OpenClaw: The AI Agent That Works While You Sleep – and Why You Still Need to Be Careful

An agent built four features overnight. The developer was asleep.

Not clickbait. Not a concept. Reality.

@JohnParadise17 on X: He defines what his electrical panelboard quoting agent should do in the evening. By morning, four new features are implemented. He wrote none of it himself.

@AlexFinn goes further: His agent reads Reddit trends overnight, autonomously decides which app ideas are promising, and builds them on his Mac Studio. By morning, finished prototypes are waiting.

The tool behind this is called OpenClaw. And it's currently the fastest-growing open-source project of all time.

What OpenClaw is – and what it isn't

OpenClaw is not a chatbot. It's not a better ChatGPT. It's an autonomous agent that runs on your own machine or server and does things.

Execute shell commands. Control browsers. Send emails. Manage files. Check calendars. Write code. Research. Negotiate. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You communicate with it via WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, or Signal – the apps you already use. No new dashboard. No new interface. You message your agent like you'd message a colleague.

Created by Peter Steinberger, founder of PSPDFKit. Built with vibe coding itself – Steinberger set the direction, AI wrote the code. 150,000 GitHub stars in under a week. Steinberger has since joined OpenAI. OpenClaw remains open source.

The architecture: A Node.js gateway runs as a daemon on your system. A heartbeat system wakes up every 30 minutes to check if there's anything to do. Cron jobs trigger tasks at set times. 5,700+ community skills on ClawHub extend its capabilities. Everything local, everything under your control.

At least in theory. More on that later.

Why this is more than hype

At Squills, we normally ignore new tools. Every week brings ten new AI wrappers that change nothing.

OpenClaw is different. For a simple reason: It solves a problem we know firsthand.

We're two people. We build AI products, advise product teams, create courses. We have zero employees. And yet support requests need answering, competitors need monitoring, KPIs need tracking, content needs creating, and products need shipping.

OpenClaw is the first tool that doesn't just help – it acts independently. Not reactive. Proactive. Not on command. In the background, around the clock.

This fundamentally separates it from Zapier or n8n. Those wait for triggers. OpenClaw understands context and makes decisions.

What real users are doing with it

No concepts. No demos. Real people, real workflows, documented on X and GitHub.

For product teams

Competitive intelligence on autopilot. @BretJutras runs a "COO Agent" system: every morning he receives via Slack an analysis of the competitive landscape, LinkedIn content suggestions, and alerts about new competitor features. No more manual Googling. No more weekly "Has anything changed at Competitor X?" Instead: a daily digest before standup begins.

KPI reports that write themselves. @chrysb configured an "AI Chief of Staff": morning briefings, spending tracking, team Slack updates. Nightly self-reflection by the agent, delivered as a morning summary. @jsundlo has OpenClaw review meeting transcripts and automatically create PowerPoints the night before.

Sprint intelligence. @dziemid uses OpenClaw as a "Scrum Master for Solo Founders" with Trello integration. The agent fixes bugs from stack traces and build logs. @eouaooo reports his agent automatically declined 14 unnecessary meeting invitations.

Production incident management. @anayatkhan09: The agent tails logs, triages alerts, proposes rollbacks, and posts summaries with feature flag and on-call context. Not as a toy – as part of the production workflow.

Multi-agent orchestration. @LarryGraham01 runs an OpenClaw orchestrator that spawns sub-agents for QA, copywriting, research, and coding. The automated flow goes from App Store Connect through Gmail and Notion to a GitHub PR. @mesetatron manages an entire Kubernetes cluster via Slack: asset uploads, lore database, skill trees.

A 36-hour product build? @jlehman_ had "Pagedrop" built entirely via Telegram: architecture, domain, infrastructure, landing page, OAuth, payments.

This sounds like the future. But it's happening now.

For professionals building an AI business alongside their day job

This is where it gets especially relevant for us. Because this is exactly the journey we support with our "For Professionals" program: from employee to digital entrepreneur in 12 months. Alongside your job. Under 10 hours per week.

OpenClaw doesn't replace strategy. But it multiplies execution.

Phase 1: Becoming visibly better at your day job.

Email triage: OpenClaw reads every email, categorizes by urgency, drafts responses in your style. @eouaooo saves most of his email time this way. @BadBrainCode indexed 14 GB of work emails in an encrypted SQLite database and now runs natural language queries: "Which budget approvals are still pending?"

Meeting preparation: @AI_Nate_SA sends a company name via WhatsApp. The agent browses current news, searches his Obsidian vault for previous contacts, and delivers a complete briefing. At 7am, automatically, for all meetings that day.

Daily briefing: @mbogoroch18 receives every morning via WhatsApp: tech news, customer talking points, meeting and deal prep. One briefing instead of five different dashboards.

Personal knowledge management: @centralizedmrc on his Obsidian integration: "I don't even open Obsidian anymore." Everything in via voice note, automatically indexed, retrievable later via natural language.

The result: 30-40% more capacity at your day job. Not by working harder. By delegating smarter.

Phase 2: Turning knowledge into digital assets.

Content factory: @Govikavaturi manages 4 X accounts, LinkedIn posts, and YouTube Shorts from a Mac Mini. @easyclaw_ai reports "60% of posting is agent-managed." Content marketing alongside a full-time job becomes possible because the agent handles execution.

Market validation in your sleep: @emillyhumphress has her agent research overnight. By morning, project and content ideas are ready. @VincentChan uses the flow from brain-dump to Linear, with the agent completing full reports in Obsidian overnight.

Audience building: @BretJutras' agent generates daily LinkedIn angles and X suggestions. From 5 hours per week down to 1 – just review and approval.

Phase 3: Launching and running the business.

Customer support: WhatsApp is the most-installed skill on ClawHub with over 5,000 active installations. @glass_bit uses tone-based auto-replies. @gustavozilles has his agent autonomously negotiate repair quotes via WhatsApp.

Lead generation: @krishlogy runs "24/7 Sales Outreach" – prepare data, research, write emails, send, flag replies. @ericosiu landed a speaking engagement this way.

Agent-run business: @davidtoniolo has a SaaS business that an agent builds and operates. 5 paying participants, ~$550/month revenue. The agent as co-founder.

And the killer feature: overnight product building. @ashar_builds, @AlexFinn, @Kalici_Luna – they all have their agents work at night. Building features, reviewing code, creating content. When the agent works 8 hours at night, 10 hours per week effectively become 30-40 hours of output.

Now comes the but. And it's a big one.

This is where we need to be honest. Because most OpenClaw articles online read like advertisements. We're not writing an ad.

You're giving an AI agent access to your entire infrastructure.

Read that sentence again.

OpenClaw reads your emails. Accesses your files. Executes shell commands on your system. Controls your browser. Sends messages on your behalf. Has access to your API keys, your databases, your credentials.

That's why it's so powerful. And that's exactly why it's so risky.

CrowdStrike explicitly warns about the security risks of autonomous AI agents like OpenClaw. Bitsight found over 30,000 exposed OpenClaw instances on the open internet – agents running without adequate protection and reachable from outside.

What this means in practice:

1. A misconfigured agent can destroy your business. Imagine your agent misinterprets an email and sends a response to your most important client that should never have gone out. Or it deletes files because it interprets a cleanup command differently than you intended. Or it commits code to production that causes an outage. These aren't hypothetical scenarios. This is the consequence of system access plus non-deterministic behavior.

2. Your data is only as secure as your configuration. OpenClaw runs locally – that's good. But it communicates with LLM APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, or other providers. Every message, every email, every file content the agent processes gets sent to these APIs. Your customer data, your internal documents, your business numbers. Locally hosted doesn't mean your data stays local.

3. Community skills are an attack vector. 5,700 skills on ClawHub sounds impressive. But every skill is code someone else wrote that runs on your system with full permissions. Yes, there's a VirusTotal partnership. But that's malware scanning, not a code audit. A skill that looks "harmless" can exfiltrate data in the background. Never blindly install skills just because they're on ClawHub.

4. Autonomy plus errors equals catastrophe. The heartbeat system and cron jobs mean the agent acts even when you're not watching. At 3am. On weekends. On vacation. When an agent makes a mistake while you're watching, you can intervene. When it makes a mistake while you're sleeping, you don't notice until morning. For irreversible actions – sending emails, deleting data, deploying code – that can be too late.

5. For regulated industries, this is a non-starter. Compliance, audit trails, traceability – all of this is difficult to impossible with a non-deterministic agent that makes autonomous decisions. If your company operates in finance, healthcare, or legal, OpenClaw without massive safeguards is not deployable.

What you should do if you use it anyway

Because – and this is the point – the benefits are real. The question isn't whether, but how.

Human-in-the-loop for everything irreversible. Sending emails, posting messages, deploying code, deleting data – never autonomous. The agent drafts, you approve. Always. No exceptions.

Minimal permissions. Only give the agent access to what it needs. Not your entire file system. Not all API keys. Not all email accounts. Create dedicated accounts and API keys with restricted permissions.

Isolated environment. Run OpenClaw in a VM, a container, or on a dedicated VPS. Not on your main machine with all credentials. Separate production environment and agent environment.

Vet skills. Read every skill before installation. Check the VirusTotal report. When in doubt, don't install. The convenience of a one-click installation isn't worth the security risk.

Monitoring. Set up alerts for unexpected behavior. Log all agent actions. Regularly check what the agent actually does – not just what it's supposed to do.

OpenClaw vs. Zapier vs. n8n – the honest comparison

The obvious question: Why not just use Zapier or n8n?

Zapier and n8n are rule-based. When X happens, do Y. Clear logic, predictable behavior, no risk of unexpected decisions. But also: no context understanding, no judgment, no proactivity.

OpenClaw understands context and makes judgments. It independently decides whether an email is urgent. It formulates responses appropriate to the context. It recognizes that a competitor launched a new feature without you telling it what to look for.

But that exact strength is also the weakness: Because it makes judgments, it can make wrong judgments. Zapier does exactly what you configure. Nothing more, nothing less. OpenClaw does what it thinks is right. Usually that's correct. Sometimes it's not.

Our recommendation: Zapier/n8n for everything that needs to be deterministic. OpenClaw for everything that requires judgment – with human-in-the-loop.

What this means for us at Squills

We're actively testing OpenClaw. For exactly the use cases we described above: competitive intelligence, content ideas, feedback analysis, meeting preparation.

But we're doing it with the guardrails we believe in. No autonomous email sending. No access to production systems. Dedicated API keys with minimal permissions. And always with the mindset: the agent drafts, we decide.

This fits our philosophy: Ship First, Perfect Later. But ship responsibly.

OpenClaw is a tool. A more powerful one than most we've seen. But a tool without clear rules is a weapon. And anyone who doesn't understand this distinction has a bigger problem than missing automation.

This article appears on the Squills blog. Squills builds AI-powered products and helps teams work faster with AI. For product teams: Request a workshop. For professionals building an AI business alongside their day job: Learn more.