OpenClaw: Setting Up Your First Personal AI Agent

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People are building personal AI agents that text them back, order their groceries, and write code while they sleep—all with an open-source tool called OpenClaw. If you spend any time on X, you will have seen these digital crustaceans—OpenClaw agents—running wild in recent weeks, joining their own social network, starting their own religion, and generally behaving like something out of the first act of a sci-fi movie about robot overlords.

A lot of the more sensational stories around these personal AIs turned out to be stunts and spectacle. But there’s a growing community of people who swear by their OpenClaw agents. The project has accrued more than 200,000 stars on GitHub, and its creator, Peter Steinberger, was recently recruited to OpenAI. If the labs are paying attention, we should too.

At our first OpenClaw Camp, we walked more than 500 subscribers through setup live and spent two hours with four OpenClaw users who’ve been running these agents daily for weeks.

The session featured Nat Eliason, entrepreneur and creator of an agent named Felix that has its own Twitter account, bank account, and crypto wallet. Brandon Gell, Every’s COO, demoed Zosia, an agent he and his wife use to track nanny hours, order groceries, and book date nights via iMessage. Austin Tedesco, Every’s head of growth, showed how his agent, Judd, proactively pings him with performance metrics and task reminders. And Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD, an AI platform for project managers, and host of the How I AI podcast, broke down the architectural principles that make these agents feel alive—and how her agent, Polly, helped her out on a diaper run.

Below: What we learned about setting up an agent, what’s working, and where things still break...

1. The single factor that determines how dangerous a personal AI agent is—and why most first-time builders overlook it
2. What happened when Austin told his agent to be “more aggressive than you think you should be”
3. Why Brandon told his agent not to let him impulse-buy on Amazon, and what happened when he tried to order a Mac Mini
4. Plus: Five questions about Claws, answered