Learn what other people don't know yet
On Claude Code, OpenClaw, and the joy of going down the rabbit hole
Dear friends,
so I am already one week in with OpenClaw and Claude Code.
And it's kind of insane.
Here are my learnings from last week.
Claude Code
This is the new standard for vibe-coding. Or call it agentic-coding. You need a Claude account, ideally with the 90$/month subscription. Install it on your computer, and off you go.
You run it in the terminal, connect whatever project you want to work on, type claude and start. You can improve existing projects, make them more stable, add new features. Or you start from scratch.
For years I wanted to make a small website for a poster project I did a long time ago. Never found the time. Now, within one hour, Claude just built it for me: www.the-poster-times.xyz
If you are a designer, a digital creative, or a developer, you really should check this out. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, offers free courses to get started. I think that's pretty cool.
OpenClaw
A lot of people have been asking me what OpenClaw actually is. It's basically a tool that lets AI control your computer. You can use it to manage notebooks, automate research, code websites, control 3D software, anything you can possibly imagine. You send your computer a voice message via Telegram, and it starts doing what you want. It feels like magic.
But there is a but.
You need to nerd yourself into it. And you should NOT install it on the machine you use for everyday stuff. Because it could access your passwords, send emails, delete your hard drive, let in hackers. All of that.
So you need a separate machine, and you need to make that machine secure. That's pretty nerdy and will take some time. If you are already comfortable with Linux, Terminal, and a bit of coding it should no be a problem.
If you have no clue about any of that, maybe don't touch it. Unless you have time to go down the rabbit hole, use AI to help you, and spend the next nights in front of your screen like a full nerd. That works too. Actually it's encouraged!
As a small experiment, I asked OpenClaw to use Claude Code to build me a website that generates a new rabbit made from cheese every hour with Stable Diffusion and uploads it online. Here it is: rabbit-made-from-cheese.pages.dev
By the way, I still write these newsletters by hand. ✋
Much love,
Marius
