Transcription
So Claude Code just released channels, which is a Telegram and Discord integration that lets you text your agents the same way that you text other human beings every day. And all I could think about when I saw this was, man, Anthropic really doesn't like OpenClaw.
So in this video, I'm going to show you a quick demo. Then I'm going to run you guys through how it all works under the hood before showing you how you can set it up on your end. And at the end, I'll also chat a little bit about what I think this personally means for the OpenClaw to debacle.
Okay, so I have two things on the screen here. The first is I have my Telegram chat and this is actually running locally on my computer in the exact same way that say OpenClaw might be running locally on you know a Mac mini or a VPS. I just have an open chat with Telegram right over here. And then on the right hand side I actually have an app that allows me to mirror the screen of my iPhone so you guys could see everything that I'm doing in real time just for simplicity.
So, I had a conversation before with it and I just asked it to give me a big wall of text that I could use to push up the previous conversation just that I could show you guys how simple it is. If I type hey over here on Telegram, essentially what occurs is my Claude code channel plugin immediately gets a message from my Telegram app and then it does two things. One, it gets the message and accomplishes whatever feature or task that I ask it to do and then it also updates the local conversation history with just a description of what went on. And so on the Telegram side, you know, I see, hey, hey, what's up? How's it going? So on and so forth. And over here, I see that, you know, our Telegram plug-in ran. What did it do? Well, I just replied to your Telegram message with the incoming query of, "Hey." And so in this way, you actually get a fair amount of accountability and interpretability, which is nice. It's not just a onetoone log of like everything you said to it. Um, you also additionally get kind of like a thinking and reasoning layer.
But anyway, let's say I'm out and about and, you know, I actually have a task I want to get done, some economically valuable work. And in this case, you know, I'm making a big course on cloud code and I saw a thumbnail that looked like this. Well, I have a skill that allows me to repurpose thumbnails that I see in the wild and then take advantage of like the good parts while also inserting myself in there and making some changes. So, I get the URL over here. I just go on my phone to Telegram and then I say, "Hey, replace the man in this thumbnail with me. Then make the following changes. Change the text, you know, replace the flags with the claw logo, change the colors, and so on and so forth."
What you see occurs locally is not only do we have the message come in which is up here. We also have the skill okay that it connected to which is now locally on my computer um sort of connected and and in that way I'm now designing the thumbnail. Now what it's doing is it's upscaling the thumbnails according to my specifications and the skill. You can see that it's now actually sending me over each of these thumbnails onto my phone. So I'm just taking a look at them right now. This one here in particular is probably the most me and that's more or less all I really wanted from this. I just wanted some sort of inspiration that I could use to, you know, quickly design a thumbnail while I'm on the go.
But it doesn't just stop at Telegram. They've also added Discord support for all you Gen Zers out there. So now what I have is I have the plugin Discord at Cloud Plugins official running. And then I have on the right hand side a Discord chat on my phone. And let's say I want to run another some economically valuable task, whatever it is. I'm going to say scrape me 100 leads from Appify Dentist in California. The title should be stuff like dentist practice manager and so on and so on and so forth. Um, what it's doing now is it's actually going to go and then run my, you know, Appify scraping skill. A few seconds later, it scrapes the leads. It's now going to do a little bit of running through them. Looks like 98 of them have phone numbers. And now that it's created a CSV, what it's going to do is send it over to me so I can open it on my phone. I then have this CSV file open here, which I can click on. And then, depending on my own workflow, I can open this up on a Google sheet or whatever, start giving people some rings.
Okay, as you guys could see, very simple and very straightforward once you actually have it set up. It has all of the benefits of the usual cloud code tooling. Um, all of the skills that you might have set up locally on your computer as well. And as long as your computer doesn't go to sleep or anything like that, which is pretty easy to do. I can run you guys through a couple ways to do that. Um, it will essentially always be listening on the same sorts of apps that you just use to talk to people every day. And you know, to be honest, this is the main reason why I think that like Open Claw, Claudebot, Moldbot, all these tools like picked off so much, just because we're now talking to agents using the exact same interfaces we talk to people. getting some economically valuable work done and it's just more convenient for us.
So, let me run you through all this stuff in a second. So, in terms of how to set this up, it's right over here at code.cloud.com/doc/en/ channels. You can even communicate with their assistant over here on the right hand side if you wanted to, but uh they have a new page set up that says push events into a running session with channels. That's basically what we are doing. You know, they're trying obviously not to just say, hey, we replicated all the functionality of OpenCloud or whatever, but to be honest, that's more or less what what we are doing here. we're having a conversation with our agent. It's the exact same sort of conversation that we might be having on our computer. It's just now we also have a stream that we can funnel through, you know, a messaging app and so on and so forth.
So, there are a couple right now, Telegram and Discord being the main ones. I should note that this came out just a few hours ago, so probably be significantly more over the coming weeks and months. Um, but it's pretty straightforward. Basically, on Telegram, you just get a little access code. You do the same thing on Discord, although you have you do have to set up an app, which I'll show you guys how to do, and then you guys could have a back and forth conversation with it in a very straightforward way.
The reason I'm on this page is because of this section right here, security. Now, if you guys know, I've made a bunch of videos on like Open Claw and then having like phone conversation style things with agents before. And usually there's some glaring security issues as a result of it. Um, the way that this plugin works is obviously we already have the built-in cloud code tooling, which has some security out of the box, but every approved channel plugin has what's called a sender allow list. So only specific IDs that you have already added ahead of time can push messages. everything else gets silently dropped. Um, in this way you still get access to, as I mentioned, all of your own tooling. You don't have to like set all the stuff up again. Um, but you also get to do this at the exact same level security you previously had in Cloud Code, which was hopefully quite high already.
So, that's it. No real magic here. Let me show you how to get this on your phone. Um, just like before, I'm going to be doing this on my iPhone mirroring app, but everything that I do there is the exact same as what you will see on your device, whether it's an Android or an iPhone.
Okay, so first to start, head over to Telegram. And what you'll have to do is you'll have to send a message to this person here called BotFather. Botfather is basically the de facto app that allows you to create new apps anytime you want. If you just click that open button, you'll be taken to a page that looks like this. You can see that I've set up a couple of clawed bots already. This was when I was testing out Nemo Claw, which I thought would have been a pretty good competitor to this, but in reality, I think this is way better. This is the um chat that we were just having a conversation with a moment ago. Then just go over to create a new bot. And then you can just add, you know, whatever details you want here. So, Claude demobot. And then I'll just call it Claude demo bot. You have to make sure that whatever you're creating is appended with the threeletter word bot. Okay. You can also add a profile picture and stuff like that. I'm not really super worried about that, so it's not a big deal. Here, you'll also have this little um invisible, you know, hidden text feature. I'm just going to click copy. And now, basically, what I have is I have my bot token, which is required in order for me to set up the next step. Once you're done with that, at any time you can just go slash mybots to actually get the list of bots that you have. And then you can just click on the specific one. When you click on it, a little /st start window will be open just like that. And now you sort of have a conversation window open. I should note that if you send it a message at this point, nothing will happen. We actually have to set up the plugin on the cloud code end as well.
So from there, I'm going to open up cloud code inside of anti-gravity, which is my preferred sort of development uh interface. If you guys don't know anything about anti-gravity or have never seen the screen before, it's actually really easy to figure out and I walk you all through it through a 4-hour in-depth tutorial. I'll show you guys like the buttons and what literally every little section of this screen means. Just check that link that I posted in the top rightand corner a second ago.
Now, in order for us to set this plugin up, we'll have to go /terminal and so actually opencloud in the terminal. Um, some of you guys may already have this set up, but obviously I use the GUI just for demo versions. I'm going to click maximize panel size on the right hand side. And now what I need to do is I need to install the plugin for Telegram. So that's pretty easy to do. You just have to go /pluginstallgram atclude-plugins-official. Now it's going to ask you where you want to install it. In my case, I want to install for me the user scope. The user scope essentially means all workspaces across all different projects on my uh computer are going to have access to Telegram if I need to. Once we're done, we just go reload plugins. Then we're basically now um we we've now activated it, which is cool.
Okay. After you're done with that, just exit out of the session. You can just hold uh Ctrl C and just press that a couple times. I'm just going to clear so that we could see this full screen. Okay. After that, you can just type /cle to get you back up to the very top. And then I'm just going to paste in /tegram colon configure. This is going to look purple, which means that it's now being recognized as an actual command. And then over here, you're just going to insert that token that you copied from BotFather earlier. If it doesn't appear purple, you may just have to restart Claude code in order for the plug-in library to initialize. Once you're done with that, the configuration script will basically create a new channel allow list or policy. And now what you can do is you can just turn this off and then turn this back on again. So I'm going to use um control C and I'll press that twice. And now I'm actually out of my Claude and I'm back in like my terminal. And there's a different set of commands here, but if you just type clear, it'll basically bump you all the way up to the top. You'll have a little bit more room and then we can continue.
Okay, last but not least, we actually just need to launch this. And the way you do so with Claude codes channel plugin is you use claude space- channels space plugin colon telegram@claude-plugins-official. So when you do this, you'll actually be connected now to your bot from a moment ago. And the last thing we have to do is we just have to send a brief message over to our bot to 100% verify that the connection is started. So I'm going to go back here. I'm just going to type in hey. When I do this, as you guys could see, we now actually have the message coming through on this side. So, boom. Hey, what's up? How's it going? Awesome. Run my scrape, you know, apply lead skill for 50 HVAC people in Texas. And now we're having a conversation with it just like you would have with anything else.
Okay, Discord is pretty straightforward as well. So, I actually already have this app set up. I'm just going to create a new one. Head over to discord.com/developer/applications and just type new app. And then what you're going to want to do is I don't know uh I'll just say not genuine app. It'll ask you to confirm you are not a robot. And now what we have is you just you've just created an app basically um somewhere. It's not that big of a deal. You don't need to worry about what this thing looks like, but it'll take you to a relatively complicated looking page. And we can just skip all that and go straight to bot down here. Once you're at bot, just scroll down to where it says message content intent. And you need to click this button. And once you're done, scroll back up to where it says token. Click reset token. Yes, do it. You'll have to enter your password obviously. So, I'm going to do so here. And now this is the token just like we had earlier. That'll allow us to communicate with our bot. The last thing we have to do is head over to OOTH 2. And then down at the very bottom, add these permissions. First, click bot. And that'll open up a bunch more bot permissions. down here, you're going to want to do uh view channels, send messages, send messages in threads, uh read messages, read message history, I think, and then attach files, which I'm going to just hold command and F and then press that. And then do the same thing for add reactions right over here.
Okay, great. Once that's up, it'll say integration type guild install and you'll get a generated URL. You may be wondering, what the heck does that mean, Nick? It's pretty straightforward. Um, this is basically just going to allow you to invite this to uh, you know, one of your servers. Okay. And now you have not genuine app wants to access your Discord account. Signed in as Nick. And then the server you're going to want is whatever your own individual, you know, Discord server is. To be clear, you do need a Discord server in order to have this all set up. You can create one for free really easily. If you've never done that before, just head over to Discord and then click this little button. Um, click create my own and then just do it for me and my friends. Name it whatever the heck you want. Okay. From there, you just click continue. And now basically it has all of these permissions. You can click authorize. Obviously I am not a human as we both know and many of my YouTube comments routinely accuse me of.
Next up, head back over to Claude. And what you're going to want to do is launch another instance of Claude. Then paste in this command /plugin install discord atcla-plugins-official. Same thing for me. So I'm installing for myself across everything. And then you can run reload-plugins to activate. You'll see we now have two plugins. And you can see that if you just go /plugins over to the right here, it says we have that's claude mem, which is currently disabled. Discord, which is enabled, Telegram, which is enabled. Then I also have a couple of other ones. Chrome devtools, Chrome stealth.
Once you're done with that, you're just going to want to type / Discord. Once you're done with that, type / Discord: Configure. And then go grab that token that we just had a second ago. In my case, it's going to be right here. Once we're done, I'm going to have to exit out of Claude code and then bring it back in. So I'll then go claude. The reason why we had to do that is because we have to pump in the token and then we also have to go /isord colon configure like this. This will turn purple and then we can press enter. And now what we're doing is we're basically doing the same thing we did a moment ago with telegram. Um, we're configuring this actually setting it up.
Okay. So now what we need to do is just DM the bot on Discord. And then once you're done with that you can head back over to your cloud code. And what you want is I'm just cycling through a bunch of old commands. claude- channels plugin colon discord@claw-plugins-official. So now it's going to be listening for channel messages from my plugin. So I'll open up Discord. You now see that there's a new conversation with not genuine app. There's a conversate. This is something I sent it a moment ago before I actually set it up. But now it's saying hello and we're actually routed in directly just like we were before. And so now I can have a conversation with uh my agent anywhere I want.
Okay. So hopefully you guys seen it's pretty straightforward to do this setup. Um, but I think probably the logical question that a lot of you are probably asking is like, "Hey Nick, now that I have it set up, like what do I do? Like where do I take this?" And realistically, this is running locally in your computer. So, if you only have one computer, okay, if you want to have this ongoing 24/7, you're going to need to find a way to basically have your computer not like lock, not have all these processes uh run stale. And so, there variety of different ways to do that on like a Mac OS, for instance. It's pretty straightforward. There's actually a really simple, easy way to do that. you just go to your terminal and then just type caffeinate and then you know if you press caffeinate-t for whatever period of time. Basically what this does is this just um turns your computer and keeps your computer screen on for however long you specify here. So this is in seconds. Uh in this case it's 60 seconds in a minute. So 60 * 60 is about an hour, 3,600 seconds, but obviously you could set that up for as long as you want. Um, likewise you could also go down to settings on Mac and then in settings you'll have two different things that you can touch. The first is the lock screen settings. So just head over to lock screen and then where it says turn display off when on battery and power adapter when inactive, you can just say never. And so now basically what's what's going to occur is it doesn't matter how long it takes the computer will just never turn the display off. So the display will always be on. And then I think you go over to battery settings as well. And then basically we go to options here. Uh you could prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off. So I click this and what that means is basically even when the display would have been off, this is just on all the time. Then where it says put hard disk to sleep when possible, you would just leave this on. Awake for network access would just be always then click done and then you're good to go.
A Windows is very very similar. They're just a bunch of features out there that allow you to just keep it on 24/7. And so in this way you now have like you have a server basically whether it's this computer or something else that is just always running in the background. Meaning no matter where you are, what you're doing, you'll always just be able to have a conversation with it.
Now, if you wanted to take this further, what you do is you get something like a Mac Mini or some sort of server, you know, that you put somewhere in your computer, maybe something that doesn't even have a screen. Obviously, you should get something that doesn't have a screen. It's way simpler. And then you would um connect it to whatever the repo or folder is that runs most of the uh you know, cloud code skills and stuff like that that you have in your computer. In my case, I'm doing that using a really interesting tool called sync things. This basically allows me to have two computers running side by side. So there's my main Mac which I'm currently operating on. And then there's like uh another one. I actually have a second MacBook which is just sitting in the corner. And what we're doing is we're just syncing the same like business folder workspace, the one that I typically run most of my cloud code skills in such that you know I basically have like a totally seamless experience. My Telegram interface, my Discord interface, those are communicating with my second MacBook which is sitting around um which just did all the things that I showed you a moment ago. And then that's syncing with this computer. So anytime I need to like lock in and do work on my desktop, I can do that as well. So we sort of have like a two-way sync. Any new file that's created on one end, even through my Telegram, is ported over here. And then the same thing goes in the other direction. And uh the only downside with that is if you're using git commit and you happen to try and commit two things at the same time on both. So locally and over there, you can run into some conflicts. In my case, that's not a really big part of my workflow. I'm not committing every 5 seconds. So doesn't really make too much sense for me.
Okay. And I just wanted to leave you guys with a couple of mentions on OpenClaw. You know, as you guys know, OpenClaw, which used to be called Clawbot and was then called Molbot, and it'll probably be called something else just given PR reasons. Um, you know, it came out like a few months ago, and the entire internet went freaking wild over it. And, you know, when I saw it as an avid and relatively competent Cloud Code user, in my head, I was just like, "Oh, is this like an additional piece of like functionality? Is this like additional intelligence on top of what Cloud Code natively offers me as somebody that uses it for business and for uh, you know, programming stuff?" And I was really trying hard to see whether or not there was. And I just kept on running into a wall where it was like, oh, this doesn't actually do anything different. It's just basically an interface layer where I can communicate with Claude through Telegram. And in my head, I was like, well, the reason why this is probably growing so popular is because we text people like friends of ours, family members and stuff like that through these messaging apps. So, you know, we're texting humans and now we can text an agent as well using the exact same sort of UX. That's going to seem pretty cool, especially so if you're not super technically competent. And so, I was like, all right, maybe that's why it's blowing up.
But anyway, it turns out there were a couple other reasons why OpenCloud grew so quickly and uh became like the number one most starred repo on freaking planet Earth basically. And this isn't a knock against that or you know the developer cuz I definitely did some knocking uh on my my old video where I was like Cloudbot sucks. So basically right around the time that all this stuff was happening there was a shitcoin launched basically some some big rug pull where uh a bunch of people decided to blast the message like Cloudbot's insane and stuff like that all over the internet to pump up a coin. And so that's called astroturfing where you try and um synthetically generate like a large amount of volume to make something look really big. And it's a common tactic used in marketing. It's kind of like a gray hat black hat technique and not really obviously morally above board. Involves the creation of a bunch of accounts and stuff like that. Maybe the a bunch of GitHub stars, who knows? Uh that wasn't the only thing though. Um right around the time obviously you had a bunch of creators start making videos on the stuff and then the creators saw a bunch of clicks and a bunch of interest because they were riding that wave of like astroturfing. And so this thing which might have been previously mostly like synthetically generated or maybe initially even had like a cool demo that was later pushed became like amplified by a bunch of people on YouTube talking about how incredible and amazing it was. And you know a few of these people had a lot of success with um, you know this Cloudbot stuff. And so every single time they put it in the title and it gets them a bunch of views. What are they going to do the next time? Obviously they're going to do the same thing, right? And so became this like self-perpetuating feedback loop. And then to top it off there were a couple of really forward-thinking companies out there. um which did VPS hosting. And so essentially these VPS hosting companies started reaching out to a bunch of creators seeing an opportunity saying, "Hey, uh we'll happily pay you $5 to $10,000 if you want to pop a video out on this stuff really quickly talking about how easy it is to host using our software." And so these three factors basically all culminated in this massive explosion of interest for something that ultimately speaking was like basically a Telegram rapper with um with with cron, which is like some heartbeat features and then some memory.
But for anybody that didn't watch the video, one of my points was why wouldn't Anthropic just do something way better and then way more secure as well because, you know, they obviously have access to the models. They're the ones that trained the models. They obviously understand risks like prompt injection, exfiltration, and stuff like that the best. And I was just like, I it doesn't really make sense to jump all over, you know, a Claudebot if you're just going to be using it for freaking, you know, Telegram, essentially a glorified messenger. And so, I know a bunch of people are like really a big fan of this stuff. And by all means, like you you can be. There's nothing wrong with the idea of like decentralized agents that are running in the cloud and stuff like that, but the vast majority of the use cases that most people are like using openclaw and cloudbot and stuff like that for, they are effectively covered by this update and then the update that happened a few days ago where anthropic dropped cloud dispatch for co-work and uh, you know I just think this is a much more secure and it's much more scalable solution that actually works like off of your stuff. You don't have it in the the cloud unsecure. It's not maintained by like random developers. It's like maintained by one of the biggest companies on planet earth realistically when it comes to AI and probably one of the most competent ones as well. And just given the recent values differences between you know anthropic and then a couple of other very major actors in the world uh and their commitment to holding firms and principles like I feel a lot more comfortable with my data in their hands than I do you know some some random bloke on GitHub or whatnot.
Okay, so those are my thoughts on it. Uh hopefully you guys appreciated the video and you know learned something new about uh how to set the stuff up and you guys can keep on chatting with Claude whether it's through your Telegram, your Discord, your computer like I mentioned or some other way. If you guys like this sort of thing, please subscribe to the channel. Really helps me out. Like, comment with something else you want to see me record a video on and I'll catch all you on the next video. See you.