Peter Steinberger — the creator of OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot — put it bluntly at the first ClawCon event in San Francisco this February, where 700 developers showed up (compared to 20 at the inaugural meetup just weeks earlier): it’s about building systems that do things on your computer. Not chat. Not suggest. Do.

Claude Code handles your codebase — reading files, writing code, running tests, managing git. It lives in your terminal. OpenClaw handles everything else — email triage, calendar management, messaging, browser automation, smart home control. It lives in your messaging apps, running as a persistent daemon with long-term memory.