You know those revenge movies where the guy goes and methodically takes out everyone who ever hurt him? That’s sort of what Anthropic’s Claude Code releases have looked like lately.

OpenClaw, for anyone who has a life and hasn’t become terminally (pun, intended) addicted by the hype machine of mac minis and AGENTS THAT WORK WHILE YOU SLEEP and A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR LLMS, is essentially a way to connect with an LLM that has access to your stuff and the internet.

This is “huge” because it’s yours.

It uses an LLM (claude, chatgpt, gemini, any open source model, or any mix and match combo therein), but you decide how dangerous it can be, which inverts the traditional way this stuff works.

And you can talk to it wherever (discord, telegram) and whenever and have it do stuff for you whenever.

I spent a weekend cobbling together my own, named it Alexi. It worked terribly and also sometimes really well. Mostly it helped me do work while at the gym on the elliptical.

It worked far less well at taking $100 in Etherium and turning it into billions. We lost 50% of our money on day one and i haven’t checked back since.

The hype frothed and foamed and peaked with OpenAI acquihiring OpenClaw and its creator, the weirdly jacked Peter Steinberger.

y tu anthropic?

Why didn’t Anthropic do anything, everyone asked. Peter said they only sent him cease and desist letters. Everyone thought what the hell Dario. How’d you miss this.

But they didn’t miss it. They just decided they didn’t need it.

Boris Cherney and the crew at Anthropic were like “hold my claude” and so the revenge plot began.

Over the next month they released piece after piece of what OpenClaude would need:

/loop for loops that run when you’re not around

/dispatch for doing the same, i think

/remote-control for continuing claude code sessions from your computer while you’re away (but the computer stays on)

channel surfing usa

And then finally came the final boss: Channels, which are a way for you to communicate with Claude Code while you’re away VIA TELEGRAM OR DISCORD.

That’s the important part: you can chat with your personal claude setup from anywhere via easy to use messaging apps.

That’s the whole OpenClaw promise, and now Claude Code does it.

but isn’t that just like the claude app

Nope not even a little.

With Claude, you’re rolling the dice on what context it has when it replies to you. Sure it might know some stuff but you can’t guarantee it, nor do you have access to the stuff that it knows.

Here, it’s got access to your entire set up. You never have to start from scratch because it’s got all the deets already stored in its memory and knows how to find them.

Of course you hafta set it up that way but that’s what I teach in www.codeforcreatives.com and also there’s a ton of help online for how to do it!

so i set it up

So i set it up. In like an hour.

I was roided up on prednisone tho so maybe that helped (poison ivy outbreak all over my human body, claude could do nothing to help).

And now i’m cruising on it. I’ve done stuff like:

  • run my /chief-of-staff skill and have a full outline of my day
  • had claude code research questions for an upcoming podcast and use those questions to build a ’launch guide’ website for the guest with the right template, fonts, design, etc
  • review my slides for the next code4creatives session and update them
  • all of which i do with a little web view that lets me edit things + add notes and send it all back to claude via markdown
  • add new tasks and ideas throughout the day

is it perfect?

Not even close! But this is like day two of them setting it up. It’s gonna get a lot better, and as it does, the main thing remains true: building your own claude code set up that’s custom and personal makes everything you do with these tools 1000x better. Otherwise, it doesn’t know you from from adam or, if I may be so bold, eve.

code? for creatives?

It’s true AND cohort three is now open for sign ups. Learn more here - www.codeforcreatives.com/c4c-explore.