I Gave an AI a Body. Here’s What Happened.

A personal reckoning with OpenClaw — the open-source assistant that doesn’t just answer, it acts. I’ve been chasing the “perfect AI assistant” for years. I tried every chatbot. I built custom GPT wrappers. I wired together n8n automations, pasted prompts into Notion, and set up more Zapier flows than I care to admit. Each time, I’d hit the same wall: the AI would think beautifully, reason eloquently — and then stop. It would hand me a plan and wait for me to execute it. It was like hiring the wo