Experiments with Openclaw

I have been a strong proponent of AI ever since I had my first experience on chatgpt and its integral to my workflows in many ways. It's also the greatest technology equalizer ever, making information and learning universal. This also means lot less BS and lot more truth.

Recently I finally gave in to the urge to get a hands on experience of Openclaw. It's still nascent and rough around the edges(security concerns aside), but it's been one heck of a roller coster ride ever since. Here a few quick notes, takeaways,usecases, recos from my own experience.

Setup and Configuration

Is a pain and most people will get turned away at this stage itself. My first attempt was on a local machine(no mac minis here), eventually settled for a VPS (hostinger+docker). Though they have a decent wrapper, I end up using the terminal for all configurations/changes. First thing you want to do is get the memory/soul files updated. This is what defines the personality of the agent and how you wish to be dealt with. Keep in mind, its not consistent though. Different models read the files differently and implement as per their choice. Hence high odds, one day your agent will greet you with great energy(xai) and another day won't even respond(Kimi)

Models

Deployed all frontier models initially, don't make the same mistake. If you are looking at coding projects use kimi 2.5 as your work horse and sonnet if kimi gets stuck with complex tasks. Opus is great but the token burn is unbearable. Also for anthropic models, recommend to go with openrouter to avoid all the token limit issues with anthropic. With respect to chatgpt/xai etc i honestly don't see the value. They are great at conversations, and i don't want to be burning tokens on an api for a chat. The subscriptions are more cost effective for that.

Clawhub

Avoid implementing random skills. Its a wild wild west write now, you don't know what might get injected. The best part is you can just build your own skills.

Channels

I setup my conversation window on slack.There are other options too including whatsapp if you are willing to assign it a number(spooky). My objective is to have an AI resource that can help me get tasks done at work faster, hence slack is the de facto choice.

Savi , "Hello world"

Meet our friendly AI intern Savi :) . This was her introduction to the team.

So we are all set and Savi is alive. The question is what do we do with her. Below are few experiments that i have tried. These can potentially be thought starters for you as well.

Playing the Business associate

I have been struggling to get our SEO firing lately. Done the hard work onpage with content but no domain authority. Decided that Savi could help out here. This is Savi with her own email id doing an outreach with potential websites to help with our upcoming launch and distribution. She did her own research on potential partners to connect with, drafted the outreach and started working on it.

Savi, the design assist

At Lyfskills We have been fortunate to have a great design partner. But at times, you have to be more hands on to get things moving. My erstwhile workflow was

Nanobanana in gemini>polish off in canva and eventually make in figma.

Below is the current workflow.

Nanobanana skill to generate image>Import with layers/elements in figma>edit prompts in slack to update in figma.

Savi, Business Analyst

This is a vertical that is close to my heart. I do believe that the real truth lies in data provided you know how to interpret it. Anyways, being a frugal startup, I'm the resident BA and with Savi coming in, building dashboards has become seemless. I'm at times switching constantly between Google ads, analytics, firebase, our DB, meta and much more. Savi has now integrated everything into one singular dashboard with full funnel view across multiple channels. It is crazy how simple it was to get this done. Of course it took an Opus and a few recharges to make it happen ;)

Savi, the Dev on steroids

For our upcoming build, I wanted to incorporate a few plugins that I believe will add value to our audience. After struggling for a while, eventually built an entire plugin store in a night that has now been deployed into our build. The star for me was the webinar tool built on top of Jitsi. Multiple create, invite, manage, publish, conduct a session all done within the span of 30 minutes.

Conclusion

Openclaw(Claude Code too), is our first peak of what is possible if AI moves from conversations to action and building. I'm delighted as a professional as its made my and the team's productivity much more. It however also poses great questions on our future as a working economy. This is the biggest tsunami wave i have seen in my career and either you ride it or get swept away by it. We all need to upskill and that too real fast else risk losing out. Will large organisations move fast enough or newer players like yours truly now have a chance to not only think but act big. It might be a bit of both, but as I said earlier, it is the greatest equalizer ever. If you are not building right now, start immediately. It's your greatest opportunity!