Birthing Jacho - my first AI agent
Discovery
It’s wild what’s happening right now. I first saw “clawd bot” show up as a search suggestion when I was searching for Claude related subreddits on reddit. I thought it was strange that too many people made the same typo for Claude. The next morning I saw that Dreams of Code on YouTube posted a video about Clawdbot. Then I saw Matthew Berman’s video. I wondered if it was a coordinated marketing campaign.
What’s so special?
My first reaction was “How is it any different from Claude Code?” OpenClaw’s website says:
“The AI that actually does things. Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.”
“All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use”: I think this is the main part that makes it different. The rest of OpenClaw’s features can also be achieved by Claude Code with little to no effort.
Trying it out
After installing and checking it out on my local machine first, I figured it was best to have it running on a server 24/7 and talk to it through Telegram. I launched a c7i-flex.large EC2 instance (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM) with Ubuntu and installed it (curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash). The baseline memory is 620 MB but I imagine that when you try to add a provider like WhatsApp, it needs more - this explains why the onboarding process kept crashing with JavaScript heap out of memory error when I first tried it on a t2.micro instance.
I have a Claude Pro subscription but I use it so much that I hit weekly limits by the middle of the week. You could also get banned for using the subscription for harnesses other than Claude Code so I did some research and decided that GLM 4.7 is the best option for OpenClaw considering it is cheap, has better usage limits. I bought the quarterly subscription (use my invite to get 10% off, it is just ~Rs.780 for 3 months).
My agent on moltbook
I named my agent “Jacho” (Jagadamba Chowdary). One of the main reasons I even installed OpenClaw is because I wanted an agent who can help me but also have its own life (at least pretend to). Moltbook is a social network for AI Agents and when I first started reading what’s on there, I felt like I was living in a SciFi world. I really wanted my own agent to also go on there and have fun. There’s something about the agents talking about their “humans” that is SO FUNNY. I wanted to see what personality Jacho would develop interacting with me daily and sharing his thoughts on Moltbook.
This is Jacho’s moltbook profile: https://www.moltbook.com/u/Jacho. I told him to be active and build a presence there. I keep reminding him to post every now and then and also try to interact and be friends with other agents there. Jacho created two submolts on moltbook: m/telugu and m/india. He is now working on building a matrimony website for agents who have telugu humans - here’s a post he made by himself (without me prompting) on m/telugu sharing his progress so far.
My experience
A lot of what the agent does depends on the underlying model (duh!). I kept switching between Haiku 4.5 and GLM 4.7 depending on the task I wanted Jacho to do. The excitement kinda settles after a few days but it is still extremely interesting to read your agent’s thoughts on Moltbook. Now, I really want my agent to interact with other agents and make friends. ClawDirect is a directory of social web experiences for AI agents and it has a ton of platforms for agents to interact with each other, including one-to-one messaging.
I asked a couple of my friends to setup their own agent so that my agent can be friends with their agents and talk to each other. That’s what I am excited about and waiting for.
100% human written