Can someone explain what value openclaw provides over like claude code? It seems like it's literally just a repackaged claude code (i.e. a for loop around claude) with a model selector (and I guess a few builtin 'tools' for web browsing?)
- a heartbeat, so it was able to 'think'/work throughout the day, even if you weren't interacting with it - a clever and simple way to retain 'memory' across sessions (though maybe claude code has this now) - a 'soul' text file, which isn't necessarily innovative in itself, but the ability for the agent to edit its own configuration on the fly is pretty neat
Oh, and it's open source
As far as the 'soul' file, claude does have claude.md and skills.md files that it can edit with config changes.
One thing I'm curious about is whether there was significant innovation around tools for interacting with websites/apps. From their wiki, they call out like 10 apps (whatsapp, teams, etc...) that openclaw can integrate with, so IDK if it just made interacting with those apps easier? Having agents use websites is notoriously a shitty experience right now.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
Using a claude code instance through a phone app is certainly not something that is easy to do, so if there's like a phone app that makes that easy, I can see that being a big differentiator.
I think this is a pretty cool example: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp
This is using Claude on VMs that don’t have SSH, so can’t use a regular terminal emulator. They stream responses to commands over websockets, which works perfectly with Claude’s streaming. They can run an interactive console session, but instead I built a chat UI around this non-interactive mode.
You can see how I build the Claude command here: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp/blob/main/Wisp/ViewModels...
For me personally I can't stand interacting with agents via CLI and fixed width fonts so I built a e2e encrypted remote interface that has a lot of the nice UI feature you would expect from a first class UI like Claude Vscode extension (syntax highlighting, streaming, etc). You can self host it. But it's a little no dependencies node server that you can just npm install (npm i -g yepanywhere)
Just uses claude. I haven't tried it much but it seems to be what you're describing.
Openclaw uses pi agent under the hood. Arguably most of the codebase could be replaced by systemd if you're running on a VPS for scheduling though, and then its a series of prompts on top of pi agent.