Note: Updated on February 12, 2026 to reflect the name change. While most of this post still stands I encourage you to look at https://openclaw.ai/ first if you’re deploying it in the future as this product has changed the name twice since I’ve mentioned it — and I’m sure best practices will too.
I’ve been experimenting with AI for years now and this is the first project I’ve become absolutely obsessed with. Don’t get swayed by supernatural Twitter claims by lying “influencers” – no, it will not print money, no it will not make you a fortune trading crypto while you sleep, no it cannot run your entire business – as a matter of fact it’s a clunky pile of #vibecode npm nightmares that barely functions. When it does work though – it’s miraculous. It’s why I named mine Stephy, after the best admin/marketing miracle worker I ever had a pleasure of working with.
What is it? ELI5
It’s a robot that lives in your computer, with access to the same tools and web services you have access to. You chat with it through your favorite chat app and tell it what to do. It has a soul, personality, heartbeat, and a scheduler that enables it to remember your interactions and perform tasks for you on schedule.
At it’s core it’s a npm package that uses an LLM (OpenAI, Codex, Claude, etc) to coordinate and execute tasks based on instructions it keeps in markdown files. As you talk to it through your chat app (Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, etc) it references those files for instructions on how to perform a task, how to respond to you, which tools to use, etc. It also has skills which are npm packages that enable it to interact with web services and tools to get the job done. Over time as your md text files grow and you get the context down to exactly what you want, it can perform your tasks on a schedule in a cron it maintains on it’s own.
I’m sold, where do I put it?
Resist the temptation to buy a Mac mini. I know it’s all the rage right now and the potential is there — but it’s pretty half baked and just like every other npm project out there you’re likely to mess it up adding vibe coded skills and broken dependencies. YMMV.
You don’t need a dedicated PC or a laptop for this, unless you expect to have it use your Chrome browser (ffs don’t!) or edit video the resources of a free VPS from Amazon or Oracle Free Cloud are more than enough. I have one running on Raspberry Pi 4 for house stuff and it’s just as happy as the one that lives in a 16GB Proxmox container in my data center. If you don’t have Linux skills or aren’t in a mood for a learning curve to setup the free VPS instance, check out VPS providers like RackNerd or Digital Ocean.
February Update: This is the friendliest YouTube guide I’ve seen on getting started but it’s as outdated as this post – AI development moves fast! I still recommend watching it just so you can get an orientation on how to install the package, ssh tunnel, and a Telegram bot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DBpfB0ao50
How do I install it?
The installation is actually the simplest part of the process, you just run this command in your shell:
curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash
This process will install all the required packages and the next thing you need to do is “hatch” your bot.
openclaw onboard
You’re now setting up your bot and I cannot encourage you highly enough to keep the documentation handy. I have only one recommendation here: when it comes to gateway bind it to 127.0.0.1. Idiots are binding their gateway to 0.0.0.0 and getting pwn3d left and right so please don’t do that. Lot’s of newbie YouTube walkthroughs are sponsored by VPS providers whose IP ranges are well known and it’s trivial to nmap the whole range for an open 18789 port and steal your credentials. Don’t be stupid.
Once you finish deploying your bot and onboarding it you have several ways of interacting with it. My favorite to get started is openclawd tui which will give you immediate access to your bot through the same terminal interface you used to install it. Give your bot a personality, name, what you want it to call you and how you prefer to interact with it.
If you’d rather interact with it through the powerful web interface, bring up an SSH tunnel. I’m assuming you’ve downloaded your VPS issued ssh key to your ~/.ssh so mind your paths and filenames
ssh -L 18789:127.0.0.1:18789 vladbot@demo.vlad.net -i ~/.ssh/vladbot-demo-vlad-net
vladbot@demo.vlad.net is my username and my vps server, the part at the end is path to my ssh key. Yours will be different but once you launch this you’ll be able to talk to your clawdbot at https://localhost:18789
What else do I need?
Next you have to pick a chat agent. I’ve personally used it on my infrastructure through Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack and Mattermost but it supports a TON of chat platforms. I loathe Facebook properties and I’ve found that it’s the most reliable on Telegram. On Telegram you just start a chat with Botfather, /newbot and follow the instructions to get your bot. By default this is locked down to you and tui or webUI make configuring the chat part of this super easy.
Some Tips
Most of what you see on social media is pure hype and fantasy. Remember these dudes hype and cut scenes to get the clicks and go viral… and if you follow them step by step at best you’re going to get hacked. Here are some of my suggestions when it comes to use:
- Make backups. Keep your bots markdown files backed up often. This is perhaps the best way to learn how clawdbot works, instruct it to make backups in ~/backups/ every day at midnight and report back. You will mess up your bot and your config as you play with it and copying back the *.md files will get you back to the experience quickly without having to recreate everything.
- DO NOT GIVE IT ACCESS TO YOUR ACCOUNTS. But Vlad, how am I going to get rich if I don’t give it access to my Polymarket and Coinbase accounts? Just like every other crypto influencer that hasn’t blown their brains out in the back of a rented Lambo – you won’t. And if you’re reading this post you likely don’t have a body for OnlyFans so calm down and give your bot it’s own accounts. It is much easier to create a forwarding rule for mail or to share a read-only calendar than it is to get your accounts back once someone has hacked it.
- Take it easy with skills and plugins. Remember that most of these addons are community built and have not gone through any sort of a security audit. Same caveats as Chrome plugins. It might be able to run your entire company but it also might send all your data to an intermediary, use your brain.
Have fun!
If you’ve ever used ChatGPT or Claude or CoPilot you know how much fun they can be but you’ve also probably experienced hallucinations and outright wrong answers. What makes Clawdbot special in my experience is the memory and instructions. It knows how to interact with the LLM to get the answer that I am looking for and it knows how to format it right. By giving it additional instructions and corrections it keeps adding specs to your markdown files which makes it far more fun and personable that ChatGPT – even when used in context with projects.
Leveraging automation with memory feels like a giant new step in the AI evolution. Happy to be alive to see what this thing does next.