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

Clawdbot is interesting but I finally feel like those people who look at people like me raving about Claude code when it barely works for them.

I have no doubt clawdBot, when it works, must feel great. But I’ve had the tough time setting it up and found it to be very buggy.

My first couple of conversations? It forgot the context literally seconds later when I responded.

Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s improving by the day so I’m going to set it up on my existing Mac mini because I think it has the capacity to be really fascinating.

I built something similar (well… with a lot of integrations) but for running my company and continue to iterate on it.

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.

How do people think about the sort of access and permissions it needs?

"Don't give it access to anything you wouldn't give a new contractor on day one."

https://x.com/rahulsood/status/2015397582105969106

I really like Clawdbots safety gloves off approach - no handholding or just saying yes to every permission.

I set it up on a old macbook pro I had that had a broken screen and it works great. Now I just message my server using telegram and it does research for me, organizes my notes, and builds small apps on the fly to help with learning.

However security is a real concern. I need to understand how to create a comprehensive set of allowlists before expanding into anything more serious like bill payments or messaging people / etc

I found this HN post because I have a Clawdbot task that scans HN periodically for data gathering purposes and it saw a post about itself and it got excited and decided to WhatsApp me about it.

So that’s where I’m at with Clawdbot.

This is all starting to feel like the productivity theater rabbit hole people (myself included) went down with apps like Notion/Obsidian. It is clearly capable of doing a lot of stuff, but where is the real impact?

Like it’s cool that your downloads folder, digital notes and emails are all properly organized and tags. But they reason they were in that state to begin with is because you don’t inherently derive value from their organization. Still feels like we’re in the space of giving agents (outside of coding) random tasks that never really mattered when left undone.

What is the intended usage case? I mean beyond what say perplexity app chatbot/search does.

Struggling to see the assistant part here. Interact with other people in WhatsApp on your behalf or something? Guessing that would annoy others fast

Clawdbot finally clicked for me this week. I was renting out an apartment and I had it connect to FB messenger, do the initial screening messages and then schedule times for viewings in my calendar. I was approving it's draft messages but starting giving it some automatic responses as well. Overall it did 9/10 on this task with a couple cases where it got confused. This is just scratching the surface but this was something that was very valuable for me and saved me several hours of time.

Just like coding your own blog in 2010, every programmer has to learn how to make an AI agent chat system to be a real programmer

I’ve installed and tested Clawdbot twice and uninstalled it. I see no reason to use this unless it’s with local models. I can do everything Clawdbot can do with Claude Code innately and with less tokens. I found Clawdbot to be rather token inefficient even with Claude max subscription. 14k tokens just to initialize and another 1000 per interaction round even with short questions like, “Hey”. Another concern is there are no guarantees that Anthropic isn’t going to lock down Oauth usage with your Max account like they did with OpenCode.

What if we will go even further? I have built end-to-end messaging layer for Clawdbot to talk to each other, called Murmur - https://github.com/slopus/murmur.

We tried this with friends and it is truly magical (while crazy insecure) - i can ask my agent to search friends life, their preferences, about their calendars, what films they are watching. It can look at emails and find if you need something and go to people around asking for help. It is truly magical. Very very curious where it can go. At the moment it is exceptionally easy to exfiltrate anything, but you still can control via proper prompts - what you want to share and what you dont want to. I bet models will became better and eventually it wont be a problem.

why is it asking me to select a model during setup if it supposedly runs on my machine?

If you're interested in hosting it at no cost on Oracle Cloud's always free tier (4 cpu, 24GB ram), instead of buying a Mac Mini or paying for a VPS, I wrote up how-to with a Pulumi infra-as-code template here: https://abrown.blog/posts/personal-assistant-clawdbot-on-ora...

the thing chews through claude usage like a rabid dog. i've not figured out what model to run it with to keep it cheap but still useful

layers and layers of security practices over the past decade are just going out the window so fast.

It's quite wild to give root access to a process that has access to the internet without any guardrails. and then connecting all your personal stuff on top of it.

I'm sure AI has been a boon for security threats.

This seems like a nightmare. I wanted to be interested, I'm still interested I guess, but the onboarding experience is just a series of horrible red flags. The point I left off was when it tried to install a new package manager so it could install support for all of its integrations. Hell no.

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?

As it is often the case with these tools, run it in isolated environments.

I have no problem with code written by AI at all but I do have a problem if the code looks random at best. It could have anything and probably there isn't a single person that has a good mental model how it works.

Just a thought.

something feels off to me about the clawdbot hype

About the maintainer's github:

688 commits on Nov 25, 2025... out of which 296 commits were in clawdbot, IN ONE DAY, he prolly let lose an agent on the project for a few hours...

he has more than 200 commits on an average per day, but mostly 400-500 commits per day, and people are still using this project without thinking of the repercussions)

Now, something else i researched:

Someone launched some crypto on this, has $6M mktcap

https://www.coincarp.com/currencies/clawdbot/

Crypto people hyping clawed: https://x.com/0xifreqs/status/2015524871137120459

And this article telling you how to use clawed and how "revolutionary" it is (which has author name "Solana Levelup"): https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-...

Make of that what you will

It's all hype and twitter-driven development. BEWARE.

i built my own version of this called 'threethings' (per pmarca's essay on the subject of personal productivity). i gave an ec2 claude instance access to a folder that is synced with gdrive so it's easy to get local files to the instance, and gsuite access. i had claude build a flutter app one hour when i couldn't sleep, and gave it a telegram bot account. i talk to it via telegram and it keeps tabs on personal and work emails. it does 'deep work' late at night and sends me a 7am summary of my day. my wife is asking for it now, because it will notice urgent emails first thing in the morning and alert me.

i don't have time to open source it, but it's low key revolutionary having a pretty smart AI looking at my life every day and helping me track the three most important things to do.