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Peter Steinberger – WhatsApp CLI: sync, search, send

https://github.com/steipete/wacli
65•dinakars777•1h ago

Comments

recsv-heredoc•1h ago
This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram.

Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter.

How does WhatsMeow compare with Baileys?

dinakars777•1h ago
WhatsMeow is stable unlike Baileys which faces challenges with maintainability.
3form•1h ago
Don't they ban people using custom clients when discovered? I feel like I've read something on that note.
recsv-heredoc•1h ago
They do - but the utility is so high vs the risk (for a new number) that it’s worth doing anyway for many users and even organizations.

Just yesterday we spoke with a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging!

blitzar•33m ago
> a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging

Couldnt they just use post-it notes internally and still be a $50-100m ARR org?

recsv-heredoc•18m ago
Yes - the interesting part is the decision that the “risk of losing internal comms to a ban is worth it” - even at that size.

According to one of the founders there’s no better way for them to reach a lot of low-skill part-time employees reliably.

It shows the need to bring AI to where people already are and onto the platforms they already use.

batuhanicoz•37m ago
whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

Baileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp

I would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.

TZubiri•7m ago
The thing is that their tight control is precisely what makes whatsapp a spam free environment. You can't have a libre federated protocol AND have it be spam free.

As soon as you open up the api floodgate, you'll start to see nigerian prince agents on openclaw speed.

faangguyindia•1h ago
I just use telegram.

Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather

And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )

I named the app "Siren".

It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.

Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.

And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.

It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.

taminka•40m ago
it's really unfortunate that telegram doesn't do e2ee, bc it's hands down the best messenger otherwise :(
tazjin•36m ago
It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E.

Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.

ymolodtsov•34m ago
It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
lxgr•32m ago
What are you talking about? WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal all have multi-device support and are E2E encrypted, just to name a few very popular options.
neya•16m ago
Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.
jeanlucas•15m ago
I personally don't use whatsapp because I like it, but because all my contacts in my country are over there. It is officially more used than SMS here. It is not optional in my case :/
andberx•58m ago
The offline search with FTS5 is really nice. I have years of WhatsApp history and searching for anything in the app is painfully slow. Being able to just grep through everything locally would be a huge upgrade.

How far back does the backfill actually go? Does it pull your full history from the primary device or is there some limit?

m00dy•56m ago
for some reason, I don't like this guy.
mechazawa•43m ago
For some reason vibe coders with no development background consider him a god. But all he is is a charlitan at best
batuhanicoz•33m ago
Peter is also the creator of PSPDFKit, and people have considered him an incredible engineer way before transformers were even invented.
hathym•42m ago
for context, he is the openclaw creator
blitzar•36m ago
browsing through the details etc, i genuinely thought they were another twitter vibe coding grifter
recsv-heredoc•33m ago
The world’s most successful one!
blitzar•31m ago
Every twitter grifter awards themselves that honorific
BoppreH•54m ago
I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.
watermelon0•47m ago
You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes.

Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.

miroljub•36m ago
Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations.

An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.

uxhacker•13m ago
And what ever happened to tools like jabber ? Or any other open source alternatives
BoppreH•31m ago
In my case I did, but it's still wasted time and money. And when breaking TOS there's always a chance of getting related accounts also banned, though I don't know if that has already happened with WhatsApp or not.
zarzavat•51m ago
Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data.

Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.

worldsavior•30m ago
Right now I see many bots on WhatsApp.
e7h4nz•51m ago
If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.
nkzd•45m ago
What is the best way to get a throwaway phone number to try this? Is it possible to get one online?
miroljub•34m ago
In most of the EU dictatorships, there's no legal way to obtain a phone number without registering with your real identity.
whilenot-dev•36m ago
OT#1, but I don't endorse the editorial choice to put the name of the "original" author in the submission title.

OT#2: Is it typical to put a package.json in a go project as replacement for a {Make,Just}file?

exitb•36m ago
It strikes me as odd that we've got so many agent harnesses, orchestrators, sandboxes, yet no one made a communicator for AIs yet.
joshwarwick15•34m ago
(Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform)

Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned.

This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high

batuhanicoz•31m ago
The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app.

As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.

asim•23m ago
I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.

Who are these people using the cli?

psychoslave•12m ago
People that prefer to use CLI I guess.

Obviously it helps that one can pipe as it might see fit in the flow of an ad hoc filled need, and so leverage on mastered composable tools.

That will never be for everyone, but it will be for no one only the day it becomes logistically unsustainable to reach some endpoint though a CLI.

intheitmines•14m ago
The lifting/interfacing with whatsapp is handled by https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
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