OpenClaw got very popular very fast. What makes it so special, that Manus does not have for example?

To me, one factor stands out:

OpenClaw took AI and put it in the most popular messaging apps: Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord.

There are two lessons to be learned here:

1. Any messaging app can also be an AI app.

2. Don’t expect people to download a new app. Put AI into the apps they already have.

Do that with great user experience, and you will get explosive growth!

My latest contribution to OpenClaw follows that example. I took the most popular coding agents, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, and I put them in Telegram and Discord, so that OpenClaw users can use these agents directly in Telegram and Discord channels, instead of having to go through OpenClaw’s own wrapped Pi harness.

I did this for developers like me, who like to work while they are on the go on the phone, or want a group chat where one can collaborate with humans and agents at the same time, through a familiar interface.

Below is an example, where I tell my agent to bind a Telegram topic to Claude Code permanently:

Telegram chat showing Claude responding inside a Telegram topic.

Telegram topic where Claude is exposed as a chat participant.

And of course, it is just a Claude Code session which you can view on Claude Code as well:

Claude Code terminal showing the same exchange in the coding interface.

Claude Code showing the same session in the terminal interface.

Why not use OpenClaw’s harness directly for development? I can count 3 reasons:

  1. There is generally a consumer tendency to use the official harness for a flagship model, to make sure “you are getting the standard experience”. Pi is great and more customizable, but sometimes labs might push updates and fixes earlier than an external harness, being internal products.
  2. Labs might not want users to use an external harness. Anthropic, for example, has banned people’s accounts for using their personal plan outside of Claude Code, in OpenClaw.
  3. You might want to use different plans for different types of work. I use Codex for development, but I don’t prefer it to be the main agent model on OpenClaw.

So my current workflow for working on my phone is, multiple channels #codex-1, #codex-2, #codex-3, and so on mapping to codex instances. I am currently in the phase of polishing the UX, such as making sending images, voice messages work, letting change harness configuration through Discord slash commands and such.

One goal of mine while implementing this was to not repeat work for each new harness. To this end, I created a CLI and client for Agent Client Protocol by the Zed team, called acpx. acpx is a lightweight “gateway” to other coding agents, designed not to be used by humans, but other agents:

OpenClaw ACPX banner

OpenClaw main agent can use acpx to call Claude Code or Codex directly, without having to emulate and scrape off characters from a terminal.

ACP standardizes all coding agents to a single interface. acpx then acts as an aggregator for different types of harnesses, stores all sessions in one place, implements features that are not in ACP yet, such as message queueing and so on.

Shoutout to the Zed team and Ben Brandt! I am standing on the shoulders of giants!

Besides being a CLI any agent can call at will, acpx is now also integrated as a backend to OpenClaw for ACP-binded channels. When you send 2 messages in a row, for example, it is acpx that queues them for the underlying harness.

The great thing about working in open source is, very smart people just show up, understand what you are trying to do, and help you out. Harold Hunt apparently had the same goal of using Codex in Telegram, found some bugs I had not accounted for yet, and fixed them. He is now working on a native Codex integration through Codex App Server Protocol, which will expose even more Codex-native features in OpenClaw.

The more interoperability, the merrier!

To learn more about how ACP works in OpenClaw, visit the docs.

Copy and paste the following to a Telegram topic or Discord channel to bind Claude Code:

bind this topic to claude code in openclaw config with acp, for telegram (agent id: claude)
then restart openclaw
docs are at: https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/acp-agents
make sure to read the docs first, and that the config is valid before you restart

Copy and paste the following to a Telegram topic or Discord channel to bind OpenAI Codex:

bind this topic to claude code in openclaw config with acp, for telegram (agent id: claude)
then restart openclaw
docs are at: https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/acp-agents
make sure to read the docs first, and that the config is valid before you restart

And so on for all the other harnesses that acpx supports. If you see that your harness isn’t supported, send a PR!