Clawdbot Can Do It

Automating repetitive tasks on my Mac has been an ongoing obsession for years. To me, it's the essence of using a computer as the tool it's meant to be. The less often I have to click the same sequence of buttons I clicked yesterday, the happier I am. To that end, I've long relied on Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Hazel, Drafts, Apple Shortcuts, and IFTTT.

Two days ago, I read about a new agentic AI app called Clawdbot that runs locally on a Mac and interacts with it in ways previous apps simply couldn't. People have strong feelings about AI. I know I do. I'm not a fan of having my blog posts harvested for their information while never getting the chance to interact with the people who want that information. Nor do I enjoy being flooded with AI-generated content passed off as "real human" effort. But AI agents--tools that let computers do actual work for us--feel fundamentally different. They don't fit neatly into those objections.

I have a spare Mac I use for testing software, so I decided to take Clawdbot for a spin. You can also run it in a VM. Once you see what it can do, you'll understand why you need to be extremely careful about the information it can access. It was a beast to set up. The developer, Peter Steinberger, is a solo creator, not a front for a giant AI company. The product is new, and while there is documentation, it's incomplete and doesn't cover many edge cases. You can install the Mac app using Homebrew--

brew install clawdbot

--but that's only part of the story. The real power lives in the CLI, and to get that you need a package manager like Node. Run

curl -fsSL https://clawd.bot/install.sh | bash 

in a shell and hope your $PATH and environment don't fight back.

One of Clawdbot's most compelling features is its ability to communicate through familiar messaging apps: WhatsApp, Messages, Discord, Slack, or, in my case, Telegram. You can literally send your Mac a message and tell it to do things. It can email you files or drop copies into cloud storage on your behalf.

The intelligence behind the agent comes from whatever AI service you're authorized to use via an API key--or from a local model if you prefer. All interaction history stays on your computer, stored plainly in a folder of Markdown files. There are already plugins for Mac apps like Obsidian and Things 3, but the most intriguing piece is Peekaboo, a radical framework that can "see" your Mac's screen, understand UI elements (buttons, menus, text fields), and interact with them by scrolling, clicking, and typing. It can chain these actions together in complex ways, and all you have to do is describe what you want in plain English. In effect, you can add capabilities to software that its developer never imagined.

You can even grant Clawdbot access to your Terminal, allowing it to design and execute scripts endlessly. Unsurprisingly, this sets off alarm bells for anyone with sensitive data. I'm not a cybersecurity expert, but I've been around long enough to have a healthy respect for risk. Be careful--but if any of this sounds exciting, it's absolutely worth exploring.