Birthing Jacho - my first AI agent
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.