Prompting tasks instead of backlogging

What if your computer didn’t need a screen in front of you to get work done? That’s the shift Ben Guo, co-founder of Zo, is building toward, and this conversation gets into the specifics of what that actually looks like day to day.

In this episode of Supra Insider, Marc Baselga and Ben Erez sit down with Ben Guo to explore Zo: a personal cloud computer with built-in AI agents, file storage, scheduled tasks, and the ability to receive commands over text or email. Together, they unpack how Zo differs from the OpenClaw movement and why Ben thinks the personal cloud becomes a device category everyone eventually owns.

The conversation goes deep on how the Zo team actually builds software: writing AI-generated markdown plans before touching any code, reviewing those plans as GitHub PRs, and largely abandoning the traditional to-do backlog in favor of just prompting something and letting it run. They also get into the real overhead that comes with this new way of working, including context management, delegation judgment, and figuring out what belongs where.

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In this episode, we covered the following topics:

* (01:50) What Zo is: a computer in the cloud with file storage, AI chat, skills, memory, scheduled tasks

* (06:00) Zo’s origin story: started as an inference platform in 2023, before agents were a thing

* (09:10) OpenClaw appealed to tinkerer/hacker audience, like the Home Brew Computer Club

* (15:20) Zo is designed for people who want to get stuff done, not necessarily tinker all day

* (27:45) The future: we’ll interact with multiple AI computers in our day-to-day

* (30:20) Back to old-school computing: peer-to-peer, FTP, SSH—protocols mostly used by engineers now

* (36:45) Could Zo eventually become the default messaging interface? Text Zo instead of friends?

* (41:00) The workflow: write PRD, ask Zo to translate to Linear tickets, Zo updates them as work progresses

* (46:20) Coding now feels more like managing a team—firing off things, checking back later

* (56:45) Ben Erez’s fanboy moment: Zo is his favorite new product of the year so far

* (59:15) Gratitude Corner: Thanking Tiff Huang (Ben’s girlfriend) for being supportive through 2.5 years of building

* And more!

Links:

* Zo: https://www.zo.computer/

* Tiff Huang: https://bytheophana.substack.com/

* Ben Guo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/0thernet

* Marc: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbaselga/

* Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benerez/

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