I used OpenClaw for a while. It's great, but it is a lot more than I needed, and my setup broke on updates often enough that I spent hours fixing it instead of using it. At some point I realized I mostly wanted to understand how these agents work under the hood, and the best way I know to understand something is to build it myself. So I spent the last six weeks writing my own.
clawd is an always-on daemon I talk to through a private Telegram bot. Conversation history and memory live in SQLite, it runs recurring schedules, and replies stream into the chat as live message drafts. I wrote it in pure modern Swift, and it ships as one binary.
Where I can, I lean on what macOS already provides: it transcribes voice messages on-device with Apple's speech APIs, and untrusted code runs in a disposable Apple container, so every run gets a fresh one.