How to Use OpenClaw Without Coding
OpenClaw is one of the most capable personal AI agents anyone's built. It manages your email, checks your calendar, sends you morning briefings, and takes actions on your behalf. But most people hear "run this in your terminal" and close the tab. You shouldn't need to be a developer to use a personal AI agent. Here's how to get the full OpenClaw experience without touching a terminal.
What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework created by Peter Steinberger. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which respond when you ask them something, OpenClaw is an agent, which means it can take actions on your behalf. It connects to your email, calendar, messaging apps, and dozens of other services, and it runs 24/7 in the background.
People are using it to get morning briefings (weather, calendar, headlines), automate their email inbox, set reminders, draft messages, track content analytics, and much more. It's exploded to over 60,000 GitHub stars in a matter of weeks, and for good reason: it works.
The Problem: Setup Is Hard
Setting up OpenClaw yourself means you need a computer running 24/7 (a Mac Mini, Linux box, or VPS), your own AI model API keys, and the patience to configure messaging channels and keep everything updated. It works great once it's running, but it's a lot of setup for something that's supposed to make your life easier.
The Easier Way: Internet Friends
Internet Friends is an iOS app that gives you the full OpenClaw agent experience without any of the setup. It's built on top of OpenClaw, so you get the same powerful AI agent, but everything runs in the cloud, managed for you.
No terminal. No API keys. No Mac Mini running in your closet.
Here's the setup process:
Free download, available on iPhone.
One tap. No passwords to create, no email verification.
That's it. Your AI agent is live and ready to help.
From there, you can connect your apps and services (email, calendar, and more) and your agent starts working for you immediately.
What Can You Actually Do?
Everything the self-hosted version can do, but from your phone:
- Morning briefings: Ask your agent "what's my day look like?" and get weather, calendar events, and headlines summarized in one message.
- Email management: Your agent reads your inbox, summarizes what matters, and drafts replies. You just approve and send.
- Calendar and reminders: Check your schedule, set reminders, and get nudged before important events. No need to open a separate app.
- Draft messages: "Draft a text to Sara saying I'll be 10 minutes late." Done in seconds.
- Content tracking: If you create content, pull engagement stats across platforms into one place.
- Prediction markets: Browse and trade on prediction markets without switching apps.
Make It Yours: Custom Agent Personalities
One thing that makes OpenClaw powerful is that you can customize your agent's personality. With Internet Friends, people are setting up agents as a fitness coach that nudges them to work out, a style advisor, a goal-tracking accountability partner, and more. Same underlying intelligence, but shaped to fit how you want to interact with it.
Comparison: Self-Hosted vs. Internet Friends
| Self-Hosted OpenClaw | Internet Friends | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | 30-60 minutes | Under 3 minutes |
| Technical skill | Terminal, Git, Node.js | None |
| Hardware | Dedicated machine (Mac Mini, VPS, etc.) | Just your iPhone |
| API keys | Required (you provide your own) | Included |
| Cost | Hardware + electricity + API costs | Free tier or subscription |
Who should self-host? If you're a developer who wants full control, custom skills, and deep integrations, self-hosted OpenClaw is incredible. The point isn't that self-hosting is bad. It's that most people don't need (or want) that level of complexity to benefit from an AI agent.
Why Now?
OpenClaw has crossed 60,000 GitHub stars, and the project is transitioning to an open-source foundation. The ecosystem is growing fast. New skills, new integrations, and new hosting options are appearing every week.
But the core insight hasn't changed: most people want the outcome of an AI agent (less email, better mornings, someone watching their calendar) without the process of setting one up. That gap is exactly what Internet Friends fills.
The only question is whether you want to run an agent yourself, or let someone handle the infrastructure so you can just talk to it.