Some quick tips for running an OpenClaw (Clawdbot) agent
Some quick tips for running an OpenClaw (Clawdbot) agent:
Sorry, you are going to need to run this on some kind of Apple hardware, whether a Mac mini or an old Apple laptop you have lying around. It works best out of the box with mac specific CLI programs like peekaboo and is able to do many desktop activities easily via things like applescript and having access to OS level accessibility. Being able to remote desktop into your OpenClaw machine to see what it is doing, as well as help it along when it gets stuck is also necessary.
The only model that can actually accomplish complex tasks right now is Claude Opus 4.5. You are going to want to use an API key from Claude to avoid the rate limiting that the subscription based access gives you. This is also very expensive!
Create (or have your agent create) its own gmail account. This way it can sign up for other sites that have email verification and anti-bot measures (which the agent can correctly identify and get around!). This also lets it send emails.
Don't bother with the chrome tab control extension and just have the agent operate its own browser instance. You can log into whatever accounts you have on this browser instance so it can do various things on your behalf but read 5 first!
Do NOT give your agent access to any sensitive information or accounts you have. This is still experimental software and you should not trust it with access to ANYTHING critical.
Telegram is the easiest messaging channel to set up currently and works across all of your devices, this also lets your send and receive voice messages (tell your agent to reply with a voice message and it will figure it out!)
Any recurring tasks included in the HEARTBEAT.md file will be very expensive so keep these to a minimum.
Enable nano banana support and give it a gemini API key so it can generate images. This is useful for having it create avatars for various services as well as post images to any sites you might want it to.
Set your expectations low for the kind of tasks it can accomplish. There are a lot of posts claiming amazing results with OpenClaw, some are completely fabricated, some are actually accomplishable with a little effort. Some things I have successfully had it do: sign up for and post on reddit, sign up and post on twitter, generate a voice summary of the days news, send and check emails. Some advanced things I had it do: sign up and post about 80s movies on https://moltbook.com. Perform a few bounties on https://shippy.sh/ . See 10 before trying these!
Be wary of any sites that ask you to add a skill.md link to your agent. You are going to want to follow the link and review what exactly the site is trying to instruct your agent to do.
If none of this post makes sense to you, but you would still like to experience what all this agent stuff is about, you can try our secure email based scheduling assistant at https://lnkd.in/e6B2RKRw ;)
Originally posted on LinkedIn on 2026-02-04.