The wild rise of OpenClaw

One of the most exciting AI apps for developers in 2026 is Claude.

No, not that Claude, but Claudebot,

a free and open- source project that's not just another lame chatbot,

but a tool that takes action in the real world 24 hours a day,

7 days per week without smoke breaks.

And it does this

while remembering everything and will hit you up on Telegram

or WhatsApp as it automates your entire life.

Over the last few weeks, everybody's been going crazy over it.

It's racked up over 65,000 GitHub stars in record time

and caused Mac Mini sales to go through the roof,

selling out everywhere.

In today's video, we'll take a hands-on look at everything it can do.

But its popularity has already created some problems.

Earlier this week, Anthropic,

a company that believes open- source AI is too dangerous for the common man,

woke up and chose violence.

Claudebot sounded too similar to their beloved Claude,

so they threatened to break the developers knees with a lead pipe

if they don't change the name.

So now Claudebot is officially called Maltbot.

Actually, no.

Wait a minute.

Maltbot.

That name sucks.

Today, they changed the name once again to its final form, OpenClaw.

The same dangerous AI assistant with a new lobster identity.

It is January 30th, 2026.

And you're watching the code report.

OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, the founder of the developer tools company PSDFKit,

aka Nutrient.

But just look at this dude's unhinged GitHub profile.

It's less of a resume

and more of a heat map of pure uninterrupted software obsession.

What's crazy is that this guy retired

and then came back for an encore by giving us Moltbot for free,

a tool written in Typescript

that wraps Claude and GPT5 to stay alive 24/7.

It can manage your calendar, clean up your email, run scripts,

find out how much money you're losing in the stock market

and deploy broken code with absolute confidence.

And best of all,

it can do all of this from your own tiny self-hosted VPS,

a Raspberry Pi, or even a Mac Mini

if you really want to overdo it.

There's no reason to pay another random startup $29 per month for the privilege.

But to understand its full power, let's put it to work right now.

The first step is to install it,

which can be done with a single command on any system,

although Linux would be the preferred route.

Once installed, you'll have access to the clawbot

or moltbot command or the open claw command

if you live in the present.

And the first thing you'll want to do is go through onboarding.

It is going to request

that you read the security doc about all the risks involved,

but I like to live dangerously.

So, let's move right on to the next step by hooking up an AI

model provider.

You can use anything you want here,

but I'm going to go ahead and drop in my Anthropic API key.

The Anthropic API does cost money,

but you could easily use a free open- source model here as well.

Now that that's done,

the second major component is hooking up some kind of messenger app like Telegram,

Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, etc.

I'm going to go with Telegram, which is really easy to set up.

Just open up your Telegram Messenger and start a chat with the bot father.

It'll have you select a name for your bot

and then eventually give you an access token,

which is like a password that you want to keep safe.

Go ahead and give the token to Moltbot.

Then the next thing it'll ask you for is to configure some skills.

It has a bunch of built-in skills or you can bring your own.

And there's even a thing called MoltHub with a bunch of other pre-built skills

depending on what you want this thing to do.

And then finally, it'll ask you about hooks.

Hooks allow you to tap into different life cycle events

that happen as this tool runs,

which is really useful

if you want it to keep memories about things

that happen in previous sessions

or trigger follow-up automations

when something important happens.

That takes care of the initial setup,

which then brings up this gateway dashboard where you can manage everything.

It has an interface for basic chat along with tons of config settings to

customize basically everything.

That's cool and all, but our goal is to use Mulbot through Telegram.

And to do that,

we need to go into Telegram

and send a message to the bot we created with the bot father earlier.

You'll notice initially it says access not configured.

And we'll respond with this pairing code.

What we have to do is take that pairing code, go into the terminal,

and run this command.

And now we're good to go.

Now we can start sending messages

and it will respond with Anthropics Claude

as the backend AI model.

And now we can start refining its personality by simply chatting with it.

I'll go ahead and name it assistant to Jeff

and tell it to behave like a casual gremlin with the fire emoji.

But what's really awesome is

that we can now start building automations directly in the chat.

Like maybe I want to check

and see how my investment in Microsoft is doing.

We can ask Moltbot through Telegram

and it turns out it's not doing

so well.

But it's not just going to pull this data once.

We now have an automation set up in the background to keep track of

this stock.

And when it moves significantly, we'll get a message on Telegram.

So now there's no need in my life to go check this stock manually.

But unfortunately, because I lost so much money in Microsoft,

I now need to get a real job.

So I might go ahead

and install this skill

that will automatically generate interview questions for software engineers.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible here.

It's an amazing tool you'll definitely want to try out.

Kind of like Tracer, the sponsor of today's video.

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If you want to get more out of your coding agents in 2026,

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This has been the Code Report.

Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.