11 posts tagged “general-agents”
Claude Code and OpenAI Codex kick-started the coding agent revolution. General agents go a step beyond that and help automate task that can be achieved by operating a computer.
2026
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff. It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time.
A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode.
Today it's much more about agentic systems - "where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go".
Gemini has fallen off Ethan's list, since Google still doesn’t have an established entry in the Codex/ChatGPT Work/Cowork category. Gemini Spark has yet to prove itself!
Ethan offers a useful explanation of the ways you can give ChatGPT or Claude a computer to use:
To use the computers provided by the AI companies, the mode you want is called ChatGPT Work in ChatGPT, and Cowork in Claude (the naming will not get less confusing, I am sorry to say). [...]
The most powerful way to use AI is to give it access to your computer. You do that by downloading the ChatGPT or Claude apps and picking a mode to use. ChatGPT's two agent modes are Work and Codex; Claude's are Cowork and Code. The names do not map onto each other in any way that will help you remember them. And yes, these use the same names as the Work and Cowork modes we discussed above, but operate differently, and have more features and capabilities because they can access your computer.
I think the difference between ChatGPT Work on a mobile device and ChatGPT Work inside the desktop app (where it's effectively a less intimidating skin on top of Codex) is spectacularly unintuitive.
Short version: if you flip ChatGPT mobile from "Chat" to "Work" mode you get a version where its Code Interpreter container is no longer restricted from accessing the internet!
It's hard to find much to write about Google I/O this year because I have a policy of not writing about anything that I can't try out myself, and a lot of the big announcements are "coming soon".
I actually prefer to write about things that are in general availability, because I've had instances in the past where the previews didn't match what was released to the general public later on.
Aside from Gemini 3.5 Flash the most interesting announcement looks to be Google's upcoming OpenClaw competitor Gemini Spark, described as "your personal AI agent" which can "connect natively with your favorite Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and Google Maps". The FAQ for that also includes this confusing detail:
What Gemini model does Gemini Spark run on?
Gemini Spark runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity.
The antigravity.google website currently lists Antigravity as a desktop app, a CLI agent tool (written in Go), the Antigravity SDK (an open source Python wrapper around a bundled closed source Go binary), and the original Antigravity IDE (a VS Code fork).
I guess Gemini Spark, the user-facing hosted agent product, might be running on that Go binary, but I'm not sure why that's worth mentioning in the FAQ!
Naturally I went looking for notes on how Gemini Spark intends to handle the risk of prompt injection. The best information I could find on that was in the Everything Google Cloud customers need to know coming out of Google I/O post aimed at enterprise customers, which includes:
Spark operates in a fully managed, secure runtime on Google Cloud, meaning you get enterprise-grade security without ever having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Every task executes in a fresh, strictly isolated, ephemeral VM to help ensure data never overlaps between sessions. To protect your enterprise, all traffic routes through our secure Agent Gateway that enforces Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, while user credentials remain fully encrypted and are never exposed directly to the agent.
Given how many people are going to be piping very sensitive data through Gemini Spark in the near future I hope they've made this bullet-proof, or this could be a top candidate for the agent security challenger disaster that we still haven't seen.
Also of note: in Transitioning Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI Google announce that the open source Gemini CLI tool (Apache 2.0 licensed TypeScript) will stop working with their AI subscription plans on June 18th, replaced by the new closed source Antigravity CLI.
Claude Code Remote Control (via) New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session.
It's a little bit janky right now. Initially when I tried it I got the error "Remote Control is not enabled for your account. Contact your administrator." (but I am my administrator?) - then I logged out and back into the Claude Code terminal app and it started working:
claude remote-control
You can only run one session on your machine at a time. If you upgrade the Claude iOS app it then shows up as "Remote Control Session (Mac)" in the Code tab.
It appears not to support the --dangerously-skip-permissions flag (I passed that to claude remote-control and it didn't reject the option, but it also appeared to have no effect) - which means you have to approve every new action it takes.
I also managed to get it to a state where every prompt I tried was met by an API 500 error.
Restarting the program on the machine also causes existing sessions to start returning mysterious API errors rather than neatly explaining that the session has terminated.
I expect they'll iron out all of these issues relatively quickly. It's interesting to then contrast this to solutions like OpenClaw, where one of the big selling points is the ability to control your personal device from your phone.
Claude Code still doesn't have a documented mechanism for running things on a schedule, which is the other killer feature of the Claw category of software.
Update: I spoke too soon: also today Anthropic announced Schedule recurring tasks in Cowork, Claude Code's general agent sibling. These do include an important limitation:
Scheduled tasks only run while your computer is awake and the Claude Desktop app is open. If your computer is asleep or the app is closed when a task is scheduled to run, Cowork will skip the task, then run it automatically once your computer wakes up or you open the desktop app again.
I really hope they're working on a Cowork Cloud product.
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.
I said “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction 🤦♀️
Andrej Karpathy talks about “Claws”. Andrej Karpathy tweeted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini ("The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused") to tinker with Claws:
I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically [...] But I do love the concept and I think that just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level.
Looking around, and given that the high level idea is clear, there are a lot of smaller Claws starting to pop out. For example, on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code (fits into both my head and that of AI agents, so it feels manageable, auditable, flexible, etc.) and runs everything in containers by default. [...]
Anyway there are many others - e.g. nanobot, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw (lol @ prefixes). [...]
Not 100% sure what my setup ends up looking like just yet but Claws are an awesome, exciting new layer of the AI stack.
Andrej has an ear for fresh terminology (see vibe coding, agentic engineering) and I think he's right about this one, too: "Claw" is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems - AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks.
It even comes with an established emoji 🦞
It's wild that the first commit to OpenClaw was on November 25th 2025, and less than three months later it's hit 10,000 commits from 600 contributors, attracted 196,000 GitHub stars and sort-of been featured in an extremely vague Super Bowl commercial for AI.com.
Quoting AI.com founder Kris Marszalek, purchaser of the most expensive domain in history for $70m:
ai.com is the world’s first easy-to-use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open source agent framework that went viral two weeks ago; we made it easy to use without any technical skills, while hardening security to keep your data safe.
Looks like vaporware to me - all you can do right now is reserve a handle - but it's still remarkable to see an open source project get to that level of hype in such a short space of time.
Update: OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger just announced that he's joining OpenAI and plans to transfer ownership of OpenClaw to a new independent foundation.
Introducing the Codex app. OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.
The app is built with Electron and Node.js. Automations track their state in a SQLite database - here's what that looks like if you explore it with uvx datasette ~/.codex/sqlite/codex-dev.db:
Here’s an interactive copy of that database in Datasette Lite.
The announcement gives us a hint at some usage numbers for Codex overall - the holiday spike is notable:
Since the launch of GPT‑5.2-Codex in mid-December, overall Codex usage has doubled, and in the past month, more than a million developers have used Codex.
Automations are currently restricted in that they can only run when your laptop is powered on. OpenAI promise that cloud-based automations are coming soon, which will resolve this limitation.
They chose Electron so they could target other operating systems in the future, with Windows “coming very soon”. OpenAI’s Alexander Embiricos noted on the Hacker News thread that:
it's taking us some time to get really solid sandboxing working on Windows, where there are fewer OS-level primitives for it.
Like Claude Code, Codex is really a general agent harness disguised as a tool for programmers. OpenAI acknowledge that here:
Codex is built on a simple premise: everything is controlled by code. The better an agent is at reasoning about and producing code, the more capable it becomes across all forms of technical and knowledge work. [...] We’ve focused on making Codex the best coding agent, which has also laid the foundation for it to become a strong agent for a broad range of knowledge work tasks that extend beyond writing code.
Claude Code had to rebrand to Cowork to better cover the general knowledge work case. OpenAI can probably get away with keeping the Codex name for both.
OpenAI have made Codex available to free and Go plans for "a limited time" (update: Sam Altman says two months) during which they are also doubling the rate limits for paying users.
TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker. I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it.
- Use their Docker Compose configuration
- Answering all of those questions
- Running administrative commands
- Setting up a Telegram bot
- Accessing the web UI
- Running commands as root
Here's a screenshot of the web UI that this serves on localhost:
First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s general agent
New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a “research preview” that they describe as “Claude Code for the rest of your work”. It’s currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. Update 16th January 2026: it’s now also available to $20/month Claude Pro subscribers.
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Skills actually came out of a prototype I built demonstrating that Claude Code is a general-purpose agent :-)
It was a natural conclusion once we realized that bash + filesystem were all we needed
— Barry Zhang, Anthropic
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
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