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Gavriel Cohen

Things Gavriel Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Gavriel Cohen hosts The AI Engineer Podcast . They have also been a guest on The Changelog .

Recently: “From zero to NanoClaw (Interview)” on The Changelog (October 2026); “Lovable HIts $500M in ARR, Apple Announces AI Siri” on The AI Engineer Podcast (June 2026); “Exploring Alphabet's $80 Billion AI Plans” on The AI Engineer Podcast (June 2026); “Uber's AI Spending, the Pope on AI, TikTok and Universal's AI Music Deal” on The AI Engineer Podcast (May 2026); “The $26.5 Trillion Future of AI” on The AI Engineer Podcast (May 2026); “Google Stops AI Exploit, Nadella Testifies, OpenAI's New $4B Unit” on The AI Engineer Podcast (May 2026).

What They Said

“If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog

Cohen, who builds agent software for companies, explaining why his agents can review code and recommend a merge but the merge itself goes through under a person's credentials. He wants people to stay at the centre, and thinks organisations that teach everyone to direct and review agents will be able to keep their staff, while those that don't will end up with mass layoffs.

The Changelog · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
The Changelog Around 1:26:07 into the episode
Gavriel Cohen

…to an agent. And I don't think. Think we have the mechanism fully in place yet for that. But there are some great companies and projects, like one of the ones we partnered with, which is called OneCLI, and they are building that identity for agents so that you can express those kinds of concepts.

Adam Stacoviak

…in this policy-driven world that is inside of NanoClaw, if I understand correctly, that you don't want an agent to merge the code. You want a human to approve it, and the merge is accredited to that person and their credential versus the agent who, in quotes, actually did the work. Is that right?

Gavriel Cohen

…the way we're building it. When we're bringing it to companies, it's the same approach. We're saying we're going to give each person in your team an agent, an assistant that's going to help them, help the person do their work, going to make them more effective, two, three times more effective. And the people in your team need to become managers of agents. Like that's where the world is going. If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before. They have to learn a lot of new skills, like clearly communicating what they want and what their intent is, giving feedback, taking responsibility, reviewing other work of other people, or in this case, other agents. So it's a whole new skill set. And the way we're approaching it is the starting point is give each person an agent where it's one-to-one. They take responsibility for it. They give…

Adam Stacoviak

I guess it makes sense too that NanoClaw is not a developer tool to create more software. It is more of a business-focused tool to, as you said before, amplify humans' output, which makes more sense because when you think about agents and loops, I'm a developer. I naturally think about how's it…

Gavriel Cohen

So the first thing is, like you're saying, it's business critical. In some ways, the agents become the whole company. It's kind of their workforce. And for any kind of large company, that has to be in their cloud environment, right? In their AWS account or GCP or Azure. And starting to speak to…

Adam Stacoviak

Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So how and everything you're doing is built on the open source version of NanoClaw, or do you have a separate repository that you deploy into enterprises? Or what's the take there? A separate or same?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog

Cohen built the agent project NanoClaw over a weekend and released it under the MIT license; he is now building a company on it. Asked whether he regrets giving it away, he argues that licenses have stopped protecting anyone, because a coding agent can rewrite any open codebase in another language. The project, in his view, is for brand, community and distribution.

The Changelog · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
The Changelog Around 42:17 into the episode
Gavriel Cohen

…an AI native agency to be, you know, to have created a successful AI agent project. So that was my thinking. But it was totally just going to be this side project. I put it out on my personal GitHub user and only moved it to our company's GitHub after it took off. This was just a weekend project.

Adam Stacoviak

…road, man. You can't put the cat back in the bag, so to speak, because you've already open source an MIT licensed NanoClaw. How does that sit with you when it comes to you building a business around a code repository that's fully open with fully permissive to any degree? How do you feel about that?

Gavriel Cohen

…it leaks. And people posted it on GitHub. And then there were all these takedown requests. So then people had AI code. Coding agents just rewrite the entire thing in Python, in Rust, in 12 other languages. And that actually, once you rewrite it in another language, the original license doesn't apply anymore. So you can look at a project and rewrite it, and that's fully allowed by licensing. So I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it. I think the new model is the open source project is just about building up a brand, getting a community, getting distribution. So that's the way we're looking at it for NanoClaw. So you've got people building on NanoClaw, individuals, businesses. That's all great. Only 1%, probably much less, probably a tenth of a percent of companies are going to build their own internal agent platform on top…

Adam Stacoviak

I like your view on open source. It's intriguing at least. I want to hear more. And so if I understand correctly, your position is that open source has obviously changed. Even if the license is not permissive, the fact that it's there might as well be permissive because anybody who has any sort of…

Gavriel Cohen

We have, so we're commercializing. We have customers, we have paying customers. And I don't know if the same will hold true for every project. I think a claw type of project, personal agent, it's a unique, it's a bit of a unique thing. It's not a developer tool, right? Which most open source…

Adam Stacoviak

Interesting. So is that the kind of business? So while I recognize the commercial opportunity here, and maybe that's just the surface that we're scratching and that's what you can share here now, is that the business you want to run? Because I mean, to start out, you began as an engineer building…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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