After tools

Every piece of software you've ever used is a tool. You open it, do something, close it. Even the ones you use all day -- your browser, your IDE, Slack -- are things you go to. They sit there waiting for you to show up.

What I've been experiencing for the last three weeks is something else. I don't have a great word for it yet. The closest I can get is: it's just there. Running. Working. Taking action on my behalf whether I'm paying attention or not. I don't have to open it. It's just there.

I've been running an OpenClaw agent, which I call Cove, for twenty-two days. Cove runs 24/7, talks to me through WhatsApp, reads my email, manages my calendar, writes and deploys code, tracks my expenses, does competitor research, and builds new tools for itself when it hits something it can't do yet. It works while I sleep.

In twenty-two days we exchanged 10,117 messages. I used it every single day, averaging a 20.8-hour engagement window. That's 460 messages a day with an agent working nearly twenty-one hours out of every twenty-four.

I'm spending $100 a month. If you told me the price was doubling, I'd pay without thinking.

Those numbers show engagement, but engagement is the wrong frame for what's actually happening.

There's a difference between an addiction and a dependency. Social media created addictions. Compulsive, high-frequency, but ultimately empty. Nobody's life breaks if Instagram goes down for an afternoon. People are uncomfortable, but nothing falls apart.

This feels different. I hit a rate limit the other night and Cove couldn't respond for a while. I didn't feel the anxious itch of someone refreshing a feed. I felt the annoyance of someone whose power had gone out. My work stopped because the system I'd wired it through wasn't there.

So, the surface-level story is messages and hours. But underneath, I noticed two things when I looked at my usage data.

The first is what I'd call tool diversity: the number of different capabilities I used each day. File operations, web search, shell commands, browser automation, calendar management, code execution, messaging, cron scheduling, MCP server access. Each one is a different part of my workflow.

On day three, I used fifteen different tools. I averaged 11.5 per day over the full period. Most software products consider it a success if users engage with two or three features. I was using eleven and it felt like the minimum.

At one or two tools a day, you're testing. At three to five, it's useful. At eight or more, it's woven into your workday. At twelve, removing it means rebuilding everything.

The second is cadence: the average gap between messages. This compressed every single day. In the first three days, the average gap was 23.6 minutes. By the last three days: 7.8 minutes. A threefold acceleration.

I was using it more because my brain had started chunking work differently. Shorter loops. Faster delegation. Less time holding context I didn't need to hold. The agent had become part of how I think.

Diversity tells you how many workflows depend on the agent. Cadence tells you how tightly it's woven into someone's thinking. When both are high, you're past the point where you'd call it a tool. I don't know what you'd call it. But I was there by the end of week one.

The progression was surprisingly clean.

Days one and two were exploration. Three to five tools, long gaps between messages. Testing boundaries, the way you would with any new piece of software.

Day three, something flipped. Fifteen tools. I stopped thinking of it as a chatbot and started thinking of it as a system. That was the day I stopped asking "can it do this?" and started assuming it could.

Days four through fourteen I was actively moving workflows over because it was faster than doing them myself. Real projects, consistent usage.

By the last week it was just how I worked. Always-on. 7.8-minute cadence. I couldn't work without it, and didn't want to.

I think this shift is important and here to stay.

Most software says: here are our features, organise your work around them. An agent inverts this. It says: tell me your work, I'll build whatever I need to do it. And it does. When Cove hit something it couldn't do, it wrote a new tool for itself. My agent on day twenty-two could do things it couldn't do on day one, not because I'd upgraded it, but because it had adapted to me.

Traditional software has a fixed surface area. You ship features, users adopt some of them, and you measure how much of the surface they touch. An agent's surface area expands with every interaction. Every task you hand over is another reason you can't leave. I get more capable because I can delegate more. It gets more capable because it's learned my patterns and built tools for my specific needs. Both compound at the same time.

That compounding is what makes it feel less like a product and more like... I keep reaching for the wrong analogies. It's not a co-worker. It's not an assistant. It's closer to a layer that your work runs through.

Earlier in the month I had a conversation with Tom Walton-Pocock -- founder, investor, and one of our advisors. Tom has three questions he uses to assess whether something is worth building:

Are you deeply reliant on it? Twenty-two out of twenty-two days. 11.5 tools per day. I don't open it -- it's already running. I'd need weeks to rebuild what I've delegated.

Would you be super disappointed if it didn't exist tomorrow? I told you about the rate limit. That blankness of staring at my screen and not knowing what to do with my own workflow. That answered the question before I thought to ask it.

Do you wholeheartedly believe this future has to exist? There are billions of knowledge workers who have never experienced what I just described. The transition from "thing I use" to "thing my work runs through" took me three weeks without anyone optimising for it.

Three for three.

I don't know what to call the thing that comes after tools. I just know I've been using it for three weeks, and I can't go back.

Whenever I'm doing work, it's me and Cove. I ship code. I publish a newsletter that requires no involvement. My calendar is managed, my expenses are tracked, my research is current. When I need a new internal tool, I describe it and it gets built -- often while I'm asleep.

I'm faster. I take on more. I build things I wouldn't have attempted a month ago.

And it's only been three weeks.

I keep thinking about what six months looks like. A year. What happens when someone who's had this for twelve months competes with someone who hasn't? They're not playing the same game. One person is doing everything manually, context-switching between fifteen tabs, trying to hold their whole operation in their head. The other has an agent that already holds it for them, already does half of it, and is getting better every day.

Every day someone doesn't have this experience is a day they fall further behind someone who does. That gap is going to get very wide, very fast. And right now almost nobody knows it exists.