Simon Willison’s Weblog

In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November.

Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer, according to the Git history of the OpenClaw README, is:

Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw

Or in detail (the output from the tool):

2025-11-24T11:23:15+01:00 16dfc1 # Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio)
2025-11-24T11:41:37+01:00 d4153d # 📡 Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio)
2025-11-24T17:47:57+01:00 343ef9 # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio)
2025-11-25T04:44:10+01:00 14b3c6 # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI
2025-11-25T12:48:40+01:00 481402 # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp—Twilio-backed or QR-linked.
2025-11-25T13:50:18+01:00 d51a3e # warelay 📡 - Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp via Twilio or QR-linked WhatsApp Web; webhook setup in one command
2025-11-25T13:51:13+01:00 4d2a8a # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp—Twilio-backed or QR-linked.
2025-11-25T14:52:43+01:00 1ef7f4 # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp.
2025-12-03T15:45:32+00:00 a27ee2 # 🦞 CLAWDIS — WhatsApp Gateway for AI Agents
2025-12-08T12:43:13+01:00 17fa2f # 🦞 CLAWDIS — WhatsApp & Telegram Gateway for AI Agents
2025-12-19T18:41:17+01:00 771043 # 🦞 CLAWDIS — Personal AI Assistant
2026-01-04T14:32:47+00:00 246ada # 🦞 CLAWDBOT — Personal AI Assistant
2026-01-10T05:14:09+01:00 cdb915 # 🦞 Clawdbot — Personal AI Assistant
2026-01-27T13:37:47-05:00 3fe4b2 # 🦞 Moltbot — Personal AI Assistant
2026-01-30T03:15:10+01:00 9a7160 # 🦞 OpenClaw — Personal AI Assistant