Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I
first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible
open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name
that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers)
that’s become very popular in certain AI communities over the
past few weeks. I kept seeing Clawdbot being mentioned by people I
follow; eventually, I gave in to peer pressure, followed the
instructions provided by the funny crustacean mascot on the app’s
website, installed Clawdbot on my new M4 Mac mini (which
is not my main production machine), and connected it to
Telegram.To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of
what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in
2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with
Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the
Anthropic API ( yikes ), and I’ve had fewer and fewer
conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the
process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a
tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the
popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points
at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly
the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will
appreciate.Clawdbot can be overwhelming at first, so I’ll try my best to
explain what it is and why it’s so exciting and fun to play
around with.
Overwhelming indeed. Clawdbot is undeniably impressive, and interest in it is skyrocketing. But because of its complexity and scope, it’s one of those things where all the excitement is being registered by people who already understand it. This essay from Viticci is the first thing I’ve seen that really helped me start to understand it.
