Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

Posted by KuzeyAbi 1/26/2026

Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant(github.com)

405 points | 261 commentspage 4

kristopolous 1/26/2026|

Baffling.

Isn't this just a basic completion loop with toolcalling hooked up to a universal chat gateway?

Isn't that a one shot chatgpt prompt?

(Yes it is: https://chatgpt.com/share/6976ca33-7bd8-8013-9b4f-2b417206d0...)

Why's everyone couch fainting over this?

shmoogy 1/26/2026||

It's good at making new skills for itself, and the ability to add to WhatsApp, telegram, and discord means sharing access to internal applications and not needing users to get onto VPN makes a great combination.

kristopolous 1/26/2026||

You're just telling me common features. Those are just normal things now

edmundsauto 1/27/2026||

What systems are making new skills for themselves? Not being snarky, I find this sort of self-teaching incredibly interesting but have only ever seen this approach

kristopolous 1/27/2026||

I literally hear about it a few times a week.

eclipxe 1/26/2026||

Less space than a nomad style comment

sangkwun 1/27/2026||

Interesting project. I've been exploring this space but eventually pivoted in a different direction.

Two main things worry me about the 'always-on' agent approach:

1. Security & Surface Area: Giving an LLM broad permissions (Email, Calendar, etc.) while it's also scraping arbitrary web content is a prompt injection nightmare. The attack surface is just too wide for production use.

2. Token Economics: Seeing reports of '$300 in 2 days' is a massive red flag. For recurring tasks, there has to be a smarter way than re-processing the entire state every time.

I built Daigest to approach this differently. Instead of an autonomous agent wandering around, it's 'document-centric.' You connect your trusted sources, set a heartbeat, and the AI only processes what's changed to update a structured document. It's less 'magical' than a full agent, but it's predictable, auditable, and won't bankrupt you.

For 'gather and summarize' workflows, a structured document often beats a chat-based agent.

maxehmookau 1/26/2026||

I get that this is cool, but I also feel grateful that my life just isn't busy enough to justify this as a thing beyond "oh wow, that's cool tech".

I'm able to juggle the competing priorities in my life without the need of an AI assistant, and I guess I'm just gonna enjoy that for as long as I can because I assume at some point it will become assumed of me.

afcool83 1/26/2026|

This is roughly my defense against anxieties about “missing the boat” on this stuff. If my life was complex enough to justify quote-simplifying-unquote it with a tool like this, I’d be quite excited about experimenting with it…but it’s not. And I don’t relish artificially adding that complexity.

The key to productivity is doing the _right_ things, not doing everything. Tools that make more possible frequently miss the point entirely.

ErneX 1/26/2026||

Tried it for a bit yesterday on a macOS VM.

I told it my local mqtt broker hostname and it figured out I have some relays using tasmota, then told it should remember how to toggle those lights and it did. I used Z.ai GLM 4.7 through OpenRouter as its brain.

It’s definitely worth checking it out, but keeping in mind the amount of things it can run by having a whole computer to itself.

7777777phil 1/26/2026|

curious to hear, what your main (expected) use case is for this?

ErneX 1/26/2026||

That’s just the 1st thing that ocurred to me to test it. I think what most people are hyped about it is related to give it access to your reminders, notes, notion, obsidian and then treat it like an assistant that proactively helps you by running scheduled tasks that are useful to you. That’s why some are recommending running the thing on a Mac Mini if you are in the Apple ecosystem, so it can create reminders etc.

I’ll keep playing with it on a VM and see where this goes.

bluesnowmonkey 1/26/2026||

Had a similar thought since I started using the Slack MCP in Claude Code. It's handy for instance during an incident to be researching the problem, digging through Sentry or Clickhouse or the code and have it post updates directly to our #engineering channel for the team to see. But... they can't reply. Or rather they can but Claude has to poll each thread or channel to see replies which is a pretty clumsy workflow.

So anyway long story short I made something like Clawdbot but in the cloud: https://stumpy.ai/

Didn't occur to me to design it to run locally and leave running on my machine. You can't close your laptop or Clawdbot dies? It can read all your files? Rather run agents in the cloud. I gave them sandboxes (Fly sprites) so you can still have them do software development or whatever.

orionblastar 1/26/2026||

I ran the install and got these errors:

npm warn deprecated npmlog@6.0.2: This package is no longer supported. npm warn deprecated are-we-there-yet@3.0.1: This package is no longer supported. npm warn deprecated gauge@4.0.4: This package is no longer supported. npm warn deprecated tar@6.2.1: Old versions of tar are not supported, and contain widely publicized security vulnerabilities, which have been fixed in the current version. Please update. Support for old versions may be purchased (at exhorbitant rates) by contacting i@izs.me npm warn deprecated node-domexception@1.0.0: Use your platform's native DOMException instead

4shadowed 1/26/2026|

That's not an error, its an ignorable warning from upstream dependencies

mickdarling 1/26/2026||

I'm looking at it right now as a tool I can hollow out and stuff in my own MCP server that also has personas, skills, an agentic loop, memory, all those pieces. I may even go simpler than that and simply take a look at it's gateway and channels and drag those over and slap them onto the MCP server I have and turn it into an independent application.

It looks far too risky to use, even if I have it sequestered in its own VM. I'm not comfortable with its present state.

edmundsauto 1/27/2026|

Where I think agents become fascinating is when we give cc an interface to something like clawdebot, plus any logging/observability, and tell it to recreate the code base.

1-6 1/26/2026||

I see this posted everywhere this week. Is it really that good? I understand this runs on any hardware (not limited to Mac Minis) as long as you have an API key to an LLM (Preferably to Claude). People online make bold promises that it will change your life...

It sounds interesting to me, I might install it on a cheap Mini PC with Ubuntu. This can't come at any worst time as storage and RAM has gotten astronomical. I feel bad for people who are just starting to build their first rig and an alt rig for this.

jhickok 1/26/2026||

I thought the same thing. I had a spare iMac sitting around so I thought I would kick the tires on it. I realize I could have used something else, but I wanted to give it iMessage access. I have to say, it's just better enough than a few things I have tried to really give me a glimpse of what is possible and make me excited. I am nervous about handing over a computer, my accounts, data, etc to a tireless bot that can destroy my life for a year on accident, but regardless I think this is startling good and fairly polished.

mentos 1/26/2026||

What’s the main use case for you or feature with the greatest promise?

jhickok 1/26/2026||

It's only been a few days and I am still exploring, but my household has two adults and three kids all with very busy, individual schedules, and one of the nicest features was setting up a morning text message to everyone with reminders for the day. It checks school schedules, test reminders, sports events, doctor's appts (I am in PT), and adds personal context assuming it has access to it (it usually does). I understand much of this probably could have been done for a while, but this seems like the nicest packaged up assistant that I have tried.

eclipxe 1/26/2026|||

You can use local llms, API key is not required...

eclipxe 1/26/2026|||

I've been really impressed with it.

wetpaws 1/26/2026||

[dead]

JoeDaDude 1/26/2026||

Making AI companions is becoming a widespread little hobby project. Many have created them and shared instructions on how to do it. My preference would be to use local resources only (say, with ollama), they can even be made with voice recognition, TTS, and an avatar character.

While I have not interfaced my AI with all the services that Clawdbot does (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) I don't think that is too much of a stretch from my very simple build.

e12e 1/26/2026|

I also would like local LLMs - but that's hardly the biggest issue with these projects?

You point it at your email, and you've opened a vector for prompt injection and data exfiltration - all as an integral part of the features you want (read my emails, send some emails).

Your local LLM won't protect you there.

You could probably write some limited tools (whitelist where mail could be sent) - but it goes against the grain of "magically wonderful ai secretary".

Security is not a convenience.

rlt 1/26/2026|

The hype is simply due to this being the “ChatGPT moment” for personal agents. It’s showing people the future. The software itself isn’t particularly impressive.

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