What makes OpenClaw powerful is surprisingly simple: it's a gateway that connects an AI agent to your messaging apps, gives it tools to interact with your computer, and lets it remember who you are across conversations.
The complexity comes from handling multiple channels simultaneously, managing persistent sessions, coordinating multiple agents, and making the whole thing reliable enough to run 24/7 on your machine.
In this post, I'll start from scratch and build up to OpenClaw's architecture step by step, showing how you could have invented it yourself from first principles, using nothing but a messaging API, an LLM, and the desire to make AI actually useful outside the chat window.
End goal: understand how persistent AI assistants work, so you can build your own.
