Comment by CMay
4 days ago
This feels like the 2026 version of "blog". A thing that didn't need a name and the name it now has contains "out of touch" qualities to it, but it spread easier under a name that got popularized so it wins out in evolutionary terms?
Unlike blog though, claw is camping on an existing word and it won't surprise me if people settle on some other word once a more popular, professional and security conscious variant exists.
I don't think operating through messaging services will be considered anything unique, since we've been doing that for over 30 years. The mobile dimension doesn't change this much, except for the difference between always connected and push notifications along with voice convenience being a given. Not using MCP was expected, because even in my personal experiments it was very natural to never adopt MCP. It's true that there are some qualities MCP has that can be useful, but it's extra work and friction that doesn't always pay off.
Total access + mobile messaging + real productivity is naturally addictive, and maybe it's logical that the lazy path to this is the first to become popularized, because the harder problems around it are simply ignored.
I do consider it unique to interface with your home lab server or personal vps through a messaging. The first time I did a version of that, I was completely blown away by that concept. I guess I just never thought about being able to talk to my computer in English via chat.
If we're talking strictly a messaging app, like ICQ, AIM, etc you could argue it's mildly different, but people have communicated with and orchestrated machines over IRC for a very long time which is where I'm coming from with it.
It is fun and feels new the first time you do it, but that aspect of it is not particularly new to computing. Back then of course, you'd interface with some flat text file database, directories, run commands or use raw sockets to scrape some website to get a result. APIs weren't a thing as much as you'd just try to replicate the queries to submit webpage forms.
You could have a music server in another room and send a message to pick the next song or open the CD drive on some machine halfway around the world. You could write new scripts that operate on a daily schedule and have them running on machines around the world. Many home computers were totally compromised back then too, so almost anything that was connected to IRC was a potential orchestration node.
Having an LLM make decisions about what to do with the machine is a natural evolution of that and not a hard thing to hack on if you have the right model, although it makes totally compromised the new default again.