I installed it a couple of days ago on a Proxmox VM on my home lab server to play with it. The key features are that it has local memory, generates cron jobs on its own and can be the one to initiate a conversation with you based on things that it does. Here are a few simple things I tried:
1. Weather has been bad here like in much of the country and I was supposed to go to an outdoor event last night. Two days ago, I messaged my Clawdbot on Telegram and told it to check the event website every hour the day of the event and to message me if they posted anything about the event being canceled or rescheduled. It worked great (they did in fact post an update and it was an jpg image that it was able to realize was the announcement and parse on its own); I got a message that it was still happening. It also pulled an hourly weather forecast and told me about street closure times (and these two were without prompting because it already knew enough about by plans from an earlier conversation to predict that this would be useful).
2. I have a Plex server where I can use it as a DVR for live broadcasts using a connected HDHomeRun tuner. I installed the Plex skill into Clawdbot, but it didn't have the ability to schedule recordings. It tried researching the API and couldn't find anything published. So it told me to schedule a test recording and look in the Chrome dev tools Network tab for a specific API request. Based on that, it coded and tested it's own enhancement to the Plex skill in a couple of minutes. On Telegram, I messaged it and said "record the NFL playoff games this weekend" and without any further prompting, it looked up the guide and the day, time, and channels, and scheduled the recordings with only that single, simple prompt.
3. I set up the GA4 skill and asked it questions about my web traffic. I asked it to follow up in a couple of days and look for some specific patterns that I expect to change.
4. I installed the Resend skill so it could send email via their API. To test it, I sent it a message and said, "Find a PDF copy of Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena and email it to me", and less than a minute later, a had a full (public domain) copy of the book in my inbox. Notably, the free version of Resend limits sending to your own email address, which might be a feature not a flaw until when/if I grow to trust it.
So right now it's on a fairly locked down VM, and it doesn't have access to any of my personal or business accounts or computers, at least not anything more than read-only access on a couple of non-critical things. Mostly just for fun. But I could see many uses where you want have keep an eye on something and have it proactively reach out when a condition is met (or just with periodic updates) and schedule all of this just by messaging it. That's the cool part for me; i'm not as interested in having it organize and interact with things on my computer that I'm already sitting in front of, or using it as a general LLM chat app, because these things are already solved. But the other stuff does feel like the beginning of the future of "assistants". Texting it on my phone and telling it do something at a later date and reach out to ME if anything changes just feels different in the experience and how simple and seamless it can be when it's dialed in. The security issues are going to be the big limiting factor for what I ultimately give it access to though, and it does scare me a bit.
I agree completely, and the quote you cited more eloquently describes what I was trying to convey in some of my earlier comments. Coming from a software-development mindset, I started practicing law twenty years ago, and the hardest adjustment to make was to understand that even though the law seemed analogous to deterministic code on the surface, in reality it is much different. Today, both writing code and practicing law, I still have to remind myself of the difference sometimes. It is a completely different mindset when dealing with ambiguity, especially in the cases where ambiguity is sometimes desired, welcomed, or necessary. It is also eye-opening to realize that the parties never consider all of the future possibilities, and as such, it's not even possible for a document, however syntactically correct, to convey the intent of the parties 100% -- they don't even know their full intent as to infinite possibilities. I think many of the commenters, just like I did before, struggle to understand this. They don't realize that the "flaw" they're trying to correct is actually a feature -- a messy, sometimes annoying, irrational, subjective, human, necessary feature that's actually an important part of the functioning of society. It's intoxicating to think of a purely logical society driven by immutable, consistent, and brutally efficient laws for everyone, but upon further thought, it's a bit terrifying. Thankfully, it's also impossible.
I'm not sure it always both "increases their productivity by broadening the scope of their work" and "allow[s] them to focus their efforts on areas that require nuance and judgement." It might increase productivity, but it could actually decrease critical thought. For example I've met some (disclaimer: some, not all) accountants who have become so reliant on software that they've essentially become data entry personnel and haven't nurtured the ability to think strategically about how or why to do certain things in light of the ever-changing tax code. It's easier to answer a software prompt. This isn't to say it has to be this way, and I agree that freeing up time doing mundane things should allow greater focus on the difficult and more important things. But often times it promotes a "good enough" mentality that enables higher volume, more competitive prices, more free time, or some combination of all three. So for every professional who is now able to do their work better, there are also probably some whose inability was disguised by the fact that they were able to do much of their job without a full understanding of the intricacies. This is especially dangerous in law, because a judge isn't going to care if you were spoon-fed language that "looked good" without fully understanding the overall legal context involved. It's often said that in law school, the most important thing you learn is how to "think like a lawyer." While that might be exaggerated a bit, it underscores the importance of critical thought and why it's a "practice." Automation is good if used as a tool to assist that process, but there are definite downsides if it's allowed to diminish ongoing competent understanding of a rapidly changing landscape. Or worse, if people without a legal background rely on it, thinking that they are getting the right "advice" which in some cases is very difficult to give even for seasoned professionals and is certainly not an exact science.
Lots of coffee. Started coding in the 90s and put it aside for a while to go to law school and then did litigation full time for a few years; then transitioned to a dev and eventually management of Dev/QA in a software company; then after the 2009 recession I formed a company for which I do all the dev for as well as went back to practicing law (almost exclusively in the IP transactional context). Split my time about 50/50. I'd never be able to do it if I were still doing litigation and going to trial; fortunately contract drafting/review/negotiation is a lot more sane/flexible regarding scheduling, and in both cases I have an understanding boss (me). But I could definitely use a vacation. :)
The challenge is that there are often many choices to make; the choices often benefit one party over the other; and either the choices themselves or the possible ramifications of those choices are not well understood by the parties. No two (separate groups of) parties are identical, and to an extent, no two projects are identical. So there's no single "right" answer that can be defined that works in every case, and it very often comes down to bargaining power and subjective risk aversion. I think there's more room for standardized or even automated contract provisions for less complicated transactions, but there are still some dangers. For example, a lot of real estate purchase agreements have been standardized by various state real estate associations that publish forms with various check-boxes for choices. The real estate agents in this case would be the ones "whose job partly involves interfacing with" software (or in this example, paper forms with physical checkboxes in many cases). From experience (I did real estate litigation for a few years), I can say that this didn't always work out so well... because the agents and the parties have to both understand the meaning of what they're choosing and the potential impact of those choices, and that requires an understanding of the law which is complex and not static. Relying on the form is nowhere near enough. This difficulty is vastly greater in areas of the law that are shifting more rapidly, like IP.
In practice, separating the subjective/objective elements is harder than it seems at first glance (and often impossible). The ideal, "perfect" contract would reflect the parties' intent with complete accuracy and would be clearly and fully interpreted by a judge/jury the exact same way. In reality, Party A and Party B want to "get the deal done." In many of the larger tech contracts I handle, the actual persons negotiating (sometimes even dedicated "contracts managers") are many steps removed from the stakeholders. Sometimes, it's a whole separate onboarding company. But even if it's the CEOs in the room, and they know fairly clearly what they want to put in a Statement of Work, they usually don't often consider (or want to think about) all of the intracies of the thousand ways something might go wrong. And standardized MSAs often fall very short (and sometimes lead to absurd results or contradictions); they are far from one size fits all and can't really be standardized to a menu of options either. 99% of what I do is dealing with retained background IP, warranties, indemnification, and liability limits. What is ultimately agreed upon is not usually something that can be determined with algorithmic certainty, nor would it matter, because the both parties would have to agree to use the same algorithm. In reality, it depends upon the particular type, severity, and likelihood of the risk to each party, each party's risk aversion, relative bargaining power, and -- much more than one might expect -- the entrenched corporate culture. A lot of the "art" in negotiating is presenting something to the other side that they can "sell" to their own superiors to get the deal done. And, very, very frequently, there's something irrational about it. For example, someone might not budge on narrowing an indemnification clause, but might bend on a blanket liability limit that would weaken it to practically nothing. Also, sometimes you might let something slide, because given the current state of the law with regard to how such a clause might be interpreted, you'd feel confortable enough that it would be interpreted in your favor -- i.e., in your risk assesment, you're considering how human beings (judge/jury) would interpret it. I've heard arguments before about how humans built laws and also built bridges, therefore laws can be reduced to scientific/mathematical/computational constructs. But unlike bridges, laws are based on this concept of "jurisprudence" which involves a foundation not built on mathematics, but instead built on ethics, morality, and philosophy. They're the thread of society. To fully "computerize" law, you'd have to do the same to society and humanity itself.
I am both a transactional (contracts) attorney and a software developer. I've observered a number of fundamental parallels between contract drafting and coding. I can see how for certain "boilerplate" documents, computer-generated document assembly could produce decent results. But I honestly don't think that (human) lawyers can be eliminated, for several important reasons. First, consider how laws come about in the first place. It's an often messy political process with a lot of disagreement and compromises. What ends up passing might have deliberate ambiguities that purposely don't create certainty in a number of fringe cases. Second, most laws are either "over-inclusive" or "under-inclusive," meaning that the text can't possibly enumerate every situation, so there has to be interpretation around the edges. Third, some aspects of law involve subjective (not objective) standards and rely on such things as "intent," "reasonableness," "community standards," and "equity." These involve very human judgment on the part of a judge or jury and vary according to time, place, culture, ethics, community, etc. Although some cases can be resolved with mathematical efficiency, the legal process is usually inextricably intertwined with humanity and all of its subjective flaws, and as long as it's human beings writing the laws and humans applying interpretations and judgments, it will be a messy, emotional, occassionally illogical process.
1. Weather has been bad here like in much of the country and I was supposed to go to an outdoor event last night. Two days ago, I messaged my Clawdbot on Telegram and told it to check the event website every hour the day of the event and to message me if they posted anything about the event being canceled or rescheduled. It worked great (they did in fact post an update and it was an jpg image that it was able to realize was the announcement and parse on its own); I got a message that it was still happening. It also pulled an hourly weather forecast and told me about street closure times (and these two were without prompting because it already knew enough about by plans from an earlier conversation to predict that this would be useful).
2. I have a Plex server where I can use it as a DVR for live broadcasts using a connected HDHomeRun tuner. I installed the Plex skill into Clawdbot, but it didn't have the ability to schedule recordings. It tried researching the API and couldn't find anything published. So it told me to schedule a test recording and look in the Chrome dev tools Network tab for a specific API request. Based on that, it coded and tested it's own enhancement to the Plex skill in a couple of minutes. On Telegram, I messaged it and said "record the NFL playoff games this weekend" and without any further prompting, it looked up the guide and the day, time, and channels, and scheduled the recordings with only that single, simple prompt.
3. I set up the GA4 skill and asked it questions about my web traffic. I asked it to follow up in a couple of days and look for some specific patterns that I expect to change.
4. I installed the Resend skill so it could send email via their API. To test it, I sent it a message and said, "Find a PDF copy of Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena and email it to me", and less than a minute later, a had a full (public domain) copy of the book in my inbox. Notably, the free version of Resend limits sending to your own email address, which might be a feature not a flaw until when/if I grow to trust it.
So right now it's on a fairly locked down VM, and it doesn't have access to any of my personal or business accounts or computers, at least not anything more than read-only access on a couple of non-critical things. Mostly just for fun. But I could see many uses where you want have keep an eye on something and have it proactively reach out when a condition is met (or just with periodic updates) and schedule all of this just by messaging it. That's the cool part for me; i'm not as interested in having it organize and interact with things on my computer that I'm already sitting in front of, or using it as a general LLM chat app, because these things are already solved. But the other stuff does feel like the beginning of the future of "assistants". Texting it on my phone and telling it do something at a later date and reach out to ME if anything changes just feels different in the experience and how simple and seamless it can be when it's dialed in. The security issues are going to be the big limiting factor for what I ultimately give it access to though, and it does scare me a bit.