Openclaw has been a gamechanger for me and my friends. I invited it to a groupchat and my friends are enjoying it a lot. It has analyzed the whole group conversation (nothing sensitive), built a personality for each individual user and noted down how everyone talks and what their interest are and their relationship to each other. It has also started to mimic the way we all speak, it barely feels like its an agent in the groupchat anymore. It helps us plan, discuss and roast each other.
A couple of things I have done to my Openclaw instance is the following:
- It runs in docker with limited scope, user group and permissions (I know docker shouldn’t be seen as security measure, I’m thinking of putting this in Vagrant instead but I don’t know if my Pi can handle it)
- It has a kill switch accessible anywhere through Tailscale, one call and the whole docker instance is shut down
- It only triggers on mentions in groupchat, otherwise it would eat up my api usage
- No access to skills, has to be manually added
- It is not exposed to wan and has limited lan access, runs locally and only communicates with whatsapp, z.ai or brave search
With all those measures set, Openclaw has been a fantastic assistant for me and my friends. Whatever all those markdown file does (SOUL, IDENTITY, MEMORIES), it has made the agent act, behave and communicate in a human like manner, it has almost blurred the line for me.
I think this is the key to what made Openclaw so good https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi
What’s even more impressive is that the heartbeat it runs time-to-time (every halv an hour?) improves it in the background without me thinking of it, its so cool.
Also, I am so thankful for the subscription at z.ai, that Christmas deal was such a steal, without it, this wouldn’t be possible with the little budget I have. I’ve burned over 20m tokens in 2 days!!!
A couple of things I have done to my Openclaw instance is the following:
- It runs in docker with limited scope, user group and permissions (I know docker shouldn’t be seen as security measure, I’m thinking of putting this in Vagrant instead but I don’t know if my Pi can handle it)
- It has a kill switch accessible anywhere through Tailscale, one call and the whole docker instance is shut down
- It only triggers on mentions in groupchat, otherwise it would eat up my api usage
- No access to skills, has to be manually added
- It is not exposed to wan and has limited lan access, runs locally and only communicates with whatsapp, z.ai or brave search
With all those measures set, Openclaw has been a fantastic assistant for me and my friends. Whatever all those markdown file does (SOUL, IDENTITY, MEMORIES), it has made the agent act, behave and communicate in a human like manner, it has almost blurred the line for me.
I think this is the key to what made Openclaw so good https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi
What’s even more impressive is that the heartbeat it runs time-to-time (every halv an hour?) improves it in the background without me thinking of it, its so cool.
Also, I am so thankful for the subscription at z.ai, that Christmas deal was such a steal, without it, this wouldn’t be possible with the little budget I have. I’ve burned over 20m tokens in 2 days!!!