Why We Built Nexting — And Opened the Devices SDK

In January 2025, I quit my job as an embedded engineer at DJI to build something I couldn't stop thinking about: an AI wearable that's actually open. Not “open” as a marketing word. Open as in: you can read the firmware, swap the AI model, write your own plugins, and fix what's broken.

The Problem with AI Wearables Today

I've tried every AI wearable that shipped in 2024. The Humane AI Pin. The Rabbit R1. The Meta Ray-Ban. They all share the same pattern: impressive demo, disappointing daily use, and zero ability to extend or fix them yourself.

The Humane AI Pin costs $699 plus a $24/month subscription and can't reliably send a text message. The Rabbit R1 promised a universal AI agent and delivered a chatbot with a scroll wheel. They failed not because the AI was bad — frontier models are genuinely capable now — but because the product design was wrong.

These devices tried to replace your phone. That's the wrong framing. Nobody wants to replace their phone. People want something that handles the moments when pulling out your phone is awkward, slow, or rude — walking, cooking, driving, in conversation.

What Nexting Actually Is

Nexting is an Agent remote-control product connecting your computer, phone, and wearable hardware. It integrates Claude Code, OpenClaw, and Codex so you can view and control live sessions, mirror and remotely control your computer, publish tasks, and receive results from anywhere.

The wearable endpoints are the PIN and Ring. Hold to speak and send a thought to the Agent running on your own computer. The companion app provides the visual control surface, while the Devices SDK lets compatible user-built hardware join the same remote-control path.

The hardware is deliberately minimal. An nRF52840 microcontroller, a PDM microphone, a tiny speaker, and a rechargeable battery. No GPS, no cellular modem, no display. Every component that doesn't directly serve the voice interaction was removed.

Why an Open Devices SDK

Nexting itself is proprietary: its hardware, firmware, app, and cloud are not open source. The boundary is deliberate and simple: only the Nexting Devices SDK is open source.

The SDK lets developers connect compatible user-built hardware to the same path for reaching and remotely controlling their agents. It opens the hardware entry point without misrepresenting the rest of the product as open source.

The OpenClaw Plugin System

The single biggest design decision in Nexting was making it extensible. We built OpenClaw, an open plugin protocol that lets anyone add capabilities to the device.

Want Nexting to control your Philips Hue lights? There's a plugin for that. Want it to query your company's internal knowledge base? Write a plugin in 50 lines of TypeScript. Want it to speak Mandarin? Configure a different TTS provider.

This is the iPhone App Store moment for AI wearables. Instead of waiting for us to build every integration, anyone can build one. The device gets better every week, not every quarter.

Two Ways to Run It

Nexting has two modes, and this is important:

What's Next

We're shipping the first batch of Nexting devices now. The firmware is stable, the cloud service is live, and the plugin ecosystem is growing.

What excites me most isn't the device itself — it's what people will build with it. An open AI wearable is a new platform. We built the PIN. The community will build everything else.

If you want to be part of it, reserve yours today.