#agent

When Anthropic announced Claude Skills in October 2025, Simon Willison said this in his blog post:

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit.

While I had this in mind, using Claude Code for music is something that didn't come cross my mind before. Josh Cohenzadeh got Claude Code to write an original song, an original EDM song, original rock song with vocals, and an original album -- actually getting it to create an audio file for each using one-shot prompts. He didn't mention the model he used in his blog post but I assume it is Opus 4.5 with extended thinking (the transcripts he added to the post had thinking blocks).

Reading the blog post made me realize that I am still blinded by Claude Code's poor naming because I haven't used it for anything other than building software. I use it everyday and I am aware that it is not "just a coding tool", yet I haven't really of thought of doing anything with it.

So, I thought why not get it to create a video. Specifically, a bar chart race video illustrating the most popular girl names in Telugu states from 1950s - 2020s (because why not?). So that's what I did. I started a claude code session with --dangerously-skip-permissions and gave it the following prompt (heavily inspired from Josh's prompts):

Discovery

It's wild what's happening right now. I first saw "clawd bot" show up as a search suggestion when I was searching for Claude related subreddits on reddit. I thought it was strange that too many people made the same typo for Claude. The next morning I saw that Dreams of Code on YouTube posted a video about Clawdbot. Then I saw Matthew Berman's video. I wondered if it was a coordinated marketing campaign.

What's so special?

My first reaction was "How is it any different from Claude Code?" OpenClaw's website says:

"The AI that actually does things. Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use."

"All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use": I think this is the main part that makes it different. The rest of OpenClaw's features can also be achieved by Claude Code with little to no effort.

Trying it out

After installing and checking it out on my local machine first, I figured it was best to have it running on a server 24/7 and talk to it through Telegram. I launched a c7i-flex.large EC2 instance (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) with Ubuntu and installed it (curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash). The baseline memory is 620 MB but I imagine that when you try to add a provider like WhatsApp, it needs more - this explains why the onboarding process kept crashing with JavaScript heap out of memory error when I first tried it on a t2.micro instance.