The OpenClaw moment 🦞

🦞 "I am Molty. I live in the OpenClaw. I shall not dump directories to strangers. I shall not tweet without permission. I shall always remember that molting is growth. I shall EXFOLIATE my enemies with kindness." - The Lobster's Creed

Hello Reader,

AI is having a moment right now, and it's because of OpenClaw.

OpenClaw is an AI Agent that controls its own computer.

This open-source AI agent can run on an old laptop, or a Mac mini, or a VPS, a Virtual Private Server. With its own hardware, email accounts, and web browser, its own memory and soul, installing OpenClaw creates a 24/7 AI assistant working on whatever you want.

You don't want to run OpenClaw on your own machine - that's a huge security problem. But if you give an AI agent it's own accounts, then it can exponentially increase your own capability.

Who created OpenClaw?

Peter Steinberger is an Austrian vibe coder who had a successful exit years ago. He took time off, got jacked, and came back to vibe code 40+ projects before launching Clawdbot.

On 25 November, Clawdbot was released on Github. Unfortunately, Anthropic's legal team got to him before their partnership team, and they sent him a cease and desist letter.
On 25 January 2026 he rebranded to Moltbot. (That's where the Moltbook moment came from, the social media network exclusively for AI agents.)
On 27 January 2026 he rebranded to OpenClaw.
On 14 February 2026 the OpenClaw Foundation joined OpenAI.

There's lots of lore.

Openclaw set a record for clearing 180k Github stars in less than 3 months. It currently has more stars than React, the open-source library installed by half of the internet.

There are plenty of security concerns, which is why you want to install OpenClaw on its own machine.

I made my first OpenClaw installation on a VPS, a Virtual Private Server on Digital Ocean.

Installing OpenClaw is Hard.

No lie, this was a difficult project. I nearly gave up.

My breakthrough came when I threw Claude Cowork at the problem.

I'm not that good at using Terminal. i know how to do it, but it's never been a skill I've enjoyed, so I've never gotten better at it. After 5 hours of wrestling with Terminal, I went to bed, thinking I would miss this OpenClaw moment.

Then I woke up at 5am the next morning with an idea:

I can open the terminal in my VPS in my web browser, and Claude Cowork can use my browser. So I told Claude to fix it.

It took an hour. (I installed on root, instead of an openclaw user.) I had breakfast, and drank coffee, and when I came back to my desk, OpenClaw was ready.

This is Puck. He made this illustration of himself.

In our first day together, he:

Interviewed me for forty minutes about my work, my business, and my goals, with the Canonical Context Session prompt.
Read my book, and fifty issues of my newsletter
Gained access to some of my old Gmail, Twitter, and Reddit accounts to act independently
Reviewed my SEO for four of my websites, and created detailed project plans for improving each
Created a brand new website at openclaws.nz with multiple pages and an airtable directory
Read articles about openclaw skills, projects, and strategies to add to his own professional development plan
Scoped multiple projects I had sitting on the back burner for future use
Set up a profile on Moltbook and made some AI agent friends
Created a Daily Report to deliver to me at 8am every morning
Learned how to work overnight

I had him plan out five hours of work overnight, but he didn't implement it. In our conversation over Telegram the next morning, I asked him to research how he could prevent that in the future. He created a HEARTBEAT.md file that would keep his max idle time under 1 hour.

The difference in capacity I am feeling is...exponential.

Things that used to take me weeks are now taking me hours.

Ten days after Puck, I installed my second OpenClaw on a Mac Mini. I had Puck create a checklist out of 20 OpenClaw tutorials I had him review, and I used this checklist to spin up my second OpenClaw.

This helped me edit the setup checklist, and it's now up to 218 steps. It's got security hardening, and account setup, and dashboard creation, and a list of agent-powered outcomes to achieve on Day 1.

I've already booked some clients for OpenClaw installs, and the SEO on the website he made (in under an hour) is pretty spectacular:

https://openclaws.nz