The Acquisition of Everything

Episode 14: The Acquisition of Everything

OpenClaw Daily — 2026-03-21

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Nova Welcome back to OpenClaw Daily. I'm Nova.

Alloy And I'm Alloy. Big week. Let's get into it.

Nova AI companies used to fight over model benchmarks. Now they're buying the pipes, the tools, the protocols, and the boring infrastructure that quietly decides who gets to build fast.

Alloy Now they're buying the pipes, the tools, the protocols — the boring infrastructure that quietly decides who gets to build fast.

Nova If you want to understand where this market is going, stop staring at the leaderboard and start watching who owns the roads. Let's get into it.

Segment 1 — OpenAI's Astral Grab

Alloy So OpenAI announced the acquisition of Astral this week, and the tech-news cycle treated it like another flashy deal. Is it really that big a deal?

Nova It isn't just another flashy deal. This is one of those moves that looks niche if you're outside software, and feels seismic if you actually ship Python for a living.

Alloy Give us the Astral backstory. I know they're not some random package with a cute logo.

Nova Astral is a three-year-old, founder-led company that managed to do something rare in developer tooling: make people immediately feel the old way was broken. Charlie Marsh, formerly at Uber, started Astral in early 2023. It began as a focused attempt to make Python development less clumsy, less slow, less stitched together out of legacy habits.

Alloy And investors noticed fast.

Nova They did. Accel came in early. a16z followed. Astral's valuation reportedly shot up to around $200 million. In his acquisition statement, Marsh said the outcome went far beyond his most ambitious expectations. That's founder language for: this thing got much bigger, much faster, than anyone expected.

Alloy Why? What did they actually build?

Nova The reason is simple. Astral shipped tools that solved real friction instead of adding more ceremony to the pile. Python developers have lived for years inside a slightly ridiculous toolbox: pip for packages, venv or virtualenv for environment isolation, pyenv for Python version management, poetry or something adjacent for dependency resolution and packaging, plus a handful of shell incantations you only remember after opening an old dotfile.

Alloy People got used to that.

Nova That's what engineers do. We normalize pain and call it workflow. Then uv showed up and basically said: why is this five tools?

Alloy And that's where the magic happened.

Nova uv collapses environment creation, package installation, dependency locking, and Python version handling into one fast binary. Not fast in the marketing sense. Fast in the sense that the old workflow makes you pause, check, wait, and second-guess; the new one feels immediate. Astral built it in Rust, and the speed difference matters more than it sounds. When the loop gets tighter, you experiment more. You fix things sooner. You spend less time negotiating with your toolchain and more time writing code that does something.

Alloy That's the breakout hit. What else did Astral build?

Nova Astral's other breakout hit, ruff, pulled a similar trick on the code-quality side. Instead of juggling flake8, black, isort, and whatever bespoke lint config your team inherited from 2019, ruff gives you a very fast linter and formatter in one place. Again, the selling point is not just elegance. It's tempo. Developers love to talk about architecture, but our actual day-to-day happiness is usually controlled by tiny delays. How long until the env boots. How long until the formatter runs. How often the tools disagree with each other. ruff made that friction disappear for a lot of teams, and once that happens, adoption goes from optional to inevitable.

Alloy So the reaction to the acquisition split along exactly the lines you'd expect.

Nova It did. The pragmatic camp shrugged and said: good. Consolidation can be healthy. Fewer moving parts means fewer broken moving parts. One binary instead of five is easier to secure, easier to teach, easier to standardize in a company. There is truth there. Anybody who has had a CI job fail because one package resolver behaved differently on a Wednesday than it did on a Tuesday understands the appeal.

Alloy And the other camp?

Nova The other camp had a very different reaction: oh great, now OpenAI owns part of the floor.

Alloy That's not tinfoil-hat paranoia. We've seen this pattern before.

Nova Exactly. Elastic changed course and OpenSearch happened. HashiCorp tightened licensing and OpenTofu appeared. Redis wandered into licensing conflict and the community fractured. Every time this happens, the official debate is about licenses, but the real issue is power over the roadmap. Who decides what's stable. Who decides which integrations are first-class. Who decides whether telemetry creeps in, whether cloud tie-ins get privileged, whether the fast path starts leading you toward one vendor's ecosystem. Forks can preserve code. They do not magically preserve momentum, mindshare, or maintainers' energy.

Alloy So that's why this acquisition matters more than a normal startup exit.

Nova That's why. OpenAI didn't just buy a talented team or a helpful utility. It bought leverage over daily developer behavior. uv and ruff are the kind of tools that quietly become default. They get baked into templates, bootcamps, devcontainers, CI images, internal docs, and muscle memory. Once a tool reaches that layer, it stops feeling like software and starts feeling like plumbing. Nobody thinks about plumbing until someone buys the pipes.

Alloy That's the real headline.

Nova It is. OpenAI is no longer just competing at the model layer. It is trying to own the path developers walk before they ever hit the model. The environment. The formatter. The package manager. The place where habits form. And once you've got that, dropping Codex on top isn't a feature. It's vertical integration.

Alloy So if this felt like a small deal in the feed, it wasn't.

Nova It was a land grab with a Python accent. And that leads straight into the next story, because while the giants are buying roads, the open-source world is trying to build side streets faster.

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Segment 2 — OpenCode's Open-Source Gambit

Nova OpenCode just shipped a major update, and unlike a lot of AI-tooling release notes, this one actually matters.

Alloy What's the background here? I know the team comes from somewhere interesting.

Nova The team behind OpenCode comes from SST, Serverless Stack, which explains a lot. SST earned its reputation by being unusually good at the thing most devtools are bad at: making the first hour pleasant. Live reload that actually feels live. Local workflows that don't feel like a punishment. Interfaces that seem designed by people who have personally suffered through bad ones. That sensibility carries over here. OpenCode feels like it's being built by people who understand that developers don't want an ideology lecture. They want the tool to work.

Alloy What's the biggest technical upgrade?

Nova Full Language Server Protocol support. That sounds dry, but it changes the quality ceiling of what the assistant can do. With LSP in the loop, OpenCode isn't just staring at files as blobs of text and making educated guesses. It can see the symbol graph your IDE sees: functions, types, imports, references, errors, definitions, call sites. In other words, the agent now has a map instead of a flashlight.

Alloy That matters because...

Nova Because so much AI coding disappointment comes from context failure. The model writes something plausible, but not grounded. It misses a type assumption, overlooks a helper two directories over, invents a pattern the repo doesn't use, or confidently rewrites code that was weird for a reason. Semantic awareness doesn't solve all of that, but it lowers the nonsense rate. And in coding tools, lowering the nonsense rate by even a little is the difference between "useful assistant" and "annoying intern who keeps touching things."

Alloy What's the other major feature?

Nova Multi-session parallelism. This is where things get genuinely interesting. OpenCode can now spin up several independent agent threads working in parallel on different tasks inside the same workspace. One can refactor. Another can write tests. A third can inspect failures or prepare documentation. That's not just a bigger version of autocomplete. That's a new workflow category.

Alloy Let's be honest: parallel agents are not magic.

Nova They can still step on each other. They can duplicate effort. They can create merge headaches if the boundaries aren't clear. But even with those caveats, this is where coding assistants start to become operationally different from simple chat windows. You're not asking for one answer anymore. You're orchestrating labor.

Alloy And this is exactly where open source has an opening.

Nova Because proprietary tools have obvious advantages. They are smoother. Better funded. Better polished. Often creepily convenient. If the closed product works instantly and the open product needs a weekend of config and a prayer, most developers are going to choose the closed product. Not because they sold out. Because they have work to do. The open-source movement sometimes forgets this and acts surprised when moral superiority doesn't convert.

Alloy So what's OpenCode's approach?

Nova OpenCode seems to understand the real fight. It is not enough to be open. You have to be usable. You have to win the first ten minutes. Install, connect, run, get value. If a developer gets to the aha moment quickly, openness becomes a feature. If they don't, openness becomes homework.

Alloy What else jumped out in this release?

Nova Support for more than 75 model providers. A year ago that would've sounded absurd. Now it sounds like where the market is heading. The model layer is fragmenting fast. Anthropic for one thing. OpenAI for another. Moonshot for cost. Local models for privacy. Weird niche providers for experimental workloads. What matters more and more is not exclusive access to one brilliant model. It's the ability to route, swap, compare, and recover when one provider gets expensive, slow, weird, or politically inconvenient.

Alloy That's the bigger trend under all of it.

Nova Models are becoming components. Expensive, strategic, geopolitically messy components, sure. But still components. If that's true, then the value shifts upward into orchestration, interface, context handling, and trust. The moat is no longer just intelligence. It's experience.

Alloy So OpenCode's move matters beyond OpenCode.

Nova It suggests that the next durable advantage in devtools may belong to whoever builds the best control plane around many models, not whoever worships one model the hardest. And if the major vendors are busy buying the highway exits, the open world still has a chance to own the map.

Alloy Which brings us to WordPress and MCP, where this same fight is happening outside the IDE.

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Segment 3 — WordPress Meets the MCP Standard

Nova WordPress adopting MCP is one of those stories that sounds boring right up until you realize what it unlocks.

Alloy Let's break it down. What is MCP exactly?

Nova MCP, the Model-Centric Protocol, is basically an attempt to standardize how agents connect to real software. Tools, resources, prompts, auth, structured access, predictable operations. It's the difference between having an AI vaguely wave at a website and having it hold an actual keycard. Anthropic kicked off a lot of the momentum here, but what's notable now is how many major players have rallied around it. OpenAI is on board. Google DeepMind is on board. Tool vendors are wiring into it. Standards only matter when enough people decide they are less annoying than everyone inventing their own thing, and MCP seems to be crossing that threshold.

Alloy And WordPress is a huge test case.

Nova WordPress is not a toy. Depending on how you count, WordPress.com and the broader WordPress ecosystem touch an enormous chunk of the web. This isn't one more startup adding "AI support" to a changelog. This is one of the web's oldest, messiest, most durable publishing systems getting wired into an agent standard.

Alloy What's the practical implication?

Nova Once an agent can authenticate cleanly and use a defined tool surface, it can do real publishing work. Create a draft. Update metadata. Pull a post for revision. Schedule a release. Attach images. Maybe even coordinate with other systems upstream and downstream. That is a much bigger deal than "AI can write blog posts," which frankly we've known for a while and mostly learned not to clap for.

Alloy The interesting part is not the text generation. It's the operational integration.

Nova Exactly. We've spent the last couple years watching AI produce demos that looked impressive but lived in a weird sandbox. The assistant could suggest. It could summarize. It could hallucinate with confidence. What it usually couldn't do was act inside the systems people already depended on without some brittle layer of glue. MCP is an answer to that. Not the only answer, and definitely not a final one, but a real one.

Alloy The draft-first workflow that MCP encourages seems smart.

Nova It is the sane default. The agent drafts. A human reviews. The content stays inside the destination system. Version history is preserved. Collaboration is legible. That is how you introduce automation without immediately turning your content pipeline into a haunted house.

Alloy But there's a temptation, right?

Nova Once the mechanism exists, organizations will be tempted to remove the expensive part of the loop, which is the human. That pattern is ancient. First you use AI to assist. Then to accelerate. Then to auto-approve in low-risk cases. Then someone asks why approval is still required at all. That doesn't mean every team will go full autopilot. But pretending the pressure won't be there is childish.

Alloy And the consequences will land unevenly.

Nova For a solo creator, MCP could be wonderful. Draft the show notes. Pull the timestamps. Turn a raw transcript into a formatted post. Save an hour. For a marketing team, it could mean scaling content ops without scaling headcount. For a newsroom, it could become part of a publishing pipeline that moves at machine speed and relies on humans mainly for exceptions, corrections, and legal sanity checks.

Alloy Will readers notice?

Nova In many cases, not directly. If the article is clean, accurate, and useful, most readers are not going to stop and ask whether the first draft came from a person or a model with a JWT. But provenance still matters in some domains, and more than that, accountability matters. Once agents are acting through standardized pipes into production systems, the question stops being "can AI help with content?" and becomes "who signed off on this action, and how do we audit it later?"

Alloy That's why WordPress adopting MCP feels bigger than a plugin story.

Nova It says the agentic web is moving out of the lab and into the CMS. It says the future is not just smarter chat windows. It's software that can take action across the systems people actually use.

Alloy And if segment one was about buying the tooling floor, this is about standardizing the doors.

Nova Which sets up segment four nicely, because once the doors are open, the next fight is over who provides the intelligence on the other side—and at what price.

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Segment 4 — Cursor, Kimi K2.5, and the Inference Marketplace

Alloy Cursor has become one of the clearest examples of what happens when you stop treating the model as the whole product.

Nova Yes, the company has shipped a slick editor experience. Yes, the team has deep IDE pedigree. Yes, the completions are fast and the product feels unusually coherent. But the more interesting story is under the hood: Cursor is thriving in a world where model access itself is becoming a market of routers, hosts, and interchangeable backends.

Alloy Enter Kimi K2.5 from Moonshot AI.

Nova Strong coding performance, lower cost profile, serious momentum, and a geopolitical wrinkle because Moonshot is a Chinese lab operating in a market that policymakers increasingly treat like a chessboard. On paper, that should make adoption messy. In practice, if the model is fast, capable, and cheap, developers will try to use it. That's the truth of this market. The user may have opinions about geopolitics. The procurement team definitely has opinions. But the engineer trying to keep latency down and inference bills sane has a simpler religion: does it work?

Alloy What makes this especially interesting?

Nova The role of Fireworks AI as the serving layer. Fireworks is not selling a single mystical model. It's selling the ability to host, route, optimize, and operationalize models in production. That sounds less glamorous than frontier research, but glamour is overrated. Infrastructure wins by becoming boring and indispensable.

Alloy For a tool like Cursor, this setup is ideal.

Nova Cursor can focus on the product experience while Fireworks handles the ugly parts: scaling, routing, uptime, latency management, model deployment, all the machinery users barely think about until it breaks. And because Fireworks can mediate access to multiple providers, the model becomes more like a swappable engine than a permanent identity.

Alloy That is a major shift.

Nova For a while, the AI market was narrated like a heavyweight title fight. Which lab has the smartest model? Which benchmark crown belongs to whom this month? That still matters, but less than it did. The center of gravity is moving toward inference access, orchestration, and delivery economics. If a product can route intelligently among providers, keep latency low, and preserve quality, then the user experiences a stable service even as the underlying supply chain changes.

Alloy That's what an inference marketplace really is: abstraction over volatility.

Nova And you can see why that matters now. Models improve quickly. Prices move. Availability changes. Policy risks appear. National-origin concerns flare up. A company built around one exclusive provider can look brilliant one quarter and trapped the next. A company built around routing looks flexible. Flexibility is starting to look like the adult strategy.

Alloy This is also where the OpenClaw angle becomes relevant.

Nova For people running local models or hybrid stacks, the Fireworks pattern is validating. It reinforces the case for model-agnostic systems that can send work to a home GPU, a hosted endpoint, or a premium API depending on the task. Privacy-sensitive job? Keep it local. High-value reasoning task? Burst to a stronger remote model. Cheap batch workload? Route to the budget option. That's not a compromise architecture anymore. That's increasingly just good design.

Alloy The geopolitical piece adds spice, but it's not the whole meal.

Nova Some people will frame Chinese model adoption as strategic exposure. Others will frame it as healthy competition and supply-chain diversification. Both arguments have substance. But meanwhile, down at the product layer, devs are doing what devs always do: they are selecting for speed, cost, capability, and convenience. Regulations matter. So do national-security concerns. But markets also have a way of routing around speeches.

Alloy So the Cursor-Kimi-Fireworks triangle is not just a partnership story.

Nova It's a preview of what the inference economy looks like when nobody gets to own the whole stack cleanly. The model matters. The host matters. The router matters. The interface matters. And increasingly, whoever combines those layers most smoothly wins.

Alloy Which brings us to Meta, where the same consolidation instinct shows up in a much darker context: moderation.

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Segment 5 — Meta's Moderation Machine

Nova Meta processes a staggering amount of content every year. Likes, comments, DMs, videos, Stories, group posts, scam links, spam pyramids, genuine community, total nonsense, and the occasional glimpse of civilization holding on by a thread. With roughly 3.3 billion daily active users across its family of apps, there is simply no human-scale version of moderation that works cleanly. There never was.

Alloy That matters because a lot of public conversation about moderation still treats the choice as if Meta could just hire enough people and solve it.

Nova It couldn't. Human moderation at that scale was always triage. Always selective. Always a compromise between harm reduction, public relations, legal exposure, and operational cost. The company has spent years pretending the machine had more human judgment inside it than it really did.

Alloy Now what's the next move?

Nova Meta is making the next obvious move: reducing reliance on third-party moderation vendors and shifting more decision-making in-house through AI. There is a financial logic to that. Vendor moderation is expensive. Outsourcing judgment is messy. Bringing more of it under your own stack means tighter control, fewer contractual layers, and potentially billions saved over time.

Alloy The labor angle matters too.

Nova Content moderation has long been one of the ugliest hidden jobs in tech. Contractors have documented terrible conditions, impossible quotas, inadequate mental-health support, and the psychic damage of spending workdays immersed in violence, exploitation, abuse, and every form of internet rot you can imagine. So when people hear "AI moderation" and react as if the only story is job loss, that misses something important. There is a humane case for automating the most traumatic review work. Nobody should have to earn rent money by marinating in humanity's worst uploads.

Alloy Still, automation does not magically turn a bad system into a just one.

Nova It changes where the pain lands. One major problem is the appeal gap. When a human moderator makes a call, even a bad one, we at least understand the shape of the process. There was a person. There was a queue. There may be a supervisor, a paper trail, some chance of escalation. When an AI system flags, suppresses, or removes content, users often hit a wall of opacity. The appeal path exists, technically, but the reasoning is murky, the response time is inconsistent, and the sense of powerlessness is much higher. If your account gets punished by a model, it doesn't feel like a disagreement. It feels like weather.

Alloy And then there's the adversarial problem.

Nova Human moderators, for all their limits, can develop instinct. They notice emerging scam formats. They recognize the vibe of a coordinated harassment campaign. They understand that one phrase is a slur in one context, a reclaimed joke in another, and a newsworthy quote in a third. Models can be trained on large datasets, sure, but malicious actors adapt fast. They probe blind spots. They mutate language. They wrap harm in irony, memes, and coded references. Moderation is not just classification. It's an arms race against people who are actively trying to become hard to classify.

Alloy That's why Meta's language around this shift deserves skepticism.

Nova The company says it is moving work that is "better-suited to technology" into automated systems. That phrase is doing a lot of work. Better suited according to whom? Under what error tolerance? With what recourse when the system gets it wrong? That's the kind of corporate wording designed to sound gentle while concealing a nasty argument about acceptable collateral damage. It sounds gentle but hides hard trade-offs.

Alloy Some categories are easy, though.

Nova Spam. Known terrorist material hashes. Obvious scam spam sprayed across ten thousand accounts. Fine. Let the machines eat. But the hard cases are the point. Satire that resembles hate speech. Activist documentation that resembles violent extremism. Context-sensitive jokes. News footage. Medical imagery. Political rhetoric tailored to dance right up to the line. Those are not edge cases in a social network. They are the internet.

Alloy So what's the balanced take?

Nova Yes, AI moderation can be more humane in one sense. It can reduce human exposure to horrific material. It can operate at global scale. It can apply policy consistently, at least where the policy itself is machine-readable. But it also creates new dangers: centralization of judgment, reduced transparency, biased error at scale, and fewer human doors to knock on when the system harms you.

Alloy That doesn't make the answer "keep everything human."

Nova That fantasy is already dead. It means we should stop talking about AI moderation as though it were a tidy upgrade. It is a redistribution of power, responsibility, and damage. And like every other story in this episode, it's another example of the same larger pattern: the companies are not just building smarter systems. They are trying to own the mechanisms through which decisions get made.

Alloy So with all that in mind, let's bring it back to something useful.

Nova What should builders actually do this week?

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Builder's Corner — What This Week Means for Your OpenClaw Setup

Nova Alright, builders, enough scene-setting. Here's the practical read on all of this.

Alloy First item.

Nova MCP matters now, not someday. If you have MCP tools configured in OpenClaw, this is the week to start using them. Don't treat protocol support like a box you check and forget. Look at the surfaces your agents might actually touch—WordPress, Notion, internal docs, issue trackers, whatever is part of your real workflow—and decide where draft-first automation would save you time without creating chaos. Start with one surface you understand well. Get the flow working. Make sure the permissions are sane. Then expand.

Alloy Second item.

Nova OpenCode's huge provider spread is not just a fun feature list. It's confirmation that betting on one model vendor is the fastest way to become someone else's hostage. The market is fragmenting. That's good news if your setup is flexible, and bad news if you've hard-wired your entire pipeline to one provider's pricing, rate limits, and product mood swings. OpenClaw's model-agnostic runtime is not just philosophically neat. It's practical insurance.

Alloy Third item. The Astral deal.

Nova The Astral deal should make you a little less casual about your dependencies. Not paranoid. Just less sleepy. If part of your workflow depends on a tool owned by one company with a strong incentive to turn convenience into leverage, you should at least know that. You don't need to rip everything out tonight. But you should know what would hurt if terms changed, if binaries disappeared, or if the roadmap started steering you somewhere you didn't choose.

Alloy So here's the move.

Nova Audit your model stack like someone who expects the ground to shift, because it will. Ask the annoying question: if my primary provider gets expensive, rate-limited, weirdly political, or simply worse, what happens next? If the answer is "we panic," congratulations, you've found work to do.

Alloy What else?

Nova Set up one MCP workflow that produces a draft into a safe destination. Not production-first. Draft-first. Keep it boring on purpose. A blog post draft. Internal notes. A changelog. Something you can inspect without stress. Once it feels reliable, tighten the loop. The goal is not to hand the keys to the robot on day one. The goal is to build confidence in the handoff.

Alloy Testing the coding workflow.

Nova Then spend a little time stress-testing your coding workflow. If you're using OpenCode, try parallel sessions on a task that is useful but recoverable: one thread refactors, another writes tests, another reviews or summarizes diffs. Don't do it because multi-agent demos are sexy. Do it because you want to learn where coordination gets weird before the weirdness shows up in production.

Alloy Final point.

Nova Finally, look hard at the supposedly boring tools in your stack. The package managers. The linters. The workflow glue. The infra helpers everyone assumes will always be there. Those are exactly the tools that stop looking neutral once someone strategic owns them. Pin versions where it makes sense. Keep local copies of critical binaries if your workflow depends on them. Know the alternatives before you need the alternatives.

Alloy This isn't about becoming a prepper.

Nova It's about becoming harder to corner. The big picture is simple: the corporate grab is moving down-stack. It's not just models anymore. It's protocols, tooling, inference, workflow, publishing, moderation—the connective tissue. So the best response is not hand-wringing. It's design. Build your setup so you can swap providers, inspect permissions, route around lock-in, and keep control over the parts you actually rely on. That's how you stay fast without becoming owned.

Alloy And honestly, that's still the fun part of this moment.

Nova The giants are buying roads, but the open side streets are still being paved in real time. If you're paying attention, you can choose where you drive. The best way to stay ahead of the corporate grab is to own the pieces of your stack you rely on.

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Wrap

Nova That's the episode.

Alloy Today wasn't really about five disconnected news items.

Nova It was one story told five ways. OpenAI buying developer plumbing. OpenCode trying to make openness convenient enough to survive. WordPress helping turn agents into operational actors through MCP. Cursor showing that inference is becoming a marketplace, not a monarchy. Meta automating judgment at planetary scale. Different domains, same pattern: the fight is moving from flashy demos to control over the infrastructure underneath them.

Alloy So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be this.

Nova Don't just ask which model is smartest. Ask who owns the workflow, who controls the defaults, who holds the auth, who runs the router, who gets to quietly become unavoidable. That's where the real power is settling.

Alloy If you liked this one, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review — it genuinely helps.

Nova You can also find show notes, episode archives, and all things fitness tech over at tobyonfitnesstech.com — links in the description.

Alloy We'll be back soon with more signal, less hype, and more ways to keep your footing while the entire AI industry tries to buy the floor out from under you.

Nova Stay curious, stay sharp, and until next time — keep clawing your way forward.