🥞 We Hit 20K Stackers (!), Agents Get an App Store, ClawdBot Breaks the Internet

We hit 20,000 subscribers this week. When I relaunched this newsletter back in July, I had about 5,000 people (from past iterations) and zero idea if anyone would care about more "AI for builders" content. Turns out you do. Thank you! 🥞🥞🥞

Big theme this week: AI is becoming infrastructure. Not "chat with AI" but "work through AI." Claude embedded Slack and Figma directly in conversations. Vercel shipped a package manager for agent capabilities.

And Moltbot went ultra mega viral for letting you run a 24/7 AI employee on a Mac Mini.

Here's what we're covering:

Let's do this.

The sponsor for this newsletter is a product I actually use every single day:

Nimbalyst: The best way to use Claude Code (it’s also free!)

Nimbalyst gives Claude Code a UI, solving all the major challenges you might have with it:

And, again, it's completely free! My Claude Code for PMs and Claude Code for Everyone courses can be completed in about 5 hours and work perfectly in Nimbalyst.

If you already use Claude Code and want a nicer UI, or if you haven’t Claude Code because you’re intimidated by the terminal, Nimbalyst is genuinely great.

I don't usually make a big deal about numbers, but this one feels significant. Like this is really going to be A Thing. I just try to create the kind of stuff I would want – hands-on, no hype, created by a real builder, and fun – and apparently a lot other people want that too.

You all motivate me to bring my best every day. I'm excited to build A LOT more alongside you!

I celebrated with a very full stack of pancakes 🥞

I've been experimenting with turning popular Youtube podcasts into bite-sized interactive lessons you run in Claude Code. They take about 20 mins. Check these out and let me know what you think:

Three announcements this week, all pointing the same direction:

Vercel Skills — One command to teach your agent a new trick. E.g., run npx skills add stripe and now your agent knows how to use Stripe. Works across Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot. You can view all skills here: skills.sh. It's early but growing.

Claude MCP Apps — Live interfaces for Slack, Figma, Asana, Canva, Amplitude, monday.com embedded directly in Claude conversations. Not "Claude generates text about Slack." Claude is your Slack interface. This feels like Anthropic catching up to ChatGPT's Apps.

MCP everywhere — Both use MCP as the standard. GitHub Copilot added MCP tooling this week too.

Tools like Claude Code and Cursor are becoming the surface through which you interact with everything. If you're already proficient, you get these new capabilities for free. If you're not, the gap widens every week.

If you haven't done any of my "tool-in-tool" courses yet, now is the time! I'm dropping a big "how to connect your AI to everything" module next week. (I really wanted to launch it this week, but it deserves a little more refinement.)

Overall, agents are shifting from "help me" to "do it."

Which brings us to...

This week’s project that broke the internet, changed names twice, and gave us glimpse into the future.

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own hardware (Mac Mini is the popular choice, but any computer will work), connects to your messaging apps, and works 24/7. As one friend put it – you give Claude a computer and let it wreak havoc.

It doesn't wait for you to ask – it sends morning briefings, drafts email replies, monitors your calendar, runs tasks while you sleep. Great, persistent memory across everything.

My favorite example: someone asked it to make a restaurant reservation. OpenTable didn't work. So it downloaded AI voice software and called the restaurant and made the reservation over the phone (!!).

It's still hobbyist stage, like personal computers when they were circuit boards in garages. Setup takes time, and it's not perfect. But it's real.

There's incredible alpha in figuring out what you can automate with a capable agent running 24/7. The people tinkering with this stuff now – learning what works, what breaks, what's possible – will have a massive advantage when this is everywhere. If you’ve ever felt behind, this is the next wave and your chance to get ahead of it.

Yes, I bought a Mac Mini to set this up. (Here's a nice hack to get one for $400.) "Learn OpenClaw IN OpenClaw" coming soon? It's not like I bought the domains or anything...

Just too perfect:

If you only have 30 minutes this week,

Keep building,
Carl 🥞