Behind the Claude Frenzy That Ate Up All the Mac Minis

In the passenger seat of Tyler Cadwell’s Ford Bronco sits a Mac mini hooked up to a portable battery and Starlink internet satellite dish, along with a touchscreen monitor mounted to the dash. Cadwell, the founder of Everything Etched, an Arizona-based small business that sells custom-engraved glassware, has always loved disappearing into the state’s sandstone canyons to brainstorm or crash on a new web project. That used to mean bringing a notebook or laptop, but now the 39-year-old entrepreneur heads out with his artificial intelligence assistant riding shotgun.

The bot has come to life thanks to OpenClaw, an open-source framework for developing personalized AI agents. Cadwell began creating Etchie, as he calls it, on his Mac in March to automate coding requests and handle marketing and administrative tasks, including triaging his email inbox and even responding on its own to supply chain problems. It has access to his store’s Etsy and Shopify accounts and is tapped into models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The bot also uses a voice plug-in, so Cadwell can chat with it as they bounce over the rocks outside Flagstaff or Tucson. “I hit the trails driving and just talk to Etchie about what I want to do. We hash out my ideas, and then it starts building a design scope,” Cadwell says. “When I wake up in the morning, the whole project’s complete.” He says the system is his “first AI employee.”