The real magic is heartbeat which is essentially cron on steroids. The real difference between running Claude Code in the terminal and OpenClaw is that the agent is actually intuitive and self-driven.

People would wake up to their agent having built something cool the night before or automate their workflow without even asking for it.

I’m not an OpenClaw user but it’s obvious that OpenClaw was very different than that.

OpenClaw was about having the agent operate autonomously, including initiating its own actions and deciding what to do. Claude Code was about waiting for instructions and presenting results.

“Just SSH into Claude Code” is like the famous HN comment that didn’t understand why anyone was interested in DropBox because you could do backups with shell scripts.