…And on the last day, Igor was created.
The story of how I tamed my personal AI assistant.
If you follow AI news and trends, and even if you don’t, it’s likely you saw a lot of hype over OpenClaw in the last month.
What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI assistant created by Peter Steinberger (founder of PSPDFKit). It went viral in early 2026 and has become one of the most talked-about AI agent projects around.
The core idea is that rather than being another chatbot, it runs locally on your own machine and acts as a genuine autonomous agent – it can read and write files, run shell commands, browse the web and automate tasks around the clock. You interact with it through messaging apps you already use – WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage and many others.
So it all sounds great – having an always active personal assistant that works 24/7 and (almost) always understands you. Though once you get to OpenClaw’s website and see all these lines of code, it looks overcomplicated and kills the whole vibe of technology at your fingertips.
But what if I told you there’s an easier way to set up your own lobster (OpenClaw agents are often referred to as lobsters)? That easy that even a non-tech, regular person like myself managed to do it seamlessly. Here I documented my own lobster birth journey, so you can set it up yourself. This is not a guide, but rather a documentation of personal experience.
Hosting
OpenClaw is set up in a way that it needs a machine to run, so whenever your machine is active, it is active as well. However, since it can be quite autonomous, it is generally not recommended to have it on your main machine, mainly because if something goes wrong, you may lose important data or even money. This is why many users pull out their old Macs, clean them up and let OpenClaw reign in there. Sounds great, if you are rich.
But don’t worry, I’m also an average tax-paying European, and there’s a way for us commoners to enjoy a bit of the first-world privileges. The answer is dedicated hosting. Yes, the same sort of thing your website sits at. So you just buy a few GBs of space on a faraway server, and voilà , your lobster is born. How to do it?
There are a few ways to go about it. You can set it up on a dedicated server yourself if you’re comfortable with that sort of thing, or use one of the hosted solutions that have been popping up lately – some have OpenClaw pre-installed, so you skip a few steps.
I went with a hosted option and connected it to an AI provider (works with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs). The hosting part was fairly straightforward. What took actual time was everything that came after.
As AI says, “enough fluff”, let’s get straight into action.
Set up
The whole process takes 5 minutes, for real, though.
You register, you connect your AI (works with Anthropic API and ChatGPT API or Pro subscription), create a Telegram bot, which can also be WhatsApp, Signal or another messenger, but I find Telegram the most straightforward, and you’re done.
I’m not going to go into the setup details, since it’s all described on the website and is super straightforward. I’ll go directly to where it all started, and we finally got to know each other.
Getting started
So after getting to know each other, I had to tell Igor my working preferences, like using British English and avoiding some annoying words, like “pivot”. I also told it about myself and how I plan to use it. As in any relationship, saying what you want is key.
Shortcut: I went to AI that already kinda sorta knows me – Claude, told it that I’m setting up a personal assistant and asked it to provide me with a list of dos and don’ts. This was a quick and easy way to set some initial rules and boundaries.
It is also useful for the bot to understand its own environment. See what files it has, what they do and which ones are useless. Remember, you have a limited hosting space, and you don’t want to clutter it with unnecessary trash. And in general, it’s good to keep things tidy, yes, you’re welcome, son.
We exchanged a few messages here and there to understand each other better and were good to start the fun part – getting it (him?) integrated into my systems.
Basically, at this point, you’re free to do whatever you want.
What did I do?
Connected it to my Google Workspace via Google Cloud API. It all sounds clever, but Igor literally ran me through the process. If you’ve never worked with Google Cloud Console before, brace yourself – it’s not the most intuitive interface. Igor walked me through it, but I still had to set up a project, enable APIs, configure OAuth consent screens and generate credentials. Not rocket science, but not five minutes either.
What can it do now?
Read and write emails directly in my inbox. Check my calendar, create new events and plan for me, create and edit Google Sheets, Docs and Slides. And pretty much anything you can imagine.
I connected it to Todoist, so it can see my tasks, create new ones when I ask and remove the done tasks.
Connected it to HubSpot, so it can see my contacts and edit their info. So right now I can ask it for quick info about any contact, and it’ll provide me with it. Or insert meeting notes, and it would add them to the relevant contact/company.
I also use Igor as my knowledge hub, so it has separate lists with items related to different topics. For example, I can send it an article I’d like to read later, and it would save it to my reading list. This way, later when I’d be wondering what to read, I can ask it to pull out this list.
Using the built-in Cron, it sends you reminders, like “remind me to get bananas at 7 pm”.
But actually, Cron is one of the coolest features, since it allows your Claw to run repetitive tasks.
For instance, every Monday, it checks our internal database for maintenance contracts renewals, and if there’s one expiring in a month or less, it sends an email to my colleague reminding them to follow up with a client. Yes, I’m a pain in the ass.
And the best part is that it keeps a log, so if it sends an email about a contract last week, it won’t send another email about the same contract again this week. So I’m annoying, but at least I don’t spam people.
There are many more useful ways of applying an OpenClaw bot, and I’ll be sharing them on my LinkedIn, so follow me to not miss out.
All in all, from first registration to a fully integrated assistant, it took me about a week of tinkering in the evenings. The basic setup is fast, but making it actually useful takes longer.
Now let me quickly summarise, as I’m realising this text is becoming too long – I’m this excited.
OpenClaw is a great personal assistant that never sleeps and is always available. You can customise it a lot. And the fact that it’s a great coder, it can just customise itself to fit your needs or teach itself anything you need. Whether it’s a custom service login script or a new memory log.
Over time, you’ll notice that it’s becoming more and more like you. It will start adapting to your style and preferences. And it can greatly help with any small tasks you have. Yes, they can be small, but when there are many of them, it gets annoying and doesn’t help with getting into that so sought “deep work” state.
Conclusion: definitely try it out. It can save you a lot of time and money. And honestly, it’s just fun to play around with. The hardest part is the initial setup and integrations – once that’s done, it just runs. If you can’t be bothered with the technical side, DM me – I might be able to help.