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Tianlu Xue: Before a Second Enlightenment

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For the first properly recorded episode of Dine Podcast, I sat down with Tianlu Xue, co-founder and CEO of Second Enlightenment. Fifteen years ago Tianlu was the first intern I ever hired, at Zhihu. He later spent four years running product at early Xiaohongshu, then five at ByteDance. He left ByteDance last year to start his own company. His newest product, Clawly, is a cloud-based OpenClaw client built for users who have never set up a local environment. For most of our hour together, though, we were not actually talking about the product. We were talking about a question Tianlu has been turning over for months: how far ahead the frontier of AI has moved, and how little of that the ordinary user has noticed.

At Every Beginning

Tianlu’s career has placed him near the uncertain early days of three of the most significant Chinese content platforms of the last fifteen years. He was a Zhihu user before he was a Zhihu employee, back when invite codes were still being handed out one by one through a Google Form. He joined Xiaohongshu at the end of 2016, at a stage when no one on the team could have told you with any confidence what the product would eventually become. He went to ByteDance in 2020, mostly out of curiosity, wanting to see up close how Douyin had grown into the first Chinese consumer product to work globally. What he takes from that sequence, he said, is that the shape of a product at the moment it actually begins to matter almost never resembles what its builders described at the start. The people standing closest to the fire are usually the ones least able to see where it will burn.

He sees the same early uncertainty in AI agents today. The capability is already real. Public understanding of it lags far behind, and the people actually doing the work still do not know what shape it will eventually settle into.

Leaving, and Starting Over

What finally pushed Tianlu out of ByteDance in mid-2025 was the shape of the role one rung above his. Management at that scale, he found, was mostly organizational work. The product judgment and product making that had originally drawn him to the industry was being quietly crowded out by the kind of career he did not want to sign himself up for over the next decade. He gave himself an entire summer. He spent a few weeks in Italy looking at Roman ruins, did a short EIR stint at Sequoia, and came home to sit with the question of what he actually wanted to build. Somewhere in the middle of that stretch he wrote a small iOS app for himself, alone at a desk, from beginning to end, something he had not been able to do in years. The app itself did not matter commercially. What mattered was the reminder that the tools had changed enough that one curious person could now build a real, working product on their own. By the fall, he had put together his team.

Nagoya Taken by Tianlu at Nagoya Castle

The Making of Clawly

In January, Tianlu’s team was building a set of productivity agents on top of the Claude Agent SDK. They had not shipped yet when the ecosystem around them moved. Late 2025 was the stretch when Opus and its surrounding tooling stepped up noticeably in capability, and the arrival of OpenClaw raised the floor high enough that almost any single-purpose agent product started to look marginal beside it. Tianlu’s team had been running OpenClaw themselves, and they knew firsthand how punishing the experience was for anyone who did not already live in a terminal. Deploys broke. Tokens had to be configured by hand. Every new capability required another round of wiring. Clawly was their shortest answer to that problem. Put an agent on a full cloud computer with enough compute to do real work, let it reach into your phone and your desktop, give it the same skill library Claude Code uses, and tuck all of that behind a chat interface.

Building Clawly has clarified something for Tianlu in particular. The foundation underneath the foundation model is thin. The model itself is a giant. Almost everything beneath it, including the tools an agent needs to reach for, the ways it takes in a user’s existing context, and the connections to the platforms where that context actually lives, is either missing or still very early. His team spent a stretch seriously considering a pivot toward infrastructure. The agent tasks most obviously worth paying for today are not consumer tasks. They are business tasks. What is blocking those tasks is not the intelligence of the model. It is access. Agents today still cannot reach most of a user’s existing data, inside or outside the major platforms, and whoever opens that gap will largely determine the shape of the next round of agent products.

Clawly Website

The Distance

Since the beta opened, the distance Tianlu has been watching between the frontier and the user is not really about capability. It is about awareness. Last month he visited the owner of a small advertising firm in Shanghai who had found his way to Clawly through a friend. They sat down, and the first thing the man asked him was whether he had heard of Hermes. A different beta user, at a different small company, had recently demonstrated to his coworkers a spreadsheet he had built in ten minutes with Clawly. The same task used to take him an hour. The capability had been sitting in the base model for months. Nobody had ever told him where to find it.

He quoted Karpathy’s recent post to me. This is not the year of agents. It is the decade of them. Most ordinary people’s primary experience of AI is still a stale voice mode on ChatGPT, routinely mocked on TikTok as evidence that AI is stupid, while the real frontier keeps moving quietly forward somewhere else. Only then did I realize what Tianlu had been pointing at in his company’s name. It was pointing at what he hoped would be on the other side of that decade.

Mentioned in this episode

Music: SeeN — SunnyWild / Jillusion (HEM Records)