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VC Ryan Sarver Details Building an AI Chief of Staff on OpenClaw

How I built a chief of staff on OpenClaw that's better than any human I've hired

Venture investor Ryan Sarver writes up how he built an AI chief of staff on OpenClaw with a markdown-based memory layer and a continuous improvement loop. He offers to open source the system if there is enough interest.

Original post · 12 min read
X ArticleHow I built a chief of staff on OpenClaw that's better than any human I've hired
I'm a VC in the middle of a fundraise, sitting on boards, helping portfolio companies, and angel investing on the side. I've worked with great human EAs and chiefs of staff over the years, so I know what high-leverage support actually looks like. When the first AI APIs came out, I tried to build an AI version of that as a product and couldn't make it work.
When OpenClaw launched I went deep immediately and haven't stopped. I have helped a number of friends set it up and each of them have asked what I have done to configure it and super power it. @ryancarson's post (link in the comments) about how he built his OpenClaw assistant was also great to see, and the response to it convinced me to finally write up what I've been building.
What I have now is more capable than any human chief of staff I've ever worked with. It never forgets a commitment, it handles the small stuff without being asked, flags the important stuff without being told, and it gets better every week. Plus it never sleeps and it never tires. There are still some bumps, but less and less each week.
If any of this is interesting, let me know. If there's enough interest I'll package the whole system up and open source it.
What makes a great chief of staff?
Before I walk through what I've built, it's worth thinking about what a great chief of staff actually does. Not the job description, the real leverage. The best ones I've worked with filtered the noise so only the right things reached me, made sure I walked into every meeting prepared and that nothing fell through after, kept the full picture of what was in flight and flagged what was slipping, tracked relationships and knew where things stood with every important person, and created the daily and weekly rhythm that kept everything moving.
Her name is Stella. She handles all of these, and I'll walk through each one below. But the two things that make my setup genuinely different from other OpenClaw builds are the memory layer underneath it all and the continuous improvement loop that makes the system get better every week. I want to start there because they're what make everything else compound.
Memory: the foundation
Session memory is a lie. Any assistant that treats conversation history as its working context will fail you at the most frustrating moments.
I built two layers. The first is daily notes: one markdown file per day (memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md) serving as a raw log of everything that happened. Meetings attended, decisions made, tasks added and completed, context that came up in conversation. A script called pulls from my sessions throughout the day and writes these automatically.
The second is long-term memory in MEMORY.md, curated by Stella herself. Key people, active projects, lessons learned, decisions made. She periodically synthesizes this from the daily notes, and it's what she reads on startup to orient herself on what matters right now.
Every meeting processed, every email triaged, and every task tracked feeds back into this picture continuously. Without this layer you have a capable assistant with amnesia. With it you have something closer to a person who's been working alongside you for months and never forgets anything.
I've also come to really value that all of this lives in flat markdown files rather than a database. I can open any memory file, read it, edit it if something's wrong, and understand exactly what the assistant knows. I can back the whole thing up to git and restore anything instantly. There's no abstraction layer between me and the assistant's understanding of my world, which means I trust it more and fix things faster when they're off.
Here's where the layers really come together. I'm managing a fundraise involving 100+ LP contacts across multiple countries. Stella tracks the full pipeline, keeps context on each LP and contact, and knows where every relationship stands. For first meetings, I've created a rule that she researches the fund and any recent content they or their partners have published, then preps me with what she found, how it maps to our thesis, and tailored talking points as part of the pre-meeting brief. For ongoing relationships, she knows exactly where they are in the pipeline, what was discussed and committed in our last meeting, and what the key issues are. You can't automate something as critical as a fundraise, but having this kind of structure underneath it means I'm spending my time on the conversations themselves rather than managing the process around them.
Kaizen: the system improves itself
This might be my favorite part, and the thing that makes it feel genuinely different from any assistant I've worked with, human or AI.
Every Friday, a cron job runs research. Stella scans the OpenClaw community, checks for new patterns, looks at what other builders are doing, and saves findings to `memory/kaizen-research-YYYY-MM-DD.md`. On Sunday morning we review it together. She summarizes the week's research, surfaces the top ideas worth tryi… continue on X ↗
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More in Agents & Dev Tools

Developer Rebuilds Seven Adobe Apps in Rust Using Opus 5.5

Peter Yang highlights a developer who reimplemented seven Adobe apps, including Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom, in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5 and open-sourced them. The developer believes they can match Adobe's features within months, against Adobe's $840 yearly all-apps plan.

Original post · 1 min read
It's insane to watch AI blow apart closed source software and games.

4 examples from the past month:

1. 7 of Adobe's biggest apps, including Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom, have been partially rebuilt in Rust with Opus 5.5 and open sourced. It's still early, but the developer thinks they can match Adobe's features within months. Adobe's all-apps plan costs $840/year.
Miguel Ángel Durán @midudev
Todos los productos de Adobe reimplementados desde cero, gratuitos y de código abierto

→ getartcraft.com/apps
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Vercel's Guillermo Rauch Explains Turborepo's Migration From Go to Rust

Guillermo Rauch says Vercel moved Turborepo from Go to Rust, a migration that was controversial internally due to human costs. He argues that with AI agents the calculus has changed, so what is best for humans is no longer necessarily best for business.

Original post · 1 min read
DHH is fundamentally right about Rust. For context, Vercel has been undergoing a Rust-ification (carcinization, technically 🦀) for a while.

One of the first projects we migrated was Turborepo, from Go to Rust¹. The migration completed, but the RoI was actually quite controversial internally.

While Rust was in our eyes better for low-level OS access, something crucial for a build system like Turbo, the human migration costs were very sustantive.

Go is very fast. It's beautifully designed. It's easy to iterate on. We were very conflicted about the migration, because it was *humans* writing the code, *even if we knew Rust was a better choice*.

The calculus has now changed. What's "best for humans" is no longer necessarily "best for business".

FWIW, it's also quite unlikely that Rust is the end-all-be-all toolchain. I'm quite certain there's greener pasture ahead, because Rust itself was designed before the 'supersonic tsunami' of agents hit.

¹ https​://vercel.com/blog/how-turborepo-is-porting-from-go-to-rust
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Integer Multiplication Algorithm Bound Tightened Repeatedly With Astra

A post reports that a user running ChatGPT Astra in a loop is repeatedly breaking records for integer multiplication algorithms. It quotes an update to OpenAI problem #109 that tightens the constant from 2^-182 to 2^-59, a roughly 500,000-fold improvement over the previous result.

Original post · 1 min read
This guy has 6.1 Astra running in a loop and is breaking the record for integer multiplication algorithms every few hours lmaooooo.
Doug Colkitt @0xdoug
We are publishing an update to OpenAI problem #109 Integer multiplication) with another substantial further tightening:

κ = 2⁻⁵⁹ (from OpenAI’s original κ = 2⁻¹⁸²)

Approximately 500 thousand fold improvement over our previous result and a 2¹²³ fold improvement over the original OAI result.

The latest redesigned the finite network to share intermediate computations and scratch space, then tightened the recursion and Gaussian estimates.
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Boris Cherny Says Prompting Claude Should Feel Like Talking to a Coworker

Boris Cherny explains his approach to prompting Claude, advising users to give clear goals, specify effort level and verification steps rather than relying on heavy scaffolding.

Original post · 1 min read
I am surprised that people are surprised this is how I prompt Claude.

Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker. There's no secret to prompting. There's no need to be overly scaffolded or prescriptive for most tasks -- give Claude a goal, and it will figure it out.

Back in the Sonnet 3.5 days, your prompt mattered a lot. Nowadays, it's much more important to communicate to the model:

1. What you want it to do
2. How much effort you want it to spend
3. How it should verify that it did the right thing
Boris Cherny @bcherny
Prompt
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Eric Raymond Highlights Open-Source Rust Clone of Photoshop Built via LLM

Eric S. Raymond shares the photocraft GitHub project, a clean-room open-source reimplementation of Photoshop that he says was likely generated by decompiling the app, converting it to a spec and prompting an LLM for Rust. He argues this threatens closed-source software.

Original post · 1 min read
This is the doom I predicted a few days ago, coming for Photoshop. A clean-room open-source reimplementation.

No prizes for guessing that they decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust.

Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead.

github.com/storytold/photocraft
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Nat Eliason Details Fourteen Ways His Bot Setup Automates Work

Nat Eliason lists fourteen functions of his bot setup, including a chief-of-staff agent that drafts emails, specialist agents per work lane, and cloud coding agents that open pull requests from Linear issues. He notes GrokBot as a substantial improvement over his previous OpenClaw setup.

Original post · 2 min read
Things my @bot setup does that still blow my mind:

1. A Chief of Staff who opens the day pulling open loops from email & tasks and suggesting things it can knock out before 7am.

2. After every meeting, decisions get folded into Notion, Linear, and Todoist — not left rotting in Granola

3. Every email starts as a draft. The CoS bot scans my email every ~2hr and drafts replies to nearly everything — including checking my cal for availability and finding requested attachments / links

4. A specialist for each lane: curriculum, engineering, coaching, hiring, content, ops, and one for every single piece of software

5. Routines that keep running while I’m offline (e.g. monitoring Sentry errors in our apps and proactively fixing things)

6. Group rooms where 2–4 bots share one project thread instead of me copy-pasting context

7. Cloud coding agents that pick up Linear issues and open PRs after running the list of open work by me EoD — then squash-merge to main when it’s done

8. Meeting prep briefs pulled from Granola + Notion before I walk in

9. A growing shareable knowledge base in Notion + a GitHub repo that we update daily based on what happens at school

10. Student progress look-up across Expertise, Followers, and CoFounder without inventing numbers — chat anytime to see where a student is on their business work

11. Mentor Mind that coaches me on how to hold the bar without inventing doctrine

12. Todoist as a central task list where it logs things it’s blocked on for me, or from meetings / emails — and I can paste links into chat to direct it how to solve them

13. Engineering work is automatically tracked in Linear so my and the product teams’ bots don’t collide with each other

14. Presentations spun up in Gamma / Claude Design without me opening a slide tool

15. Plaud / live capture → notes the bots can actually act on

Probably more but these were the immediate ones we thought of.
Nat Eliason @nateliason
GrokBot feels like absolute magic at this point, a meaningful leg up on my previous OpenClaw etc. setups.

And with how easy it is to setup, there's really no excuse now.
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