Before I get into the meat of this post. I’m excited to announce I’m running two “Zero To OpenClaw” workshops in collaboration with Igor Ranc at Handpicked Berlin.
They are designed for people who classify themselves as non-technical, and we’re going to dig in pretty deep to help those people get themselves up to speed with personal AI agents and make sure they’re prepared for the disruption that’s going to happen in the next few years and months. There is one for Mac users and one for Windows users.
Details and booking links here:
For those who have been following along with this newsletter for a while, you might be a little bit surprised that these workshops seem to be a bit of a breakneck departure from my a) cynicism about AI and future technology, b) core work in engineering leadership.
There are two driving factors for this: the first is that I intend to retrain as a Kindergarten Teacher, and the second is that I am now fully on board with the concept of “AI will change the future”.
I can almost hear the record scratch noises in people’s heads. Let me break this down a little bit.
Kindergarten Teacher
As some of you will know, I’m the proud father of a spectacular two-year-old atom bomb of creativity and violent physical energy called Vivian. About a year and a half ago, I accompanied him through his kindergarten onboarding, which required me to spend over a month supporting his transition to full-time kindergarten. During this time, I spent quite a lot of time with him and his teachers.
At the time, I was awestruck by the whole experience. I quickly realised that in just a few days, these incredible individuals were contributing more to society than I did in years of working in tech. It tickled something in my brain that never went away. “I think I’d really enjoy doing this.”
But I dismissed it as a dream.
A few weeks ago, I went to read to Vivian’s group, sharing my native English tongue with them in the hope that I could, in some way, influence a few Germans who can pronounce “squirrel” properly in the future.
The dream came back, and so much stronger this time.
My plan now is to retrain as a teacher, hopefully a kindergarten teacher.
Now here’s where it gets tricky: the path towards this goal is not at all clear to me right now. If I want to do this in Germany, I need to massively improve my German, and an immediate return to the UK isn’t on the cards right now (simply because childcare costs prohibit such a move). Therefore, this becomes a much longer-term plan.
Which leads to point two… the immediate future.
The New Digital Middle Class
I’ve been working more and more over the last couple of months with LLMs, coding agents, and agentic orchestration systems like OpenClaw, and my mind is officially blown. We’ve gone from “er, this is shit” two years ago to “ok, we might be onto something” towards the end of last year to “holy moly, what on earth is going on, this is equally terrifying, and also I feel like I did the first time I touched a computer” today.
Anyone who says they know what the future holds is lying to you; no one knows, and any guesses are wild stabs in the dark.
But, that being said, here’s my guess.
What we’re experiencing now parallels the Industrial Revolution of 1750–1850: massive leaps in technology will open up unforeseen opportunities for business and society.
One of the most impactful outcomes of that revolution was the creation of the middle class. Those who were educated, had valuable skills, or a little capital were able to leverage the changes to their advantage and elevate themselves into a class between the working class and the ruling aristocracy.
This is going to happen again: those with a technical foundation or who can afford access to more powerful AI tools will capitalise on the coming tools and changes.
I feel that I’m well-positioned to help people avoid falling behind on these topics and, for those who are really interested, get ahead of the curve.
This is why I will be running these workshops and focusing some of my consulting time on this topic.
For those who are here for engineering leadership topics, don’t worry. I will continue my consultancy and writing about how to lead awesome engineering teams; there will just be a little career transition and some AI equality topics mixed in.
So if you are interested in OpenClaw, or know someone who might be, point them towards these courses, it’ll help them leverage the future, and me pay for some German lessons: