<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/33df73b4-eee9-4341-afb0-a0a8e1ccb2c8.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/33df73b4-eee9-4341-afb0-a0a8e1ccb2c8.png"/> Author | Huang Yu
From the emergence of OpenClaw at the beginning of the year to geeks eagerly sharing their &#34;shrimp farming&#34; experiences on social media, and then to ordinary people lining up at Tencent headquarters for free installation of OpenClaw.
In the spring of 2026, a &#34;lobster storm&#34; triggered by desktop agents is quietly reshaping the work paradigm of every worker.
In this torrent of efficiency revolution, Tencent's WorkBuddy officially launched on March 9. The user traffic was overwhelming, leading to &#34;growing pains&#34; due to excessive pressure on core services, forcing an urgent tenfold expansion to accommodate market enthusiasm.
This phenomenon of &#34;crashing upon launch&#34; reveals the high enthusiasm of non-developers for &#34;desktop agent products.&#34;
As the product head of Tencent WorkBuddy and the head of Tencent Cloud Developer Products, Wang Shengjie witnessed the journey of WorkBuddy from incubation to explosive popularity.
On March 13, Wang Shengjie revealed in a conversation with media such as Wall Street News that the market performance of WorkBuddy after its launch far exceeded the team's expectations, with requests surpassing CodeBuddy by many times, and computing power was far from sufficient, reaching the warning threshold. &#34;We urgently expanded capacity and optimized the architecture to make the login logic more stable.&#34;
WorkBuddy was developed by Tencent Cloud's CodeBuddy team. CodeBuddy is an AI programming tool released by Tencent last year, while WorkBuddy is built on the same Agent intelligent architecture as CodeBuddy, serving as a desktop intelligent agent platform with a foundation, ecosystem, and scalability.
The birth of WorkBuddy was not a hasty follow-up but a well-planned &#34;blitzkrieg.&#34;
As early as the second half of 2025, Wang Shengjie's team had already built the underlying architecture and open platform supporting AI autonomous task execution for CodeBuddy and released the SDK. Their approach of solidifying execution infrastructure first and then opening up the ecosystem is entirely consistent with the core logic of Anthropic's Claude Cowork.
Wang Shengjie recalled, &#34;After New Year's Day this year, Claude Cowork came out, and I took the idea to my boss. Based on our own platform, we quickly iterated to create the prototype of WorkBuddy, and my boss was on board, thinking it was great, so we got started.&#34;
Wang Shengjie specifically mentioned that before the explosive popularity of OpenClaw, the strongest product in this track was actually Claude Cowork, but it failed to gain traction because it was an overseas product and not open source.
After just two all-nighters, version 0.01 of WorkBuddy was launched, but it was mainly for internal use at Tencent. &#34;I still remember (when we started) it was January 17, and those two days were Saturday and Sunday. My colleagues and I stayed up all night for two days.&#34;
The first time the outside world learned that Tencent was developing a desktop Agent tool similar to OpenClaw was on February 6th.
On that day, the official account of Tencent Cloud Code Assistant &#34;CodeBuddy&#34; announced the internal testing launch of WorkBuddy.
With the explosive popularity of OpenClaw after the Spring Festival, the CodeBuddy team accelerated the process for the official launch of WorkBuddy.
Wang Shengjie stated that the key to OpenClaw's sudden popularity lies in its combination of open-source capabilities and the automation needs of office scenarios. The missions of WorkBuddy and OpenClaw are very similar, but their implementation methods are different.
In simple terms, WorkBuddy follows a self-developed product, secure and controllable, and ecosystem integration route, while OpenClaw follows an open-source, highly free, and community-driven route.
Wang Shengjie said, &#34;When we were internally incubating WorkBuddy, we focused more on experience and security, helping users solve their problems within a specific controllable range.&#34;
He stated that WorkBuddy is 100% self-developed and has not used any lines of OpenClaw's source code. &#34;Because we already have the entire infrastructure of CodeBuddy—AI-driven, autonomously completing tasks, we don't need to borrow. We started from user scenarios to create a product aligned with the form of OpenClaw, not just a shell.&#34;
As the focus of competition in the AI industry shifts from &#34;comparing model parameters&#34; to &#34;comparing implementation capabilities,&#34; Agent products are becoming popular. Now, OpenClaw seems to have become synonymous with such products, and any similar product launch is easily seen as following the trend of OpenClaw.
At the same time, Wang Shengjie explained that lobster is a concept with different implementation ideas. Currently, WorkBuddy is not a purely managed automation product; in terms of automation level, it can be considered to be in the middle position.
The WorkBuddy team's judgment is that most users currently need search-type content reorganization scenarios, such as daily AI news analysis, turning Twitter content into Xiaohongshu style and automatically posting it.
&#34;This is already a very advanced scenario, and it is safe.&#34; In Wang Shengjie's view, there is no need for AI to autonomously post or learn without user authorization, which is a terrifying thing.
&#34;There are overseas products attempting to move towards higher autonomy or even complete management. Only when everyone truly understands which scenarios are valuable will WorkBuddy consider laying out full automation.&#34;
OpenClaw has completely popularized the lobster concept, no longer just a specific product name, but a productivity concept representing &#34;autonomy and remote.&#34; However, competition after the benefits have faded often comes with questions about safety and boundaries.
In this tumultuous battle for survival in technology, those who can truly understand users' pain points will be able to cultivate the strongest &#34;lobster&#34; in the jungle of computing power

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- The launch of Tencent's WorkBuddy on March 9, 2026, followed the success of OpenClaw, showcasing high user demand and leading to a necessary tenfold increase in service capacity.  
- WorkBuddy was developed using the same foundational architecture as CodeBuddy, Tencent's AI programming tool, aiming for a secure, self-developed product that aligns with user scenarios.  
- As the AI industry shifts focus to practical implementation, WorkBuddy responds to user needs for content curation and analysis, balancing automation with safety concerns in the evolving landscape of desktop agents.

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Interview with the head of Tencent WorkBuddy: Ambitions of a product aiming to benchmark Cowork