and AI had like escaped the containment of like the tech ecosphere and the tech pro culture and all the rest of that that comes with it. And for the first time, it was part of the zeitgeist. And you had like your Uber driver talking about this claw AI thing. I remember I was like in a bar in New York in my hotel, just like trying to take a breather before this clock on event that we just had. And I was like, people had like walked for, the queue was like three blocks long.