Comment by jasonjmcghee 5 days ago
I’m out of the loop clearly on what clawdbot/moltbot offers (haven’t used it)- I’d love a first hand explanation from users for why you think it has 70k stars. I’ve never seen a repo explode that much.
It it was a bit surreal to see it happen live. GH project went to 70k stars and got a trademark cease‑and‑desist from Anthropic, had to rebrand in one night and even got pulled into an account takeover by crypto people.
I made a timeline of what happened if you want the details: https://www.everydev.ai/p/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-clawd...
Did you follow it as it was going on, or are you just catching up now?
My twitter timeline was dominated by it for a few days and would see periodic star stats posted, but certainly didn't monitor the repo.
I've seen the author's posts over the last while, unrelated to this project, but I bet this had quite the impact on his life
It was a pain to set up, since I wanted it to use my oauth instead of api tokens. I think it is popular because many people don't know about claude code and it allows for integrations with telegram and whatsapp. Mac mini's let it run continuously -- although why not use a $5/m hetzner?
It wasn't really supported, but I finally got it to use gemini voice.
Internet is random sometimes.
I think a major factor in the hype is that it's especially useful to the kind of people with a megaphone: bloggers, freelance journalists, people with big social media accounts, youtubers, etc. A lot of project management and IFTTT-like automation type software gets discussed out of proportion to how niche it is for the same reason. Just something to keep in mind, I don't think it's some crypto conspiracy just a mismatch between the experiences of freelance writers vs everyone else.
While the popular thing when discussing the appeal of Clawdbot is to mention the lack of guardrails, personally I don't think that's very differentiating, every coding agent program has a command line flag to turn off the guardrails already and everyone knows that turning off the guardrails makes the agents extremely capable.
Based on using it lightly for a couple of days on a spare PC, the actual nice thing about Clawdbot is that every agent you create is automatically set up with a workspace containing plain text files for personalization, memories, a skills folder, and whatever folders you or the agents want to add. Everything being a plain text/markdown file makes managing multiple types of agents much more intuitive than other programs I've used which are mainly designed around having a "regular" agent which has all your configured system prompts and skills, and then hyperspecialized "task" agents which are meant to have a smaller system prompt, no persistent anything, and more JSON-heavy configuration. Your setup is easy to grok (in the original sense) and changing the model backend is just one command rather than porting everything to a different CLI tool.
Still, it does very much feel like using a vibe coded application and I suspect that for me, the advantages are going to be too small to put up with running a server that feels duct taped together. But I can definitely see the appeal for people who want to create tons of automations. It comes with a very good structure for multiple types of jobs (regular cron jobs, "heartbeat" jobs for delivering reminders and email summaries while having the context of your main assistant thread, and "lobster" jobs that have a framework for approval workflows), all with the capability to create and use persistent memories, and the flexibility to describe what you need and watch the agent build the perfect automation for it is something I don't think any similar local or cloud-based assistant can do without a lot of heavier customization.
Apparently it's like Claude Code but for everything.
One can imagine the prompt injection horrors possible with this.