A Tale of Two Demos

Two rooms, two entirely different crowds

I’ve spent the last 48 hours indulging my “clawriosity”, demoing a few of my OpenClaw projects in front of two entirely different groups. The most valuable experience didn’t come from the demos, however, but from getting to see how different audiences interact with technology (and getting to meet some of my clawstomers).

The first gathering was ostensibly the more “clawcentric” of the two - “Build Night: Cage the Claw” put on by AI Tinkerers San Francisco. This was more low-key than other AI Tinkerers events I have been to… maybe it was the six-hour duration and lack of any set program that gave it more of a laid back vibe?

The participants ranged from the claw-curious (ok… I should probably stop with the claw-isms) to those who had seemingly been playing with OpenClaw since it’s inception. And the demos at the end of the day ran the gamut as well from highly focused on OpenClaw to “OpenClaw-adjacent” or just Claw-like. The event was taking place against the backdrop of Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw access to its subscription plans (happening just two hours prior to the start of the event), which clearly caught some of the participants by surprise and threw a bit of a wrench into their plans.

Several of the demos touched on the idea of making OpenClaw (and AI in general) safer and more useful for children and familes. Another, CivicClaw, focused on making local government more accessible to its constituents. Clawcast presented itself as a platform for budding crustacean podcasters and smol machines as a platform for quickly and securely deploying software systems like OpenClaw in isolation. Another participant shared their use of multimodality on a Daylight Computer to make agentic interactions feel more organic. I was most impressed, however, by the woman sitting across the table from me who went from “what is this OpenClaw thing all about?” to “Here’s a dashboard for monitoring security incidents on an OpenClaw instance” over the course of the afternoon.

As for myself, I spent the time learning more about NemoClaw (aka OpenShell) and demonstrated it running OpenClaw remotely on a DGX-Spark with Google’s gemma4-26B-A4B as a local model (yes, it is as good as they say), along with Even Realities G2 glasses using clawg-ui to communicate with Open Claw for hands-free voice-enabled chatting (my goal of going end-to-end from my glasses to the DGX-Spark eluded me, however). In general the group felt less “techie” than the typical AI Tinkerers event, an aspect that manifested itself in the wider variety of demos. Thanks to Oracle and Nvidia for sponsoring the event (it might have been nice to have a DGX-Spark or two on hand for everyone to play with) and to Composio for hosting.

The second event, Generative UI Night, was a more typical SF tech event… pizza, drinks and networking, followed by presentations from the sponsors and an open mic “lightning round” of community demos (which is where I came in) - highly organized and tightly structured over the course of 150 minutes. And, unlike the event two days prior, I would turn out to be the only presenter focusing on OpenClaw.

I hadn’t even planned on doing a demo (although OpenClaw does have a generative UI angle in the form of its webview-based A2UI Canvas). I always like to use a product from one of the sponsors when I participate in community demos and the nature of this A2UI implementation did not lend itself well to integration with CopilotKit (the most obvious choice). The night before, however, I was browsing through the pull requests on the AG-UI repo (as one does on a Sunday evening) and came across one from CopilotKit CEO Atai Barkai entitled “Open Gen UI pre-release”. Long story short, I forked the PR and turned it into an “A2UI over AG-UI” integration for OpenClaw, the end result of which you can see here.

Spoiler alert: the demo, as most of the demos before and after mine, did not go entirely as expected, in my case after I committed the AI demo equivalent of an own goal - I used the wrong prompt. If you watch the 4-minute demo, you might be able to see that it ended in a page of generated text when instead, it was supposed to end with the visual payoff of a carousel of cards (a realization that dawned me as soon as I sat down - a sort of technological l’esprit de l’escalier) :

The highlight of the evening, however, was getting to meet two developers who had used my clawg-ui plugin in their own projects (in one case a hackathon-winning project) - Jerel Velarde and Kush Ise

Thanks to CopilotKit and WorkOS for making the IRL meetup possible!