Story 3: The break

About a year in, I’d built and built, but my local AI was still just a chatbot, and the dashboards hardly changed from week to week. My setup was Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, the AI server, and my NAS.

Then ClawdBot dropped. Wait, MoltBot. No, I mean OpenClaw. Whatever it was called that week, I went all in on it that weekend.

The problem was that it wasn’t really built for local AI yet. On top of that, they were renaming everything to MoltBot in the middle of my install. I never got it fully running. By the next week, when local models did work, I’d heard about all the security issues, and I decided against it.

Still, it was new and exciting, and it gave me ideas. Within a week I found a developer on GitHub building their own version of OpenClaw called IronClaw. That’s where the name for my own infrastructure and AI setup came from: IronClaw.

Sometimes the thing you never get running is the thing that points you in the right direction.