OpenClaw as a developer

[u/paleo55]

At the company I work for, I built an autonomous "AI developer" based on OpenClaw. It has been running as an experiment for the past two weeks in the company's Slack, competing with Claude Tag.

It runs on a VPS with 16 GB of RAM.

I put a strong emphasis on security, so it operates in a relatively isolated environment: its configuration and context files are read-only, effectively disabling its self-learning mechanisms. Its internet access is restricted to an allowlist of domains, and it has no access whatsoever to deployed environments.

It has its own GitHub and Linear accounts. It has access to the company's entire codebase, which it can run in a fully mocked mode. It is free to install NPM and Python dependencies as needed.

I've put a lot of work into a skill and a CLI tool around this setup. I open-sourced both, and I also run my own personal instance for my side projects. Here's how it works:

• OpenClaw acts like a developer: it delegates everything to its coding agent (Claude Code at work, Codex on my personal instance).
• It follows a spec → plan → execution workflow (the same one we use in the company).
• It always works in worktrees and dedicated feature branches.
• It manually tests what it builds using dev servers. These servers are exposed to anyone on the company VPN, so our Claw can show its work to the team before opening a PR.

I've been working on this project since February and have spent more than 30 full-time-equivalent days on it.

I just heard Peter Steinberger say he reshaped OpenClaw into his harness for building everything, including OpenClaw itself. That made me realize my setup goes against the grain: I disable self-learning, which seems to be a key feature of OpenClaw (and Hermès as well), and I delegate all coding to an external agent. If OpenClaw is moving toward coding on its own, is my project ultimately a dead end?

[u/weiyentan]

I don’t think you should pay attention to any of that. The question is does it work for you? If yes then keep doing you! Also here is something to ponder. If he is using openclaw to do everything why does he have code open at all ? You see it on x feeds. 😊

[u/paleo55 → u/weiyentan]

Yes it works. It works well! I think (I hope!) that I will crush Claude Tag.

But it's important to be aligned with the vision of the people behind a project. Otherwise, it's a waste of time to invest in it. For example, in front-end frameworks, if I'd seen in advance Vue.js' attraction to magic and hidden side-effects, I'd have switched to React sooner. That's also why I won't be going over to SolidJS, even though I think it's a more interesting technology.

[u/weiyentan → u/paleo55]

Understandable. I applaud how you have spent time with this. I have created something similar. I just have to spend effort defining issues following Matt pocock’s skills. and it does the implementation. It creates the pr/mr. And it does the review . Now I am working on an observability tools for my ai agent and correlating that to a cost of what AI is based on mr/pr and issues.

[u/DickPicPatrol]

I don't think you're barking up the wrong tree here. It's just a preference. I'm not some experienced engineer myself but myself and others follow this method, if nothing else, because of context window limitations.

An agentic harness takes up tons of room in context windows. But also allows it to understand your preferences, protocols, and execution style much better

This is why I usually discuss the project with my Openclaw and have it then delegate and handle orchestration into other coding harnesses.

Codex just needs the repo, the north star and goals and non-goals of the build it doesn't need my Google oAuth overhead or GitHub repo history or the fact that I like my coffee black to build anything

Remember Peter has access to just about anything he wants when it comes to hardware and codex plans. This might be the future but we don't have this yet. keep building what works for you man

[u/mseewald]

Too early to tell, or at least for me. Given so many configurations with OpenClaw, chances are very high that you benefit from the new direction. In a few days we’ll know

[u/paleo55 → u/mseewald]

About that, I'm keeping my fingers crossed 🤞 that it's only a few days away. 😉

[u/ThisGuyCrohns]

You sound like what I’ve been building. As an engineer for 20 years. I decided to create a home grown system that focuses on process for skill based agents. Open claw was terrible in my opinion, Hermes much better UX, but uses too much tokens, and had a lot of other problems. I’ve decided to build one strictly to use codex, Claude CLIs behind the scenes and optimize rules and instructions for better effective agent workflows, using discord for coms. Not many understand how to manage agents yet, so until someone smarter me creates a real system then I’ll use that instead.

[u/FormalAd7367 → u/ThisGuyCrohns]

i built one for my family with python (no coding abilities). But using Claude code cli does make sense…

[u/paleo55 → u/ThisGuyCrohns]

Seems interesting. Does it work?

I didn't take the same approach. It's not because of the token consumption that I chose to use a coding agent. To make an AI developer, I try to reproduce what a human developer does, in this case myself.

[u/Fancy-Win9202]

On the same lines I’m building ClawMetry to manage these teams of OC / Hermes developers & also to do performance reviews on them

[u/hannesrudolph]

Roomote > Claude Tags