If you follow anything related to AI, you may have started hearing about Clawd Bot, an open-source AI assistant that leverages large language models like Claude (get it?).
Calling Clawd Bot an AI assistant doesn’t really do it justice though. It’s more of a chief of staff that just gets stuff done. Clawd Bot runs on a computer (ideally a dedicated Mac-mini) or in the cloud on a virtual machine, and can read, edit, create, and delete files, use tools like a web browser, connect to other services and APIs like Gmail, etc. This level of computer access and tool use, combined with a brain like GPT-5.2 or Claude Opus 4.5, gives it incredible power to perform tasks for you.
A key aspect of Clawd Bot is skills. Skills are a framework created and open sourced by Anthropic. They are a set of instructions and scripts that give LLMs additional context and domain expertise in order to be more efficient and productive. For example, you might create a skill with your company’s branding, color palette, fonts, etc. so when you produce a document it always uses the company style. Another example would be documenting the exact process your company uses to perform due diligence on a real estate transaction so it follows the exact same steps each time it’s prompted.
Clawd Bot (and Claude) will only reference and use a skill when the user asks it to perform a task that requires that skill. They will intelligently determine what skills are needed for each task. This prevents your context window from unnecessarily filling up with random skills which is a waste of tokens and money.
I had to test Clawd Bot out myself so let’s see it in action. I set up my Clawd Bot to use Telegram as the interface and named him Winston after my favorite historical figure. Winston lives in the cloud on a Linux server hosted on Hostinger.com. Many people are using dedicated Mac Minis which gives you more functionality but I didn’t have one handy.
You can literally ask Clawd Bot anything but let’s keep it simple for now. I’m wondering if we will get snow in the next week in New Jersey.
No snow. Thank G-d.
We can make Winston smarter by giving him new skills. We will assume we are an appraiser, property inspector, or asset manager that regularly tours different buildings. We take lots of pictures of our buildings but they are always disorganized with names like ‘IMG_2349.jpg’. Naming and filing them afterward is a tedious, low-value task. We can do better.
We can instruct Winston to build a skill for us to help manage this process.
Building the skill took all of 3 minutes. I could have done it in the parking lot of a building I was going to look at.
Let’s try it out. Inspection time!
Winston created the Paulson Center folder and correctly figured out we were looking at lobby seating and a classroom and saved the photos to the Paulson Center folder. Now when I’m done with my inspection I can go back to my computer and everything is already named and categorized. Pretty straightforward.
This is just one of an unlimited number of ways you could use Clawd Bot. If you give it access to your email, calendar, and other services, it becomes more powerful. I’m not quite ready to hand off control of my email to AI yet so we’ll save that for another day. If you do want to try that I recommend creating a burner email for testing purposes.
Right now this is a fun project and toy for AI enthusiasts to tinker with. Nonetheless, it provides a glimpse into where AI is going. AI is becoming more proactive and with skills and memory it is gaining a better understanding of how we live, work, and play. It is becoming more custom and thus more useful.
Pretend you are a surfer. You ask your AI for the weather. It provides the weather but it knows you surf and also notices that in one week it’s going to be 83 degrees with clear skies. On its own initiative It looks up expected surf conditions and they’re going to be great. It asks if you want go surfing. You say yes. It knows you typically surf with Jack and Jill. It asks if you want to text them to see if they’re in. It texts them. Next thing you know you’re riding waves with Jack and Jill.
I look forward to the day when someone creates a safe and secure version of this. My money is ready for them.
Happy building!
-Prof. Scott
P.S. Clawd Bot is now OpenClaw. https://openclaw.ai/blog/introducing-openclaw
P.P.S. Use at your own risk!