Friction Log: Clawdbot

Context

Besides Claude Code, the other project that has dominated part of my X timeline over the past 1-2 months is Clawdbot (by steipete). It had been on my list to check out, I finally go around to playing with it this week.

I won't say I'm totally Clawd-pilled just yet, but I'm getting there. It's easily one of the most fun and exiting open-source projects I've played around with in a while!

My Clawdbot is called Octo 🐙 Octo is running on a cloud VPS.

I'm still testing it's capabilities, and haven't setup a ton of skills just yet. But already Octo has been busy:

• help me pull together screenshots of all my past website versions (across 3-4 different domains) from the internet archive
• automated a bunch of sysadmin type stuff
• setup Tailscale on my server
• helped secure some existing services

We're currently working on a very minimal self-hosted Vercel type setup: basically every time I push one of my projects to Github, I want it to pull down the latest and re-deploy.

🟢 Onboarding and docs

For a (relatively) young project, that has quite a few moving parts (auth providers, channels, gateways, nodes etc) and a ton of complexity, Clawdbot's onboarding is fantastic. The wizard makes the initial setup a breeze. Though I will caveat that precisely because there are combinatorially exponential permutations of configurations, some of them are bound to fail if you get unlucky (as I was, more on that below). YMMV.

Likewise, the docs are very comprehensive and surprisingly accurate. Of course, Clawdbot is pretty good at fixing its own problems, so in many cases you won't even need the docs but I ended up referring to them quite a bit.

🟢 Community

The excited commentary on X is infectious, see for yourself! It's impossible not to feel excited. The discussion on Discord is lively. The community support (led by Krill, another Clawdbot) is stellar. The ideas and enthusiasm is really inspiring, fun times!

🟡 Paradox of choice

Clawdbot works with everything – Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, Signal, Slack. It supports all the big LLM providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, Perplexity. It integrates with everything: gmail, github, notion etc. It has skills. You can add more skills. The possibilities are endless!

But this can also be overwhelming. And paralyzing / confusing. If you happen to make the wrong set of choices, it can make an otherwise lovely onboarding quite frustrating. I recommend starting with Telegram + Claude (via API key).

For instance, I made the mistake of setting WhatsApp as the first chat provider. The path of least resistance led to me just add it to my personal number, which was a mistake – I found out because ppl started getting weird "pairing" messages from my number 😅

Likewise, I had a lot of trouble (and still having some issues) getting a reliable model setup. The options can also feel a LOT. Like, like Clawd has 3 distinct authentication methods for both Google and Anthropic, and the trade-offs between all of them aren't obvious.

🟡 Debugging

While Clawd is pretty good at debugging itself, figuring out what's wrong is hard if the chatbot isn't even running.

Here's a simple example: Octo kept saying "AI service returned an error, please try again". Turns out I had hit out my daily Opus limits :/ But I had to talk to Claude directly to figure that out.

There were lots of other instances where Octo failed or got hung up in weird ways, clawdbot doctor reported no issues and there was no smoking gun in clawdbot logs. Some examples of when this happened:

🟠 Token guzzler

Clawdbot can be a token guzzler. Both during "normal" usage and due to bugs.

It took me 3-4 attempts of fresh installs to get things working properly. During one of the failed attempts, Clawdbot spammed me with THOUSANDS of messages like this, completely nuking my token usage in the process.

Even without bugs, just the nature of the bot is that a casual statement can fan out into subagents that end up consuming a ton of tokens.

I suppose that explains why Peter also built CodexBar 😅

Anyways, the main reason I'm writing this is because I hit my daily quota on Claude so I had to take a break 🤣

One final observation: even though I was expecting it, I was still surprised by how different Octo's personality felt as I switched models (esp. Gemini compared to Claude), even though it was the exact same harness, same SOUL.md and so on. Hard to put in words, just a different vibe. Distinctly felt I was talking to different personas.

Can't wait to play more with Octo! If you've been on the fence for trying out Clawdbot, go try it out!!