One of the most electrifying AI applications for developers in 2026 is here. It’s a free and open-source project that is so much more than just another lame chatbot. This is a tool that takes real-world action, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no smoke breaks. It does all this while remembering everything, ready to ping you on Telegram or WhatsApp as it diligently automates your entire life.

Over the last few weeks, the developer community has gone absolutely crazy over it. The project has racked up over 65,000 GitHub stars in record time and caused Mac Mini sales to skyrocket, selling out everywhere. In this article, we’ll take a hands-on look at everything it can do.

A Lobster’s Tale: The Naming Saga

Its meteoric popularity has already created some turbulence. Earlier this week, Anthropic, a company that believes open-source AI is too dangerous for the common person, woke up and chose violence. The project’s original name, “Claudebot,” sounded too similar to their beloved Claude. They threatened the developers, forcing a name change.

So, Claudebot was officially renamed Maltbot. But that name was terrible. Just today, the project has settled into its final form: OpenClaw. It’s the same powerful AI assistant, now with a fresh lobster identity. As of January 30th, 2026, this is the state of autonomous AI agents.

The Mastermind Behind the Claw

OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, the founder of the developer tools company PSDFKit. A quick glance at this developer’s GitHub profile reveals not just a resume, but a heatmap of pure, uninterrupted software obsession. What’s truly remarkable is that this individual retired and then returned for an encore, gifting the community this incredible tool for free.

Written in TypeScript, OpenClaw is a sophisticated wrapper for models like Claude and GPT-5, designed to stay alive and active 24/7. It can:

• Manage your calendar
• Clean up your email inbox
• Execute scripts on your machine
• Track how much money you’re losing in the stock market
• Deploy broken code with absolute, unwavering confidence

Best of all, it can do all of this from your own tiny, self-hosted VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or even a Mac Mini if you really want to flex. There’s no reason to pay another random startup $29 per month for this privilege. To understand its full power, let’s put it to work.

Getting Started: Installation and Setup

The first step is to install it, which can be accomplished with a single command on any system, though Linux is the preferred route.

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

Once installed, you’ll have access to the openclaw command. The first thing you’ll want to do is run through the onboarding process.

1. Onboarding and Security

The tool will request that you read the security documentation about the risks involved. Since this tool can execute commands on your system, this is a crucial step.

2. Connecting an AI Model

Next, you’ll hook up an AI model provider. You can use anything you want here. For this demonstration, I’ll drop in my Anthropic API key. While the Anthropic API is a paid service, you can easily substitute a free, open-source model here as well.

3. Integrating a Messenger

The second major component is connecting a messenger app like Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, or Discord. I’m going with Telegram, which is incredibly easy to set up.

1. Open your Telegram messenger and start a chat with the BotFather.
2. Follow its prompts to select a name for your bot.
3. The BotFather will give you an access token. This is like a password, so keep it safe.
4. Provide this token to OpenClaw during the setup.

4. Configuring Skills and Hooks

The setup will then ask you to configure some skills. It has a variety of built-in skills, and you can also bring your own. There’s even a community repository called MoltHub with a bunch of pre-built skills depending on your needs.

After skills, it will ask about hooks. Hooks allow you to tap into different lifecycle events as the tool runs. This is extremely useful if you want it to maintain memories across sessions or trigger follow-up automations when something important occurs.

5. Finalizing the Setup

That takes care of the initial setup, which then brings up a gateway dashboard where you can manage everything. It provides an interface for basic chat along with tons of configuration settings to customize the experience.

That’s cool, but our goal is to use OpenClaw through Telegram. To do that, we need to send a message to the bot we created with the BotFather earlier. Initially, it will say Access not configured and respond with a pairing code.

Take that pairing code and run the following command in your terminal:

openclaw pair --code "YOUR_PAIRING_CODE_HERE"

Now you’re good to go! You can start sending messages, and it will respond using Anthropic’s Claude as the backend AI model.

Building Automations in Chat

Now the real fun begins. We can start refining its personality simply by chatting with it. I’ll name it “Assistant to Jeff” and instruct it to behave like a casual gremlin with a fire emoji.

What’s truly awesome is that we can now build automations directly in the chat. For instance, maybe I want to check on my investment in Microsoft.

You: How is my investment in MSFT doing today?

OpenClaw: It’s not doing so well, down 3% today.

But it’s not just going to pull this data once. We have now implicitly set up an automation in the background. OpenClaw will continue to keep track of this stock, and when it moves significantly, I’ll get a message on Telegram. There’s no longer a need to manually check stock prices.

Because I lost so much money in Microsoft, I now need to get a real job. I might go ahead and install a skill that automatically generates interview questions for software engineers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible here. It’s an amazing tool that you’ll definitely want to try out for yourself. The power of a self-hosted, autonomous agent that can be extended with custom skills opens up a new frontier for personal and professional automation.