I wanted to add a feature to OpenClaw that didn’t exist: a Hacker News digest that summarizes the top stories every morning and posts them to my Slack. Nothing like this existed as a skill. So I built one.
It took four hours the first time, including two hours of reading the skill specification wrong. The
If you’re new to deploying AI agents and the terminology is overwhelming, this is the article I wish I’d had when I started. No assumptions about your background. Just the tools, the concepts, and the steps.
What “Deployment” Actually Means
Deployment is getting your AI agent from “running on my computer” to “running on a server
Every week, someone in the OpenClaw Discord asks: “Should I use OpenClaw or LangChain?” And every week, the answer is the same: “They’re not really competing products.” But nobody explains why clearly, so here’s my attempt.
I’ve used both extensively. LangChain for about a year, OpenClaw for eight months. I’ve built production systems with each. And
If you’ve ever spent three hours debugging a Slack integration that just won’t cooperate, welcome to the club. When I first tried connecting OpenClaw to our team’s Slack workspace, I genuinely considered throwing my laptop out the window. The docs made it sound like a 15-minute setup. It was not a 15-minute setup.
But I got