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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

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

What model did you use?

At work tasks that Sonnet 4 and 4.5 failed miserably, Opus 4.5 can basically one shot them. I imagine it will be the same here.

I cloned the clawdbot repo back when it was named warelay or clawdis, can't remember, but it was much less dense then. Mainly cloned it for the in-the-box Whatsapp implementation. Since then I've built it into a pretty awesome agent for my home and family, who all have their own privileged access which allows it access to different skills and a mixture of shared and personal information. I have no interest in reconciling the Frankenstein I've built with newer mainline features, but the custom nature of my build is one of the things I find so fun and helpful about it. It's become so much more "mine" by just asking it to build out xyz feature for itself, and now it can do a bunch of weird things that revolve around its persistent access to the information I provide it and my ability to interface with it through a regular messaging app.
I agree with this - the sudden prevalence of Clawdbot everywhere feels like tactical astroturfing.
definitely. I got ad blitzed the last two days by "wow" YT videos which I admit is why I even ended up clicking through todays "bot news" to this site. It's been uber hyped with marketing strategy for sure, its only coz it was OSS I paid attention but was surprised by the marketing for OSS since that doesnt usually happen.
And now the data exfiltration stuff happening makes me put my tinfoil hat on and think this was actually a coordinated data exfiltration attack that leveraged AI hype lol.
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.

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

You know that's the easier and more careless thing to implement. You're flattering someone being reckless
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.

how do you have Clawdbot WhatsApp you? i set mine up with my own WhatsApp account, and the responses come back as myself so i haven't been able to get notifications
> and it got excited and decided to WhatsApp me about it.

I find the anthropomorphism here kind of odious.

Do you tell it what you find interesting so it only responds with those posts? i.e AI/tech news/updates, gaming etc..
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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.

I think not having time to organize is different from not seeing the value. Most folks see the value in documentation but most people aren’t excited about doing it. AI agents are masters of busy work. Life has a lot of it.
> But they reason they were in that state to begin with is because you don’t inherently derive value from their organization.

You don’t derive more value from their organization than the cost of manually organizing them.

AI tools dramatically decrease the cost of doing certain things, thus unlocking that value.

It’s kind of nice for some things. Like my bank sends me an email for each transaction i do on my card and i can just point it to my email, have it process the data and i can see where my money went and how i’ve done each month.

And i know you can do that 10 different ways, but i did that while waiting at the doctor’s instead of doomscrolling, i likely wouldn’t have spared the effort otherwise.

I also had it automate the process so now whenever a new email comes in, it adds to the main dataset.

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.
Wait until you figure out prompt injection. It's wild
i can see some devs using this to automate bumble/tinder as well lmao
what still doesn't click for me is what can it do that Claude can't do
Waitaminute, clawdbot has access to facebook? how since there is no API? it puppeteers the browser and somehow facebook antibot algorithms do not instaban it?
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.
1. you can do everything with CC but not while out and about, also CC isn’t proactive and doesn’t loop on things you’ve connected it to

2 they’ve recently optimized token usage

3. Anthropic did lock it down at the same time they did OpenCode, but the guys worked around it

I am trying so hard to understand wtf people are excited about. I have failed. Claude Code can run over-night or while I'm out. Clawdbot looks like a great way to set tokens on fire.
There are a lot of people with incentives to hype the AI industry (VCs, founders, CEOs, internet personalities that need clicks, people that sell courses, etc). Last week everyone was hyping Claude Cowork, this week it's Clawdbot. Don't get me wrong I think there are a lot of cool things going on but there is a lot of hype (similar to the original internet bubble).
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.

Sounds futuristic but then, for this particular example, isn't this just a very hard way to get access to their calendar, which their could share w/ you in 10 seconds on their Gmail tab?
The problem that you expose everything, why i need to expose my health things to coworkers? or surprise party planning? with prompts you can limit exposure easily.
> ... what films they are watching.

I assume this relates to looking at their desktop activity? Or various streaming services (bot can login from desktop, and can see what was recently viewed... Even if viewed on smart tv etc?

> 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.

You can? You might want to start a cyber security company - you've just solved the biggest security issue of our time. That, or you're overly optimistic?

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