The afternoon that changed everything.
How one demo on February 27, 2026 pulled me into building with AI agents.
One afternoon my friend Askhat Soltanov talked me into dropping everything and coming along. That afternoon changed everything.
He wanted us to visit another friend, Olzhas Kemalov, who had something to show us.
That was February 27, 2026. We spent about an hour at Olzhas's place while he showed us OpenClaw, an AI agent you talk to in a chat that actually does things on your computer. Our jaws dropped. If I remember right, Askhat ordered a Mac mini on the spot. I drove straight to Micro Center and bought one.
That's where it all started for me.
The first days
The first days were all setup: installing things, connecting subscriptions, figuring out what goes where. For weeks we barely slept and coded nonstop. Slowly I started to see what was possible. I was amazed and furious at the same time. Amazed at what it could do, furious at how dumb my bot could be.
I think everyone goes through that stage.
Then came the walls everyone hits. The first one sounds simple: where do you keep the passwords your bots need?
In May, a group of friends flew to Silicon Valley together, Askhat and Olzhas among them. We met people working at Google, Meta and Microsoft and traded notes.
None of this came free. Eight months in, I still run on very little sleep, and my bots burn through about 10 billion tokens a month.
It all started with one afternoon and one demo. Next I'll write about what I've learned along the way: keys and passwords, MCP, our trip to Silicon Valley, shipping apps to the stores, AI agents in my construction business, and a lot more.
Askhat, thanks for dragging me along. Olzhas, thanks for the demo that started it all. We still bounce ideas off each other all the time, and we tend to see things the same way.