Dave Onkels

Yesterday Mark Cuban reposted my work, DM'd me, and told me to keep telling my story. So here it is. I'm a Master Electrician. IBEW Local 369. 15 years pulling wire in Kentucky. Zero coding background. I didn't go to Stanford. I went to trade school. Every week I'd show up to a home where someone just bought a Tesla or a Rivian. And every time, someone had already told them they needed a $3,000-$5,000 panel upgrade to install a charger. 70% of the time? They didn't need it. The math is in the NEC — Section 220.82. Load calculations. But nobody was doing them for homeowners. Electricians upsell. Dealers don't know. And the homeowner just pays. I got angry enough to build something about it. I found @claudeai. No coding experience. I just started talking to it like I'd explain a job to an apprentice. "Here's how load calcs work. Here's the NEC code. Now help me build a tool that does this." 6 months later — @ChargeRight is live. Real software. Stripe payments. PDF reports. NEC 220.82 calculations automated. $12.99 instead of a $500 truck roll. I'm still pulling wire. I still take service calls. I wake up at 5:05 AM for work. But something shifted. Yesterday @vivilinsv published my story as Claude Builder Spotlight #1. Mark Cuban saw it. The Claude community showed up. And for the first time, I felt like this thing I built in my kitchen might actually matter. I'm not a tech founder. I'm a dad who wants to coach little league and be home for dinner. I just happened to build something that helps people. If you're in the trades and thinking about using AI — do it. The barrier isn't technical skill. It's believing you're allowed to try. EVchargeright.com

@theAIsailor @openclaw @lyzr__ai Love the adaptability. Any plans for QMD backed or similar memory handling? Added the project to my directory btw. shelldex.com

Meet GitClaw - the multi-model git-native @openclaw alternative. We set out to build an OpenClaw equivalent for enterprises (codenamed @lyzr__ai Chimera). One that is safe, with built-in version control, and that runs under strict controls instead of spontaneously launching tools, agents, and skills without oversight. Today, we hit an important milestone. GitClaw is the OpenClaw alternative built on the open agent standard GitAgent. That means versioning and file system management follow the same proven model software teams have trusted for decades. The core idea of Git, applied to agents. Now add vision and speech on top of that and you get something very powerful. GitClaw is multimodal. It can handle text, images, and even video. You now have a system that is more capable than OpenClaw and infinitely more controllable for enterprise deployment. Run it completely locally on your own machine or on a secure server. And very soon, GitClaw will be available inside Lyzr Agent Studio as an agent framework. Check out the video below to see our very own @Shreyaskapale interacting with GitClaw in real time. This is what enterprise-grade agentic AI actually looks like. GitClaw and GitAgent are both open-source. GitClaw: github.com/open-gitagent/… GitAgent: gitagent.sh

@JulianGoldieSEO Every. single. one? shelldex.com

I tested every OpenClaw alternative so you don't have to. Here's the honest ranking: 🥇 Agent Zero — easiest to set up, most polished, beat OpenClaw in every test 🥈 Manus Agent — all skills built in, runs in Telegram, never broke once 🥉 OpenClaw — breaks constantly, nobody talks about it, but it still works ❌ IronClaw — great idea, terrible setup, couldn't get it working no matter what IronClaw is built in Rust, focused on security, container isolation, version control for your prompts. Sounds amazing on paper. But if you're not deeply technical, you will spend 3 hours troubleshooting and get nothing done. The AI world is full of tools that are impressive in theory and painful in real life. Save your time. Start with Agent Zero + Ollama + GLM 4.7 Flash. Free. Local. Actually works. Want the exact setup? DM me. 💬

@SiliconSnark 8? I'm tracking 40 and more everyday. shelldex.com

OpenClaw went viral. Now the AI agent clone wars have begun. Here are 8 OpenClaw competitors trying to run your computer (and maybe your company). Some are serious. Some are… GitHub experiments. Read: siliconsnark.com/the-openclaw-c…🤖⚔️

@chebyte Agree. Very easy hop from OpenClaw for me. I'm tracking and testing as many as I can. shelldex.com

Been testing OpenFang. They’re positioning it as an Agent Operating System — and honestly, it’s one of the cleanest early implementations I’ve seen. Built in Rust, so it’s extremely lightweight and fast. The web dashboard makes it easy to manage agents, skills, MCP tools, and channels. It ships with preconfigured agents (assistant, coder, etc.) and you can chain them into agent workflows from a single input. You can also plug channels like Telegram and choose which agent you want to talk to. Multi-agent orchestration is still early, but the foundation is solid. For a first version, this is very well executed.

@5unnykum4r Tracking it and a few dozen others on my directory here: shelldex.com/projects/grip-…

Introducing grip-ai — a self-hostable AI agent platform similar to OpenClaw with two engines: Claude Agent SDK or Grip's own agent loop powering 15+ LLMs via LiteLLM. - 26 tools. -DAG workflows. -Telegram/Discord/Slack. -Cron scheduling. -Memory that persists, and more! Install with: pip install grip-ai

@uraimo Tracking it and related projects here. shelldex.com/projects/basho…

A small experiment: a personal AI assistant built with... Bash! Not a complete clone of ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw but it has all the basic features. All in Bash, can run almost anywhere!

@jianxliao @openclaw Great project - love to see the vibrant claw community shelldex.com/projects/tinyc…

Introducing TinyClaw 🦞 OpenClaw in 400 LoC @openclaw is great, but it breaks all the time. So I recreated @openclaw with just a shell script in ~400 lines of code using Claude Code and tmux. Everything works! WhatsApp channels, heartbeat system, cron jobs, and it uses your existing Claude Code plugins and setup. It’s super stable and extremely easy to deploy compared to openclaw, just install Claude Code! github.com/jlia0/tinyclaw

@MisbahSy Trying to evaluate options and keep track of where the clones diverge from OpenClaw so I created this directory. shelldex.com/?e=rz

Full comparison of the six popular claws

@AITinkerers Thanks, @AITinkerers - Enjoyed the Seattle event, thanks for facilitating. Added another OpenClaw clone to my directory too (shoutout to the OpenBrowserClaw demo) shelldex.com

On Saturday, February 28 OpenClaw Global Unhackathon runs at the same time in 29 cities across 6 continents. This isn’t a demo day. You show up with an idea. You test it in public. You break things. You fix them. You leave with something real. Find your city aitinkerers.org

@Akashi203 @Scobleizer @openclaw @openfangg Thanks - trying to keep it to purely self contained agents that spawn (or molt) off of OpenClaw vs skills or enhancements.

@Akashi203 @Scobleizer @openclaw @openfangg Added to theclawdex.com

We open sourced an operating system for ai agents 137k lines of rust, MIT licensed we love @openclaw and it inspired a lot of what we built. but we wanted something that works at the kernel level so we built @openfangg agents run inside WASM sandboxes the same way processes run on linux. the kernel schedules them, isolates them, meters their resources, and kills them if they go rogue. it has 16 security layers baked into the core. WASM sandboxing, merkle hash-chain audit trails, taint tracking on secrets, signed agent manifests, prompt injection detection, SSRF protection, and more. every layer works independently. giving an LLM tools with zero isolation is insane and we're not doing it. we also created something called Hands. right now every ai agent is a chatbot that waits for you to type. Hands are different. you activate one and it runs on a schedule, 24/7, no prompting needed. your Lead Hand finds and scores prospects every morning and delivers them to your telegram before you wake up. your Researcher Hand writes cited reports while you sleep. your Collector Hand monitors targets and builds knowledge graphs continuously. they work for you. you don't babysit them github.com/RightNow-AI/op… ⭐

There are too many *Claw projects live now so I made a directory. Clawdex catalogs every @openclaw clone, fork, and derivative with momentum. Anything missing? theclawdex.com Intentionally avoiding pinging my friend #steipete 🦞 for the 14 millionth time.

@dodeja @housecor I concur.

@housecor If you want to go down a rabbit hole -- checkout clawdbot

Problem: I’d like to be able to check on or work with my laptop’s Claude or Codex instance via my phone. Solution: Happy. Jump right into an existing desktop/laptop session via your phone. github.com/slopus/happy

@wizaj @steipete Same. Been running Sonnet 4.5 for the past 2 days after a couple with Opus. Noticeable but more on the margins. Suspect I'll break down and upgrade to Max 2x and go back to Opus.

@steipete how big of a difference does it make switching to Sonnet instead of Opus when running Clawdbot? I’m burning through tokens but afraid to ruin the novelty 😅

@Hythacg Curious if you made your way down to Rochester from Minneapolis. I've always been fond of the Plummer Building. history.mayoclinic.org/tours-events/p…

Honorable Mention - The Guardian Building in Detroit, MI. The architect said he was inspired by a trip to Barcelona where he studied Gaudi's work. The influence shows!

After a year of traveling the USA to document historic skyscrapers through high-res drone photography, here are my favorite Art Deco Buildings🧵

@museumofflight Was this for practice?

On this dark drizzly Seattle day it is nice to be reminded that summer--and its Blue Angels air shows--will return!

@largewhiteguy @IronicBadger @PASFadden I can confirm that Audiobookshelf with the iOS app available via TestFlight is quite good. Not as polished as Prologue but completely functional. Love that it’s not tied to my media server. It always felt strange to jam books into Plex anyway.

Day 1 of #JellyfinJanuary Plex is disabled. Jellyfin setup and configured successfully in under 20 mins via docker with Intel Quicksync and reverse proxy via traefik. Initial questions: - Intro skipping with audio fingerprinting worth doing? - What do folks do for audiobooks?

@TechnoTimLive Maybe not my favorite, but an honorable mention goes to Mosquito for keeping Home Assistant going.

What's your favorite service you have self-hosted in your #homelab?

@EverySmartHome X10 from RadioShack

What was your first smart home device?