My Multi-Agent Team with OpenClaw

Well, sitting on my desk is a new Mac

Mini that I set up just for the purpose

of running my team of AI agents using

OpenClaw. I've got a developer, a

marketer, a project manager, a system

admin. They each have their own

personality. They've got a queue of

tasks tracked in this custom dashboard

that I built and I'm chatting with them

in Slack just like I would with my real

team members except they're agents

powered by OpenClaw and various large

language models. What a time this is.

But, you know, getting this up and

running was not a plug-and-play

situation. Over the past week and many

late nights, I had to figure out my

answers to question after question, some

technical, some strategic, like, should

I order a new Mac Mini or can I run

OpenClaw on a VPS? And what's this going

to cost me in API tokens? And could I

use my Claw Max plan? And what chat tool

is best for my agents, Telegram or

WhatsApp or Slack? Should I have it

power one agent or can I set up a team

of agents? and am I going to need a

custom dashboard for managing them? And

let's not forget about security. What

should my agents be able to access? And

how should I think about safeguards? And

most importantly, what's my use case

here? What will I have my team of agents

actually do for me? So today, I'll share

where I've landed on all of those

questions, and I'll show you my setup

for all of it. You know, to be honest, I

didn't see the appeal of OpenClaw at

first. Back when it was called Claudebot

and then Moltbot and it was buzzing

around Twitter a couple weeks ago,

everyone was talking about having their

agent respond to their emails for them

or book flights or order takeout. And I

don't want or need an AI agent in my

personal life and I don't even want it

to manage my calendar. But then I

started thinking about a real challenge

that I've been having in my business and

how setting up OpenClaw could help me

solve it. You know, I run this YouTube

channel and Builder Methods Pro on my

courses and a weekly newsletter. And

thanks to things like Claude Code, of

course, building things has never been

easier. But building it is only half of

what I do. I develop training content. I

manage a publishing pipeline. And I

oversee my membership business. But

lately, I've been bottlenecked. There's

so much more that I want to create and

deliver. If only I had the bandwidth. In

my past businesses, I solved this by

hiring real teams and building processes

to help us scale. And that worked, but

the overhead was real, too. So, when I

gave OpenClaw another look, I asked a

different question. Not do I want a

personal assistant, but what if this

could fill roles on my team? And now,

I'm convinced that this paradigm,

autonomous agents with defined roles

running on their own machines, I think

this is here to stay. Now, OpenCloud is

just the first generation of what I

think will be much bigger. So, I want to

be figuring this out now, and maybe this

video can help you get started, too. If

you're new here, I'm Brian Castle. I

help builders stay ahead of the curve

with AI. And every Friday, I send my

builder briefing. That's a free

fiveminute read where I give you my no

hype take on making this transition to

adopting AI. You can get yours by going

to buildermethods.com.

And if you're serious about leveling up,

check out builder methods pro where you

can join our community and get training

for builders. All right, so what

actually is OpenClaw? It used to be

called Cloudbot and then Moltbot. And

how is this actually different from how

you might use cloud code or any other

agent? The core of OpenClaw is what's

called the gateway. That's a process

running on a machine, which shouldn't be

your personal machine, but we'll talk

about security in a moment. The

OpenCloud gateway can run tools. It

could use a browser. It can execute bash

scripts. Of course, cloud code can do a

lot of that, too. But what makes

OpenCloud different is that it's always

on. It maintains a persistent workspace

with memory and session logs. So you can

chat with your agents through Telegram

or Slack and delegate tasks that they

can do on their own in the background.

So that's a fundamentally different

paradigm from you personally managing

cloud code sessions in your terminal.

OpenClaw is closer to having teammates

who do their work on their own

workstations. The first question is

where should this thing run? Now I don't

recommend you run OpenClaw on your daily

driver machine. You don't want to give

it unfettered access to your files and

your accounts. And even if you isolate

it with something like Docker, your

machine would need to be on and awake

24/7 for your agents to work. So,

OpenClaw needs its own dedicated

machine. That could be a cloud VPS

starting at around five bucks a month.

Or it could be a physical machine.

Doesn't have to be a Mac Mini. Any kind

of computer on your network. Both are

valid and a lot of people are doing well

with the VPS setups. But I went ahead

and I spent the 600 bucks on a new Mac

Mini M4. And call me old school, but I

like to be able to screen share into it,

see the desktop, install things, and

manage it visually. And I SSH in too

when I just need to run a quick command.

And if I end up using my agent team for

all the use cases that I have in mind,

I'll need more storage and bandwidth

than the cheap VPS tiers offer. So, the

cost would start to balance out anyway.

And hey, if none of this works out, I'll

throw that Mac Mini up in my home music

studio. I'll use it up there. So, I've

got the dedicated machine. But that's

just the first layer. I need to think

carefully about what my agents can and

can't access. Now, this is where the

hiring metaphor really kicked in. If I'm

bringing someone onto my team, I

wouldn't give them access to my personal

laptop or let them loose on a browser

where I'm logged into everything. No, an

employee would get their own machine,

their own email, access to the files and

services that they need with the right

permissions, nothing more. So, that's

what I did. I set up a dedicated email

address for my agents. I created a

GitHub username that I can invite to

specific repos. I can grant and revoke

access to services just like I would

with any other team member. Now, files

were a bit trickier. I want easy two-way

syncing between my computer and the

OpenClaw workspace on the Mac Mini,

especially since I'm developing a a

brain system where all my business

activity gets logged into Markdown files

that my agents can access and work with.

More on the brain maybe another time. So

all my files live either in GitHub repos

or my main Dropbox account, but I don't

want to just share my personal Dropbox

with OpenClaw. That gives it access to

way too much. So I had OpenClaw set up

its own Dropbox account. And so the

specific folders that I want to share

between my main Mac and the OpenClaw Mac

Mini, both Dropbox accounts have access

to those. And so everything else stays

walled off. All right, let's talk about

costs because if you're not careful, you

can easily run up hundreds or even

thousands of dollars in token costs just

chatting with your agents and running

tasks. I blew past $200 in the first two

days of setting up my system. Now, I

already pay for a Cloud Max plan and I

was hoping that I could just use that,

but then I heard the stories of accounts

being shut down because this type of

usage might be against Anthropic's terms

of service. And then within a few days

he upgraded to the $200 subscription or

euros because he's in Austria. And he

was in love with that thing. That for me

was like a very early product

validation. It's like I built something

that

captures

people. And then a few days later

Andropic blocked him because based on

their rules using the subscription is

problematic or whatever.

>> So there's real ambiguity there. And I

genuinely wish that there would be some

official word one way or the other. Now

I intend to play by the rules. So,

here's where I landed. My Cloud Max plan

stays for my personal use with Claude

and Claude code on my devices when I'm

working. My OpenClaw agents use API

tokens completely separate. I'm running

those tokens through Open Router, which

centralizes all my API usage and makes

it easy to select from hundreds of

models and providers. More importantly,

it lets me carefully optimize which

agents use which models for which tasks.

You know, honestly, that optimization is

probably where I spent the most time

this past week, just figuring out which

tasks need the power of Opus and which

can run on cheaper, faster models.

Still, running this team of agents is

not cheap. And if you've been building

with the frontier models, then you

already know this isn't a free ride. And

from a business standpoint, if you

compare the token costs to the cost of

hiring multiple team members to do the

work that can maybe should be delegated

to agents, the ROI math gets pretty

compelling. Now to the question of

chatting with my agents. OpenClaw

supports a wide range of chat tools. I

started with Telegram since that was the

easiest to get up and running. It worked

for a few days and I was even able to

set up separate Telegram bots for each

agent. I'll talk about my multi- aent

configuration in just a minute. But

after a few days on Telegram, I found

the interface just wasn't comfortable,

especially when agents would send me

markdown formatted content, which kind

of works, kind of doesn't. So again, I'm

working with my agents like I tend to

work with teammates. and my teams have

always used Slack. So, I set up Slack

bots for each of my agents and that was

super easy. And Slack has great markdown

support. And I really like how we can

use threaded replies and that makes it

easy to manage multiple agents with

multiple requests and responses flying

around. Now, here's what made OpenClaw

really click for me. Instead of using it

as a single agent, I set up a multi-

aent configuration so that I can build

an actual team of four agents. Claw is

my system admin who I work with when I'm

tinkering with my OpenClaw system

itself. Bernard is my developer. Vale

works on marketing tasks and Gumbo is my

general assistant. Each agent runs as

its own Slackbot with its own

conversations. And I experimented with

having them all in a group chat which

kind of works but has some quirks. So I

assigned a default model to each agent.

Opus for Bernard the developer and Claw

the system admin. That's where reasoning

power really matters. And then Sonnet

for Vale, the marketer, and Gumbo, the

assistant. That's where speed and

efficiency make more sense. But I often

direct them to delegate parts of their

work to sub agents for tasks where I

need to specify a more expensive model

or a cheaper model. Now, I decided to

have them all share one workspace, which

means they all access the same memory

and I can manage configurations and

agents MD directives all in one place.

Also, my brain folder lives in this

workspace and that's where all of our

work gets synced up. And if you want to

hear more about my productivity system

with my agents, let me know in the

comments and I'll make another video all

about that. Now, OpenClaw has an

identity.md file and that's typically

used to define a single agents identity,

but I use it to define multiple

identities, one for each agent on my

team. I even used Claude and Gemini to

develop unique personality traits and a

visual avatar for each agent. I wanted

to have fun with it. You know, my bots

are characters inspired by one of my

favorite bands, Gorillas. Now, I did run

into some challenges with OpenClaw's

built-in cron system for scheduled

tasks. It was hard to associate those

tasks with specific agents on my team.

And so, that ended up being one of the

main reasons I built my own custom

dashboard and task dispatching system.

So, I quickly realized that managing my

agents via chat alone was not going to

cut it. I wanted to see all my scheduled

tasks in one place and be able to assign

them to specific agents. And I wanted to

track token usage so I know how much all

of this is costing me. You know, I just

wanted a central dashboard where I could

see the whole system at a glance. So,

naturally, I built one. Any excuse to

build something, right? I used cloud

code and my design OS process and I had

a working app in about a day. It's a

simple Rails app that connects to

OpenClaus Gateway and gives me a clean

interface for managing everything.

Honestly, that HQ dashboard was just the

beginning. Now I'm building another app

for editing and reading markdown files

in my brain system so that I can easily

manage what my agents have access to.

This is what I love about this moment

for builders. When a tool that I need

doesn't exist yet, I just build it in a

day. Now, the most important question

and the one that I keep hearing

everywhere is what are you actually

going to use your agents for? So, I've

identified a few specific areas where my

agents can fill real gaps in my

business. Let's start with the content

that I publish. Now, I only put things

out when I have something to say, and

that'll never change. But the truth is,

so much happens inside my projects and

in my conversations with other builders

that never makes it to a video or a

social post. So, I'm building systems

now that let my agents observe and

capture more of that work and help me

share more of it across my platforms.

Second is development. Now, I still love

to spend most of my time in cloud code

and cursor designing and architecting

products. That's not going to change,

but I'm having Bernard, my developer

agent, pick up backlog issues and track

production errors and submit PRs during

times when I can't get my hands on those

things. Third is the glue work. This is

a bottleneck that I feel every single

day. Every minute that I spend project

managing or copying and pasting or

scheduling content or documenting

things, that's time that I'm not

thinking, creating or building. And

those tasks should be automated or

delegated. And that's exactly what my

general assistant Gumbo is for. And the

use case that has me most excited is

reporting. So, having my agents surface

trends and patterns and new ideas on a

regular basis, helping me see blind

spots that I wouldn't notice on my own,

that's the kind of insight that helps me

teach ideas that actually help builders

get ahead and helps me create tools that

solve real problems. Now, I've already

started assembling the building blocks,

the processes for my agents to follow,

the automations, the custom tooling, and

I'd love to report back on a future

video to show you how all that's coming

together. So, make sure you subscribe to

the channel. Now, I want to be careful

not to oversell OpenClaw. It's still

very early, very raw, and I spent more

late nights than I'd like to admit just

getting things configured. But there's

no denying the breakthrough as a concept

that OpenClaw has broken open here, at

least in our circles of AI pill

builders. And I see this as one of those

things that's worth our extra effort to

be an early adopter on because systems

like this are only going to become more

commonplace as this year and next year

play out. And that gets at something

that I think is a fundamental skill for

us as builders in 2026. We have to be

willing to explore and tinker to figure

out how new tools can help us make real

progress in our business. That's the

value that we bring to the table and

it's one of the five essential skills

that I think we need to master to go

from being overwhelmed by the speed of

change to actually thriving in this new

environment. And I cover all five in my

video on going from an AI skeptic to

building an unfair advantage. So, right

after you hit subscribe on the channel,

I'll see you on that one next. Let's

keep building.