It's a new, dangerous and wildly popular shape of what I've in the past called a "personal digital assistant" - usually while writing about how hard it is to secure them from prompt injection attacks.

The term is in the process of being defined right now, but I think the key characteristics may be:

- Used by an individual. People have their own Claw (or Claws).

- Has access to a terminal that lets it write code and run tools.

- Can be prompted via various chat app integrations.

- Ability to run things on a schedule (it can edit its own frontal equivalent)

- Probably has access to the user's private data from various sources - calendars, email, files etc. very lethal trifecta.

Claws often run directly on consumer hardware, but that's not a requirement - you can host them on a VPS or pay someone to host them for you too (a brand new market.)

I think for me it is an agent that runs on some schedule, checks some sort of inbox (or not) and does things based on that. Optionally it has all of your credentials for email, PayPal, whatever so that it can do things on your behalf.

Basically cron-for-agents.

Before we had to go prompt an agent to do something right now but this allows them to be async, with more of a YOLO-outlook on permissions to use your creds, and a more permissive SI.

Not rocket science, but interesting.

I read all 500+ comments at the time of writing and I don't understand. Something about something, with people saying something isn't a claw.

it's a psychological state that happens when someone is so desperate to seem cool and up with the latest AI hype that they decide to recklessly endanger themselves and others.

That's it basically. I do not think running the tool in a container really solves the fundamental danger these tools pose to your personal data.

There are a few qualitative product experiences that make claw agents unique.

One is that it relentlessly strives thoroughly to complete tasks without asking you to micromanage it.

The second is that it has personality.

The third is that it's artfully constructed so that it feels like it has infinite context.

The above may sound purely circumstantial and frivolous. But together it's the first agent that many people who usually avoid AI simply LOVE.

A claw is an orchestrator for agents with its own memory, multiprocessing, job queue and access to instant messengers.

I am creating a claw that is basically a loop that runs every x minutes. It uses the Claude cli tool. And it builds a memory based on some kind of simple node system. With active memories and fading old memories. I also added functionality to add integrations like whatsapp, agenda. Slack and gmail. so every "loop" the ai reads in information and updates it's memory. There is also a directive that can decide to create tasks or directly message me or others. It's a bit of playing around. Very dangerous, but fun to play with. The application even has self improvement system. I creates a few pull requests every day it thinks is needed to make it better. Hugely fun to see it evolving. https://github.com/holoduke/myagent