Sometime around early 2026, I started hearing “agentic AI” everywhere. Tech news, YouTube, coworkers dropping it into conversations like it was obvious. I did some Googling. The concept sounded interesting — but I couldn’t quite picture what it actually was.
How does it work? And more importantly, how is it any different from just going to Claude.ai or ChatGPT and typing a question? Is it basically the same thing, just with extra steps? I kept seeing comparisons to “AI co-work” — is that what this is?
Then I started looking at how other people were actually using it. What problems were they solving? What were they building that they couldn’t build before? The more I read, the more I realized I wasn’t going to figure this out by reading about it.
Those questions are what drove me to start this project.
I watched a Jensen Huang keynote where he talked about open systems being the direction AI was heading. Then Nvidia released NemoClaw, their own open agent framework. When the chip company powering the whole AI boom starts shipping agent tooling, as a seasoned IT professional, maybe I should start paying more attention.
I started my research and came across OpenClaw — but I got some mixed messages. Some people, Jensen Huang included, were saying it was the future, that it could do things nothing else could touch. Others were warning about serious security vulnerabilities, that it could be compromised, that running it locally opened up risks most people weren’t thinking about. That tension made me more curious than cautious. Why were people installing it anyway, knowing all that? How was it actually different from Claude co-work or just asking ChatGPT? What could it do that you simply can’t do through a browser tab? In order to find out, I decided to try NemoClaw, Nvidia’s own open agent framework. My goal was simple: find out what OpenClaw can do, without sacrificing on security.
Hardware decision was easy — a new, base model Mac Mini. Familiar, affordable, runs Docker, stable enough that I wouldn’t have to worry too much about security. What I didn’t expect was the wait. Turns out a lot of other people had the same idea at the same time, and Mac Minis were backordered. A month of lead time. I finally got mine on May 12th.
Now that I had the machine, it was time to actually try something.