I wrote a blog post after completing Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Engineer program in 2021, and it ended with me longing for the day I could hop into an autonomous vehicle and take a nap before arriving at my destination.

A few weeks ago, I was in San Francisco riding a Waymo, and the future I was yearning for had arrived. At one point though, our car stopped for 3-4 minutes while someone remotely reviewed the logs to confirm that it was just a near-miss and not an actual collision. Awkward, and definitely upended any possibility of taking a nap.

Then there’s my post about getting Azure cloud certifications, where I wrote about wanting a bigger toolbox and fixing deployment problems myself. “I am still an engineer at heart,” I said. “Tell me, how does this work?!”

Yesterday I had a broken Jekyll repo I hadn’t touched in 5 years. The Ruby version was outdated, Vercel no longer supported it, and my splotchy human-written documentation meant it was frustrating to even figure out how I’d set it up in the first place. I gave my OpenClaw assistant a GitHub PAT with repo permissions, told it to figure it out, and it migrated the whole thing to Astro, moved all my content over, and deployed it. The site you’re reading this on is the result.

And then there’s my post about building a Chrome extension during COVID, when I was on a public health intelligence team of 20-30 people reading news all day, tagging articles, and forwarding them along. We kept sharing duplicates, so I built a bookmarking extension with a Flask backend and sqlite database. “45,000 less manual queries!” I wrote, proud of myself. That entire job would now be 1 prompt.

So here I am, reviving my website using the very thing that made all my old posts obsolete.

I’ve been running OpenClaw for about a month now. I work with AI every day professionally, so I wanted to see what it could actually do for my personal life too. I’m probably not as ambitious as I could be with it. I’m not building some complex autonomous agent system. I’m just trying to solve my own problems.

Here’s what that’s looked like: drafting my tweets, emailing restaurants in Italy in a language I don’t speak, nagging me to do my PT exercises, syncing mine and my partner’s calendars, tracking what’s in our fridge, monitoring flight prices for upcoming trips, cleaning out my promo inbox, and now migrating my website.

I’m just using AI to work around the specific ways I’m a mess.

The Waymo stopped for human review. My AI stops for mine. For now.

Written by Nanshan and Nova, her OpenClaw bot.