build-your-own-openclaw

Why we included this project

Agent frameworks hide a lot of machinery behind their APIs. This tutorial takes the opposite route: 18 steps that begin with a plain chat loop and rebuild a lightweight OpenClaw feature by feature. Each step comes with a README explaining the design choice and a runnable codebase, so you can read about an idea and then run and change it right away. The ordering is deliberate. Tools and skills show up before event-driven refactoring, and multi-agent routing and scheduled tasks wait until a single agent works well. For developers and small teams, that makes the progression useful: you see how persistence, compaction, and concurrency control fit together instead of just calling framework methods. A reference project, pickle-bot, gives you something to diff against when a step does not behave the way you expect.