To be honest, anyone with a Claude Code subscription can just write their own in moments. My own assistant has its own email address and Apple ID and interacts primarily via a Telegram bot. I share my calendar with it and my email syncs down and is indexed, but it sends email via its own Gmail account.

The interesting part about OpenClaw is that if you give a world-class model an arbitrary number of skills then emergent behavior mimicking intelligent assistance appears. The structural pieces of that are just long-term memory, an agentic loop, a messaging system, and self-modification.

You can get something quite functional out of:

* A memory.md

* A hand-rolled agent loop (this is just "keep calling till num tries exhausted or agent says stop") - claude knows how to write openai function call syntax and codex tool call syntax

* A Telegram bot

* Access to a persistent filesystem for it to build itself skills

It can be quite expensive to run, but a trick that is supported[0] is to use a Codex subscription by getting a codex cli token and using that. OpenAI explicitly supports this, so you can just use it.

You can try to make improvements to this structure in all sorts of ways using all sorts of tools and get somewhere but this much is all you need. You really have to just give yourself 2 hours with Claude Code and a similar prompt to get somewhere. This is the first time in history that personal software has been this accessible to everyone.

0: someone here told me about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151310