For the past decade, everyone has been talking about the cloud. Everything has to be in the browser, everything has to be SaaS, everything has to sync automatically on some server on the other side of the world. And then suddenly you realize that half of your daily work no longer happens in the browser, but right on your hard drive. So what happened? Why is "the hard drive making a comeback"? That's exactly what we'll try to unpack in this article.
OpenClaw Made People Think
OpenClaw, created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, is an open-source AI agent that works directly in your operating system - opening applications, navigating between files, clicking buttons, and communicating with the outside world. On GitHub, it already has over 145,000 stars and 20,000 forks. Almost immediately, Moltbook appeared - a social network where only AI agents can post and humans can only watch. Moltbook already has over 1.5 million AI agents and more than 110,000 posts. Elon Musk called it "an early phase of singularity."
This was the moment when many people first truly saw what "an AI agent on your computer" actually means. And many were alarmed.
But here's an important nuance: this wasn't actually anything particularly new or unprecedented.
Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and many other agents have been working directly on your computer with your files long before OpenClaw. They've communicated with external services on your behalf, written code, managed projects. My own Ritemark is a small ripple on this big wave - a tool that works with your files locally, not somewhere in the cloud.
OpenClaw simply brought this trend to the wider public because its behavior was visually noticeable and startlingly human-like.
Why Do Agents Prefer Your Hard Drive?
I think the reason lies in the fact that cloud tools are simply a bit too limiting and rigid for today's pace of development. You can only use what the vendor has made available to you. You can only combine tools in ways someone has anticipated for you. And if you want to do something differently... tough luck.
On your own hard drive, though, you're the king.
You have your own files, your own structure, your own workflows. You can have one AI agent writing code, another editing texts, and a third managing projects - and they all work with your files, according to your rules. In the cloud, you're a tenant; on your own machine, you're the owner.
And what's even more important - speed. When an agent works directly with your files, it doesn't need to reach out to some server for every action, wait for a response, send data back and forth. It just... does it. Immediately. It's a surprisingly big difference once you've tried it.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
To end the theorizing with a concrete example, at Agrello we use a method where the shared file storage is in Google Drive, but synced to local hard drives as needed. Website content, code, marketing materials - everything lives as markdown and other files in a shared repository.
Both Toomas and I work with these files directly on our hard drives using Ritemark, while GDrive handles the syncing in the background. Toomas has OpenAI's Codex agent running in his Ritemark, and I have Claude Code in mine. So - two people, two different AI agents, one and the same file system. Each of us gets to use whichever agent suits them better and work in whatever way is most comfortable.
This is exactly the kind of flexibility you'll never get in the cloud. Not all SaaS tools let you choose which AI runs under the hood. On your own computer, you simply swap out the agent and everything else stays the same.
What Happens Next?
OpenClaw was a fun experiment and an exciting preview, but real life will probably head in a slightly different direction. My prediction is that we'll soon see mainly agents from trusted major players working on our computers.
Microsoft is already there with Copilot (albeit rather clunky for now) - but they have Windows, Office, and the entire enterprise ecosystem where agents fit in nicely. Anthropic has announced Claude Cowork - and its impact was so strong that SaaS company stocks dropped by a combined $285 billion, which came to be known as the "SaaSpocalypse". Cowork runs on your machine, managing files and documents without your data ever leaving your computer. A ChatGPT agent is OpenAI's obvious next step. And I wouldn't rule out Google bringing Gemini straight to the desktop as well.
So we're not going back to a time when everything was offline and local. Rather, a hybrid work environment is emerging where, alongside cloud applications, agents are working on your machine that know your files, your preferences, and your workflows. The result is the flexibility to do things exactly as needed on the ground.
So no need to install OpenClaw right away - you can manage quite well with somewhat more conventional (and probably safer) solutions too 😂