Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:24:54 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:24:54] S0: So let's show people how to actually install it because there's all this talk of just like, okay, I'm going to do OpenClaw one day. And I don't think people realize how easy it is. So as you're pulling it up, so what you need before you do this, because you don't want to install it on your local machine, is you want some kind of separate computer, old laptop or Mac Mini. You want to create a Gmail account, which sounds weird, but it's very easy. You just go and create a separate account from this computer. You create a local account on the computer, and that's basically all you need. I guess you install Chrome, would be the next step so that you can go to the website. [00:25:29] S1: Yeah. So you have a computer and it has Chrome installed, you have an email for it, et cetera. And you really just have to go to openclaw.ai and copy, press this copy button for this one line of code. And then you need to open the terminal. I use iTerm, but you can open your terminal and then you just paste it in, press enter, and I already have Homebrew and some dependencies installed. And so it's going to install OpenClaw and then it should drop you into a step- by-step onboarding. So it's pretty easy. [00:26:02] S0: For folks that don't know how to open the terminal, what's the command? I know it's like a muscle memory thing sometimes. [00:26:05] S1: Yeah. It's command space and then I just type in term. [00:26:07] S0: Command space type term. Easy. [00:26:09] S1: Yeah. Easy.
00:26:09 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:09] S1: Yeah. Easy. [00:26:10] S0: And then you just copy and paste that command. Okay. And then it's off and running, doing stuff, installing, and it's going to ask you some questions. What comes next just as it's loading, just what's going to come next?
00:26:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:26:10] S0: And then you just copy and paste that command. Okay. And then it's off and running, doing stuff, installing, and it's going to ask you some questions. What comes next just as it's loading, just what's going to come next? [00:26:18] S1: Yeah. So it has this really nice onboarding flow, which we will see here. And it's going to ask you, I love this first question, which is, again, I feel like the creator and the maintainers are just such good citizens, and that they say here, this is personal by default. And just so people know what that means, this is not an agent to drop into the group chat. Part of the security posture of OpenClaw is presuming it's working with you and you alone, and you are a trusted sort of instructor of the agent. So we're not going to drop this into your Discord community where anybody and everybody can talk to it. Maybe to your spouse, I have a group chat with my spouse, maybe to a trusted business partner. I have one. ... group chat with my spouse, maybe to a trusted business partner, I have one with my course business partner, but otherwise this is for you and you alone. So you say, "Yes, it's personal use only," and then you do this quick start onboarding and it's going to ask you a couple of things. I won't go through all of it. It's going to ask you what model you want to use, I say use the good models. One, because they're really hardened against prompt injection and some security risks out of the box, and, two, you're just going to get a better experience. So I use a lot of Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.4.
00:26:18 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:18] S1: Yeah. So it has this really nice onboarding flow, which we will see here. And it's going to ask you, I love this first question, which is, again, I feel like the creator and the maintainers are just such good citizens, and that they say here, this is personal by default. And just so people know what that means, this is not an agent to drop into the group chat. Part of the security posture of OpenClaw is presuming it's working with you and you alone, and you are a trusted sort of instructor of the agent. So we're not going to drop this into your Discord community where anybody and everybody can talk to it. Maybe to your spouse, I have a group chat with my spouse, maybe to a trusted business partner. I have one. ... group chat with my spouse, maybe to a trusted business partner, I have one with my course business partner, but otherwise this is for you and you alone. So you say, "Yes, it's personal use only," and then you do this quick start onboarding and it's going to ask you a couple of things. I won't go through all of it. It's going to ask you what model you want to use, I say use the good models. One, because they're really hardened against prompt injection and some security risks out of the box, and, two, you're just going to get a better experience. So I use a lot of Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.4. [00:27:34] S0: And that's versus cheap models is what you're saying there, don't use the cheap stuff?
00:27:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:27:34] S0: And that's versus cheap models is what you're saying there, don't use the cheap stuff? [00:27:36] S1: Versus cheap models. If you want to go on advanced mode and start to optimize this agent uses this open source model and that agent used that, go for it. I pay for the confidence of the experience and I pay for the security of the nicer model. So it's going to ask you about the model and off provider, and then it's going to ask how you want to talk to it, and it's going to give you a couple options. And I picked Telegram, because I think it's the most beginner-friendly way to set up. Even though you do, and trust me, you'll just have to do it, you do have to talk to this guy called the BotFather on Telegram to set up talking to your OpenClaw, just close your eyes and message the BotFather and don't think too hard about how weird that is. And then once you have the model configured and your channel or how you chat with it configured, you can add a couple tools and then you're off to the races. [00:28:33] S0: And once you get that initial stuff going, you can connect it to WhatsApp, you can connect it to iMessage, something that I did, which is a little complicated but easy to do, and then you could talk to it over email, Slack. [00:28:44] S1: Yeah, anything you want. [00:28:46] S0: Okay, cool. So, I know one of the steps is it asks you just like, "What am I? What do you want me to do? Who do you want me to be?" Talk about that step.
00:28:46 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:28:46] S0: Okay, cool. So, I know one of the steps is it asks you just like, "What am I? What do you want me to do? Who do you want me to be?" Talk about that step. [00:28:53] S1: Let's do that. I'm going to pull up this screen, which is a agent I just configured before the show. Its name is Q. And Q is going to be my kid's agent. I have a personal assistant for the family, I have a personal assistant for work, my kids have too much homework or they think they have too much homework, and so I'm going to set up Q. [00:29:17] S0: This is an awesome idea, by the way. Just the idea of giving... Versus ChatGPT.