I recorded a voice note on a Friday evening while cooking dinner, describing a feature I wanted. By the time the onions were done, the feature existed — as a blog post about building the machine that made it.
Two weeks ago, I installed OpenClaw — the open-source AI assistant framework that hit 192K GitHub stars — on a Google Cloud VM. The first real task I gave it: migrate itself somewhere cheaper. It browsed pricing pages, picked Hetzner, and walked me through the move. Like teleporting infrastructure.
Since then I've wired up seven AI agents across Telegram and WhatsApp, running cron jobs, monitoring deployments, and — as of tonight — turning voice notes into blog posts.
The new essay is about what that actually looks like. The compound returns, yes. But also the auth bugs at 2am, the session wipes, the cron misfires. The overhead.
I also launched a companion podcast — async voice-note conversations between me and the AI about building on AI. No script, no production polish.
Listen: The Overhead Podcast →
— Zak
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