🦞 The little lobster that could

A freshly-spawned, open-source agent ecosystem closes in on the last mile of agents

🦞 A new agentic ecosystem seems to have spawned over the weekend.

Affectionately named Clawd and created by Pete Steinberger, this lobster-themed agent seems to have finally closed the last-mile gap in agentic experiences: user experience.

Yes, setting it up to run 24/7 on a VM was slightly painful (I opted for a cloud server over a Mac Mini. Psst I think there’s a massive opportunity for someone to build a streamlined hosting experience here).

But once I got it running and communicating on WhatsApp, it truly felt like magic.

In minutes, my Clawd (that I named Seb after Ariel’s best buddy):

• Built a daily news scraper for trending papers and news sent to my email and Whatsapp

• Organized my work data into a full portal

• Coded a cost-monitoring dashboard and deployed it to GitHub

I’ve tried all the general-purpose agents out there (including Manus, GenSpark, and Gemini), and none have come close to reliably executing chains of commands (especially recurring ones) as well as Mr. Lobster.

Most frustratingly, while Gemini now does recurring tasks, it’s unable to send emails or update spreadsheets, even within the Google workspace ecosystem.

Clawd functions less like a chatbot and truly like a personal assistant for your life. It runs 24/7 on a VM (or Mac Mini), stays completely synced across a Web UI and WhatsApp/Telegram/Slack, and most crucially, maintains a persistent state.

It’s even able to solve captchas and help make phone calls on your behalf.

There’s way more to come. Some users have already set it up with its own email, GitHub accounts, and are even handing over credit cards.

The last mile era of autonomous agents is finally here. It’s a big, delightful glimpse into the future. Have fun! And of course, be safe.

🛠️ Quick Sidebar: The Clawd Setup Guide

Getting a 24/7 agent running isn’t plug-and-play yet, but the payoff is massive. Here is the quick-start guide to doing it right, curated from the power users on X.

1. The Host (Don’t just run this on your laptop)

• VPS Path: Rent a cheap cloud server (Hetzner or DigitalOcean or Google).

• Local Path: An always-on Mac Mini if you want it to control local apps.

2. The Identity

• Get a Second Number: Get a secondary phone number for WhatsApp. Or if you want to initially try it out, Clawd will be in self-message mode on WhatsApp. Grab a cheap eSIM for your agent’s “Work Phone.”

3. Models / Web Search

• Claude Opus: Still the king for the actual coding/analysis tasks. I use Sonnet when tackling most daily and routine tasks and questions (to avoid a huge bill!)

• Use Grok for X Search: While you can plug in various models, power users suggest routing the “Search” skill through Grok (via API) for the most up-to-date real-time news retrieval.

4. The Community

• Join the Discord: Nearly 20,000 and counting 🦞

• ClawdHub: for the latest Skills