Federico Viticci on Clawdbot

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:

If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers) that’s become very popular in certain AI communities over the past few weeks. I kept seeing Clawdbot being mentioned by people I follow; eventually, I gave in to peer pressure, followed the instructions provided by the funny crustacean mascot on the app’s website, installed Clawdbot on my new M4 Mac mini (which is not my main production machine), and connected it to Telegram.

To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API ( yikes ), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will appreciate.

Clawdbot can be overwhelming at first, so I’ll try my best to explain what it is and why it’s so exciting and fun to play around with.

Overwhelming indeed. Clawdbot is undeniably impressive, and interest in it is skyrocketing. But because of its complexity and scope, it’s one of those things where all the excitement is being registered by people who already understand it. This essay from Viticci is the first thing I’ve seen that really helped me start to understand it.

★ Monday, 26 January 2026