I Changed My Mind About OpenClaw Three Times
From eye-roll to excitement to caution — and what that tells us about AI agents in 2026
My feed has been flooded with OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot, aka Moltbot) posts lately.
It started with Reddit.
People sharing it saying “this is a real personal AI assistant” and “feels like early AGI.” My first reaction was an eye-roll, here we go again, another overhyped AI agent tool.
We’ve seen too many of these revolutionary products over the past two years. Don’t they all end up being the same thing in different packaging?
But one detail made me pause. This wasn’t some startup’s million-dollar product. It was a personal project by a German developer named Peter Steinberger. Open source, with now more than 80k GitHub stars in just a few weeks. I even heard some usually skeptical tech veterans were saying, “This changed how I use AI.”
So, I decided to dig in.
A few hours later, my opinion had flipped 180 degrees three times.
Here's the video version:
What Is Clawdbot?
Simply put, it lets you run a real, always-on AI assistant on your own hardware (Mac, PC, Raspberry Pi, VPS, whatever you’ve got), and you control it through the chat apps you already use every day, for instance, WhatsApp.
But that description is still too abstract.
What really helped me understand it was comparing it to Claude Cowork, a feature that Anthropic launched on January 12th.
Haven’t tried Cowork yet?
No worries, some use cases here, I hope these give you an idea. I started to dump a folder of dozens of screenshots from my research rabbit hole and say, ‘rename these based on what’s in them so I can actually find them later,’ or I got a messy transcript from a recording nearly ready for a YouTube video. I’ll ask, ‘clean this up, fix the timestamps, split it by chapter.’
Basically, small repetitive tasks that aren’t exciting, but the kind of tasks that actually pile up.
Clawdbot is a completely different animal.
One user recently used it to buy a car right from WhatsApp: “Find me a Hyundai Palisade Hybrid within 50 miles of Boston, blue or green exterior, brown interior, contact each dealer for the best price.”
The AI agent executed a sophisticated multi-step process:
Price Research: It first searched Reddit’s r/hyundaipalisade community to establish market pricing benchmarks (found most buyers paid around $58,000)
Inventory Search: It used the specialized Hyundai inventory tool to locate matching vehicles (blue or green exterior, brown interior code ISB) within 50 miles.
Dealer Contact: Autonomously filled out contact forms on multiple dealer websites using the person’s email (which it had access to via Gmail) and phone number (which it extracted from WhatsApp)
Automated Negotiation: It then set up a job to monitor emails and send competing dealer quotes to drive down prices, playing dealers against each other
Result: Secured a $4,200 dealer discount, bringing the final price to $56,000 (below the target of $57,000)
It took a few days, but it eventually negotiated a good price. The whole time, the user just occasionally checked progress on his phone.
This is when I started getting excited. I saw three core differences that Cowork or other agents released so far can’t match:
Different availability model. Cowork requires you to open the Claude Desktop app, and it only works when you’re actively using this app, and it’s macOS only. Whereas Clawdbot runs 24/7 on a server or an idle Mac, invoked anytime through your favourite messaging apps, on any platform.
Different control model. Cowork is Anthropic’s attempt to agent, running in their virtual environment. Clawdbot is open source, all code auditable, running on your own hardware, data completely under your control. Something that’s much more friendly to independent developers and people who care about control over convenience, and also want data privacy.
Different capability boundaries. Clawdbot can do anything your computer can do, manage emails, control smart home devices, make phone calls to book restaurants, review GitHub PRs, monitor RSS feeds, and create Todoist tasks. Which, in comparison, Cowork focuses on file management and document generation (at least the pre-scripted work).
Why So Many People Are Hyping This
From a market timing perspective, it’s hitting at the right moment…
