beardedeagle

See more of my writing here.

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 (or become an OpenClaw power user).

First, let's establish the problem

When you use ChatGPT or Claude in a browser, there are several limitations:

beardedeagle

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Very simple HTTP server in python.

Usage::
    ./dummy-web-server.py [<port>]

Send a GET request::
    curl http://localhost

beardedeagle

###################################################################
# mixin that utilizes dehydrate to implement field selection      #
# Tested with python 2.7.5, django 1.8 and django-tastypie 0.12.1 #
###################################################################
class fieldSelectMixin(object):
    """
    Mixin to allow field selection, dehydrate method.
    """
    def dehydrate(self, bundle):
        selectedFields = bundle.request.GET.get('fields')

beardedeagle

class fieldSelectMixin(object):
    """
    Mixin to allow field selection. full_dehydrate method.
    """
    def full_dehydrate(self, bundle, for_list=False):
        """
        Given a bundle with an object instance, extract the information from it
        to populate the resource.
        """
        use_in = ['all', 'list' if for_list else 'detail']

beardedeagle

class fieldSelectMixin(object):
    """
    Mixin to allow field selection, dehydrate method.
    """
    def dehydrate(self, bundle):
        selectedFields = bundle.request.GET.get('fields')

        if selectedFields:
            selectedFields = selectedFields.split(',')
            removedFields = [field for field in bundle.data.keys() if field not in selectedFields]