It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
- As you mentioned, the message bot thing was kind of cool. - It can browse the internet and act (like posting on MoltBook, which I tried). - It has a a permanent "memory" (loads of .md files, so nothing fancy). - It can be schedulded via cron jobs.
Overall, nothing really impressive. It is very gimmicky and it felt very unsafe the whole time (I had already read about the security issues, but sometimes you gotta live dangerously). The most annoying part was the huge token consumption (conversations start at 20k+ because of all the .md files) and it cost me roughly $12 for a few hours of testing.
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
> accessibility to non-technical folks.