I've always been passionate about AI and automation so when I first heard about OpenClaw I got excited. But as a professional software developer for almost 20 years, and who currently leads a DevOps team I found the experience extremely frustrating: constant gateway restarts and "NO_REPLY" responses from my agents when I would simply ask "Are you there?".

So after using it for a bit the TLDR is that while I think OpenClaw and all the other AI driven automation tools like it are a genuinely powerful concept, they don't feel ready to be seriously used in a production environment.

So I'm building OpenKIWI as a framework to enable developers to build tooling with real tangible value (with security in mind from the start). A quick note on security - OpenKIWI runs all components in isolated Docker containers. Agents can only access files, and run tools that you explicitly allow them to. This project is still early in development, but is already providing real world value to msyelf and my teammates.

I'll constantly see people say that while all these agentic tools sound cool, they have no idea what to do with them other than chat. So here's my most recent use case, plus a few others:

One of my responsibilities is to write a monthly risk assessment report for all the infrastructure my team manages. I do this by reviewing all the bulletins on cisa.gov, and comparing the recent CVEs to the services we manage. I've been doing this for years. This month, instead of my normal workflow of crawling through bulletins and capturing data by hand I decided to spend that time writing a plugin for OpenKIWI. Now, I tell an agent "Generate the monthly CISA report for February 2026" and it does all the work for me.

A few more use cases: 1. Weekly GitHub Pulse: Every Monday at 9am: query the user’s repos via the GitHub API, run a sentiment/issue trend analysis, and post a concise digest to WhatsApp. This keeps the team up to date without manual “status update” calls. 2. Daily Google Tasks Sync: Every day at 6 pm: pull all tasks due today, flag overdue ones, and send a gentle reminder to the user’s phone. Acts like a personal assistant that never forgets deadlines. 3. Automatic code quality scans. Every night, run a static analysis tool to flag critical issues and publish a summary.

You can check out OpenKIWI here: https://github.com/chrispyers/openkiwi

The onboarding experience is designed to be as easy as possible. You should be up and running in less than 5m.

And if you have ideas for plugins, or a real world workflows that you think OpenKIWI could help automate I'd love to hear about them!