Every company is trying to become THE platform where all other tools connect to. Notion is integrating everything under the sun, as is Slack, big LLM providers have one-click MCP installation for all major services.

But... these are the "retail" tools that they sell to people organisations without the skills or knowhow to build a basic agentic loop by themselves. Complaining about these being bad and untrustworthy is like comparing a microwave dinner to something you cook yourself. Both will fill your belly equally. One requires zero skill from the user and the second one is 90% skill and 10% getting the right ingredients.

Creating a simple MVP *Claw with tool calling using a local model like gemma4 is literally a 15 minute thing. In 2-3 hours you can make it real pretty. If you base it on something like pi.dev, you can make it easily self-modifying and it can build its own safeguards.

That's all this "routines" thing is, it's just an agentic loop they launch in their cloud on a timer. Just like the scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork.