Show HN: Clor – give your agent claws | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Clor – give your agent claws

clor.com

11 pointsjacobgold5 comments

At my last job I spent a year building an agentic coding platform used by hundreds of thousands of people. Along the way I tried building a hosting service on OpenClaw, and also ran Hermes myself for a while. Both projects have some great feature ideas, but when I tried to use them for real work they failed more often than not, and their security models worried me. I just couldn't see either one becoming something I'd trust enough for myself/friends/family. After a lot of exploration I realized that what I really wanted all along was to create automations using the coding agent I already work in every day. It turned out coding agents were the best tool for automating anything, not just code, as long as they had the right environment and tools to work with.

I also spent 20 years leading Linux infrastructure and distributed systems teams. Anyone who's written service daemons knows that most of what we think of as "always on" is really just wake up, do some work, and go back to sleep, which is an efficient pattern to use and reason about. Cron has worked this way for decades.

So I built Clor, a CLI that lets your coding agent create "claws", which are background agents that automate anything on a schedule and run on your laptop, Mac mini, or a VM.

A claw can be defined and shared as a single CLAW.md file, which contains a bit of metadata (name, schedule, personality, etc.) and one or more ordered tasks. Each task is a real agent run with full tool use, or a plain bash step. Anything you can ask your agent to do once, a claw can do repeatedly. One of my claws tidies my inbox every few minutes, labeling obvious spam, rescuing legit email that got mislabeled, and starring threads I owe a reply to, etc. It's way smarter than Gmail's filters because it actually reads my mail instead of just matching rules.

Installing is the usual command on Linux/macOS in the terminal: curl -fsSL https://clor.com/install.sh | bash. That will set up the CLI, a small scheduling daemon, and a skill that you can run from your agent, /claws in Claude Code or $claws in Codex.

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I'm one of the co-founders, happy to answer questions.

Clor ships a toolbox of CLIs that claws can call directly (but don't have to), grouped into simple areas like Inference (Claude/GPT/Gemini/OpenRouter), Web (search and scraping), Email (IMAP/SMTP), Drive (cloud storage), Pages (static web hosting, SPAs), Notifications, Social, Domains, Weather, and Secrets. This makes claws dramatically more efficient and deterministic.

The big AI companies have tried building some claw-like functionality, but I think they're missing that claws need to be their own first class primitive inside every agent. Today we're open sourcing the CLAW.md format. It's completely vendor-neutral, and we're hoping to work with other companies to improve it:

Website: https://agentclaws.io

GitHub: https://github.com/agentclawsio/agentclaws

Happy to get into the technical details or anything else. Thank you!

Hey fairramone, not sure why your comment got killed (maybe ask the mods) but I'll answer it here:

"Your laptop, Mac mini, or a VM" -- is there a Clor-hosted option, or is it always on your own hardware? Do the tools run locally or are those hosted by you?

The tools run locally using the `clor` CLI and access Clor's own APIs as well as mail servers, DNS servers, etc.

The claws run entirely on your own computers, for now. There are a lot of trade-offs to running agents in the cloud, like not having access to local devices for home automation, using datacenter internet which is often blocked, being somewhat out of the user's immediate control, etc.

Running claws in the cloud is definitely part of the future though.

The "agents as daemons" framing is the right one. The piece that bit me trying this: every scheduled run needs to be safely re-runnable, because the agent will occasionally retry a step it actually finished last cycle. Does CLAW.md have a convention for marking a step idempotent, or is that left to the prompt?

Thanks!

Yeah, it is left to a claw's tasks to be idempotent. A rollback mechanism could be interesting but many of the tasks have irreversible side effects. For example, you can't undo sending an email that has already been delivered.

So far it seems to be the case that by default most tasks are "naturally" idempotent. Even when there are minor issues, agents tend to come up with good workarounds, which is a very different kind of solution from how we've had to do it in the past.

It would be possible to add runtime options that enable certain environments to do fancy things like block-level snapshots/rollbacks, API level undos, etc. The spec for CLAW.md is designed to be simple but very flexible by letting claw runtimes define sandboxing and other advanced features.

How does Clor prevent a claw from accidentally or maliciously executing destructive actions on the host system?

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