Picture this: you type a message in Telegram, and instead of getting a canned reply, an AI agent reads your files, browses websites, runs shell commands, controls your smart-home devices, and messages people on your behalf. That's OpenClaw.
It's a self-hosted AI assistant that uses your messaging apps as its interface and LLMs as its brain. What separates it from a plain chatbot? OpenClaw has "eyes and hands." You give it instructions through chat, and it acts on them. This is agentic behavior in practice. Think of it as the difference between asking someone a question and hiring someone to do a job.