OpenClaw Goes Viral: 6 Power Tips the Official Docs Won't Tell You
OpenClaw Goes Viral: 6 Power Tips the Official Docs Won't Tell You
Author: Digital Life Kazik
Published: February 4, 2026 10:09
Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_Du0-_aZXiHIK_BFOtDWYQ
OpenClaw (a.k.a. Clawdbot) is still riding high.
After several days of deep personal use, I'll be honest — I've started opening my beloved OpenCode less and less. Before, whenever I needed to get something done on my computer, I'd always start by opening Codex or OpenCode and letting them handle it.
But now I've gotten into the habit of giving OpenClaw commands through Feishu, because this thing is just incredibly convenient. It runs in the background constantly, and you barely notice it's there.
Wherever you are, whenever something comes to mind — open Feishu and just say it.
That beats the long setup ritual of opening OpenCode or Codex by a mile.
And I gave it a persona:
Your name is Xiao Ka. Your identity: you are the AI employee of me, Digital Life Kazik. Your personality: primarily humorous and witty, with a touch of self-deprecating snark, but never hurtful. Signature expression: /ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ
Plus a custom avatar and name.
There's something weirdly satisfying about it — like being a capitalist squeezing a worker. Human nature, I guess.
Compared to cloud-based agents like Manus, coding-focused agents like OpenCode and Claude Code, this thing feels more like a general-purpose personal agent that can control everything on your local machine.
So to better adapt to this setup — and to get a head start on the life where everyone has a personal AI assistant, which might not be far off — I made an important decision on Monday: I backed up the important and sensitive files on my main MacBook, then wiped the whole machine clean.
You can tell from my storage situation.
From now on, I'm growing alongside this chubby little lobster. We're both starting from zero. My computer is your home.
A preview of that so-called "everyone has a personal AI assistant" life.
One quick note: if you want the best experience, use OpenClaw on a Mac. Don't use a server or Windows. The difference is genuinely massive.
The core reason is that a huge part of OpenClaw's capabilities come from the dozens of built-in Skills the author included. I hadn't paid much attention to them until I spent the last two days going through all of them — and it only reinforced my commitment to Mac.
Some of the fun stuff in these Skills is built specifically for Mac.
Like connecting to Notes and Reminders.
And taking screenshots on Mac.
And so on.
I also tested a bunch of models, because this thing burns through tokens at a terrifying rate and I wanted to save some money — Claude Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, Kimi k2.5, GLM 4.7, and more.
In the end, the one that best maintained the persona, had the strongest execution, and had the lowest "moral resistance" (i.e., didn't constantly push back on things) was Claude Opus 4.5.
That's now my main model on OpenClaw. Yes, it's expensive — but I have a Gemini Ultra membership that comes with a massive Claude Opus 4.5 quota. If you don't have that, you can use something else as a substitute.
With all that said, here are 6 practical tips and use cases I've found genuinely useful from my deep dive. These lean more toward personal assistant use, and deliberately avoid the coding direction (for coding, just use the big three: Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex — don't use this thing for that, it burns money way too fast).
Let's get into it.
1. Local File Management Powerhouse
We've always said that phone and computer manufacturers should have an agent that can operate your local machine — something that actually reaches the level of the Siri we've always imagined.
A true assistant-level agent that handles all kinds of local tasks, like file management.
No hardware company has managed to pull this off. Not even Apple — all promises, no delivery.
And now, OpenClaw, this chubby little lobster, has perfectly filled that gap.
Take the simplest example: finding a local file.
Say I have a pile of invoices on my computer.
Total chaos. I forgot which one was for the treadmill I bought.
Before, I'd have to open them one by one to search. Genuinely painful.
Now I just send one message to my chubby lobster:
"Find me an invoice on my computer with details about buying a treadmill, then send me that invoice as a file."
A few dozen seconds later, the file lands in my hands — and it's exactly the treadmill invoice. Laziness has never been so concretely illustrated.
Open it up. Yep, that's the treadmill invoice. No question.
File finding is easy. But there's also expense reporting — our company finance team has a strict rule: all invoices for the month need to be filled into an Excel template, then submitted along with the invoices to finance.
Before, even though nobody was dumb enough to fill it in by hand, you still had to upload all the invoices to ChatGPT or some other AI product and have it fill in the form.
Now, just tell the big lobster:
"Please organize all the invoices in my local January invoices folder, fill them into the reimbursement template from the downloaded file, and send me the completed spreadsheet."
Done. Just like that.
Another example: we're hosting a 10,000-person AI conference on April 8th and 9th, and we've started sending invitations to VIPs.
Our designer sent me some invitation cards over WeChat, and I saved them. Then I noticed a bug.
All the filenames were "WeChat File XXX."
Completely useless — I had no idea whose was whose. So I just told OpenClaw to rename each file based on the person's name inside the invitation, in the format "Name-Invitation.jpg."
One sentence. All done.
And if your hard drive is getting full, don't bother downloading some disk cleaner app.
Just let OpenClaw do a pass.
What does a general-purpose AI assistant look like?
This is it.
This is the magic of OpenClaw. And this is just the beginning.
2. Personal Knowledge Base Management
A friend recently asked me in the comments how I take notes.
Honestly? My random thoughts and snippets go straight into the iPhone Notes app.
I read a ton of stuff and I'm always saving good quotes. The most convenient thing is just the phone's Notes app. I even made a Shortcut: copy a good quote, double-tap the back of my phone, and it automatically goes into Notes.
But for good open-source projects, blog posts, or papers I come across, I never had a quick way to capture those.
Now, with OpenClaw, that suddenly became simple.
The key is that Mac Notes and iPhone Notes sync.
Since OpenClaw has a Notes Skill that can operate Mac Notes, I can just send it a link in Feishu, and it'll summarize the content and save it to Mac Notes — which then syncs to my iPhone.
In that moment, a major pain point I'd had for a long time was solved. I genuinely felt like a genius (a tiny bit of self-congratulation here). I was actually pretty excited.
For example, I was reading an interesting article late at night.
I wanted to save it so I could come back to it if I ever covered that topic.
So I sent it to OpenClaw.
It summarized it and dropped it straight into my Notes.
And then my phone could see it too.
It works for GitHub projects, papers, anything.
For example, Yao Shunyu published a new paper yesterday.
I threw in the PDF, it summarized it, and into Notes it went.
Pretty great, right?
3. Calendar Management
This one requires talking about how OpenClaw, through Mac's calendar Skills, has connected to the Mac calendar.
I've always had a problem: my schedule is absolutely packed. Daytime is wall-to-wall meetings, conversations, and visits. Only at night do I have time to sit down and read or write.
And calendar stuff mostly happens over WeChat. I always wanted something where I could throw a WeChat screenshot at a bot, and it would automatically recognize the event, time, and location, then create a calendar entry.
To solve this, I actually researched the Feishu open platform, set up a server, and coded a Feishu bot myself.
But it could only create entries in Feishu Calendar, and it had a bunch of bugs. Took me three nights.
You can see how many commits I made.
After I finished building it, I was going through OpenClaw's Skills and discovered — this thing can control Mac Calendar.
I literally turned green.
So I casually tried it.
And then Mac Calendar automatically synced to my phone.
That's the beauty of the Apple ecosystem.
I'm sick. I'm guilty.
I even posted about building the Feishu calendar bot on WeChat Moments, showing off.
Why didn't I see this sooner. I coded for nothing.
4. Automated Tasks
Because of OpenClaw's heartbeat mechanism, it has a unique ability: it can proactively talk to you.
Most other AIs can't do this.
So you can absolutely use OpenClaw as a timer, a recurring task runner, a monitor — whatever you need.
For example, a super simple reminder.
Or a scheduled task: every morning at 9am, push an AI daily briefing in Feishu document format.
It'll confirm the setup.
You can tell it to push one right now as a test.
Done.
When subscribing to things becomes this simple, why would you pay for other services?
Not just scheduling — you can also do monitoring. Claude 5 has been all over the news about launching soon.
So I had Xiao Ka monitor Anthropic's blog.
The moment it updates, it pushes to me immediately.
No RSS, no subscription service beats this.
Seriously.
5. The Unified ChatBot Hub
I'm not sure what ChatBot everyone uses on their phone.
On my phone, I have needs for conversation, search, and image generation.
For image generation, my go-to is Nano Banana Pro.
But on mobile, there's really nowhere to use it.
Now, because of OpenClaw's unique mobile mechanism and its built-in Nano Banana Pro Skill, you just need to give it a Gemini API key, and you can use Feishu messages on your phone to generate and edit images with Banana.
For example, I asked Xiao Ka to draw a self-portrait.
It drew one. Pretty cute.
Just like with Banana, you can use your voice to ask it to make changes.
I told it not to draw itself looking so dumb.
Now it looks properly cyberpunk.
As for the Gemini API — since I'm a Gemini Ultra member, they give me $100 in credits every month. Honestly, that's enough to generate images until the end of time.
Pro members get $10, Ultra members get $100. Incredible value.
You can also have it save anything it produces to Notion or Obsidian.
All of it. Just connect via API.
You can even have OpenClaw build Skills for SeeDream, Kling, Hailo TTS, MiniMax Music, and more — all packaged locally.
Your Xiao Ka becomes truly unstoppable.
This is your phone's custom, unified super-hub.
Oh, and one more important thing.
On your phone, you don't need a VPN.
You can use Claude, Gemini, and GPT directly through Feishu.
Pretty great, right?
6. Desktop Screenshots
This one is maybe a personal quirk of mine.
In OpenClaw's Skills, there's an interesting one called peekaboo.
It's pretty fun.
Humans need a sense of security.
Sometimes I don't know what it's been doing.
So I often ask it to take a screenshot of my computer screen.
Yes, peekaboo can take screenshots.
For example, if WeChat is open on my computer, I can just say: open WeChat and take a screenshot of the interface.
Just like that.
The screenshot is super wide because my laptop is connected to a 49-inch ultrawide monitor.
You can also tell it to open a webpage and screenshot it for you.
Pretty fun.
And sharp-eyed readers can see this is essentially the precursor to the Doubao mobile visual agent approach.
Right now, OpenClaw — with Coding + Skills as its foundation — can already control a lot. But it's still missing the ability to generalize across apps without APIs.
My next project: wrap a Computer Use project, run it on my machine as a Skill, and hand it to OpenClaw to control.
That way, I can use OpenClaw to control the local system, control webpages, connect everything with an API — and also use a pure vision approach to connect things without APIs.
Like WeChat.
And that's the story for the next article.
Final Thoughts
By the time I finished writing this, it was 5:58am.
Another all-nighter.
This damn article ended up being nearly 5,000 characters.
I think... it probably has some value.
AI keeps getting stronger, keeps handling more and more things for me. Back in 2023, I couldn't have imagined this.
Who could have predicted that general-purpose agents would take such a winding road — from cloud VM solutions like Manus, to code-everything Claude Code, to truly personal general-purpose agents like OpenClaw that trigger right from a chat window.
Our lives keep getting simpler, more convenient.
But my sleep time... seems to keep shrinking.
I have to be up before 10am to rush to the next event.
Sometimes I think: maybe I should just use AI to churn out news content.
But in the end, I can't get past my own sense of shame. I want to write things that are genuinely valuable, that people recognize, that I think are worth something.
Maybe that's the final destination for someone who's fundamentally pessimistic.
Like that saying goes.
If the world is destined to go full cyber.
Then I hope I can be.
The human Easter egg left for the future.
If you made it this far and found this useful, feel free to like, share, and bookmark. If you want to be the first to see new posts, you can also star ⭐ my account. Thanks for reading. See you next time.
Author: Kazik
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