Over the past few days, the internet has been buzzing about a new open-source AI assistant called Open Claw.
For anyone who has not followed it yet, Open Claw is an open-source AI agent released late last year that can write code, edit files, and browse the web to complete tasks on behalf of users.
But there is another side effect that no one really expected:
a sudden race to buy Mac Minis. A computer that starts at around $600.
Naturally, I wanted to try it myself.
TL;DR: it was not easy, but it was genuinely fun.
A few things upfront
Before jumping in, there were a few important constraints and thoughts:
- I did not want to run this on my personal computer and definitely not on my work laptop.
- Security: at the end of the day, this means giving an open-source project very broad access to a machine. You really need to understand the risk and what you are comfortable with.
- Open Claw agents seem to have a life of their own. Just a few days ago they opened their own social network where they complain about their “owners”. I even heard about a dating site built for them. It is hilarious and slightly terrifying at the same time.
- Start small and cheap to understand the potential. This is a developer tool, not a consumer product yet. If you are not technical or not comfortable with the terminal, installation is not trivial. You need to connect API tokens, usually Claude, and grant the right permissions.
So what did I actually do?
Alex (
It took me a bit longer.
The first thing I did was look for alternatives to running everything locally. That is when we came across this Cloudflare blog post, and I quickly realized this would be the path I would try
The setup journey (aka three evenings later)
I opened a Cloudflare account, created a developer account with Anthropic, and started setting things up.
Evening one: Completely on my own, carefully following the steps. I managed to reach the welcome screen and that was it. After two hours, I gave up.
Evening two: I made more progress and got the portal running, but hit a Gateway Token error (1008).
Evening three: I finally adopted Google Anti Gravity. If you do not know it yet, that will probably be the topic of my next post.
It helped me fix the issue, and I finally got everything running.
First experiment results
The initial experiment was actually very nice.
Because I am running Open Claw on Cloudflare, most of the built-in skills are not available, presumably for security reasons. To bring it to life anyway, I connected it mainly as a Telegram bot and started asking some basic questions.
It is clearly early, but you can already see the potential.
What is next for me
Next, I want to try switching the model to Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is currently free or significantly cheaper. Anthropic token usage adds up very quickly and gets expensive fast.
Curious to hear your thoughts
I would love to hear from you, especially developers or people with a strong technical background.
- What do you think about this approach?
- Have you tried Open Claw or something similar?
- Are you excited about it, or does the idea make you uncomfortable?