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August 2, 20266 min read

Meet oncellclaw: a personal AI assistant that survives your laptop

Open source, tiny enough to audit, and its memory lives in a durable cell — not in a container on your machine. Here is everything it can do today, honestly labeled.

A
Anup Singh
Founder, oncell.ai

Every personal AI assistant so far has had the same fatal dependency: your machine. The container on your laptop is the assistant. Close the lid and it stops thinking. Lose the disk and it forgets who you are.

oncellclaw is a fork of NanoClaw — the same tiny, auditable codebase — with one structural change: the agents don't run next to you, they live in OnCellcells. A cell is a private, gVisor-isolated world holding the agent's memory, files, and CLAUDE.md. It pauses to roughly $0 when idle and wakes on your next message. Your laptop becomes what it should have been all along: just one of the places you talk to it from.

Talk to it anywhere

  • Web chat. Streamed, ordered transcript in the dashboard — live today on hosted.
  • CLI. Talk to it from a terminal.
  • Telegram. Pairs at runtime with a bot token — no webhook, no redeploy.
  • Thirteen more via skills. WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, iMessage, Teams, Matrix, Google Chat, Webex, Signal, WeChat, DeltaChat — plus Linear, GitHub, and Resend email as channels.
  • Channel isolation, your choice. A private agent per channel, one shared agent, or fused — same brain everywhere.

What it does for you

  • Persistent memory. CLAUDE.md plus a budgeted memory index — projects, people, preferences, kept forever.
  • Web research. agent-browser drives a real browser: reads pages, fills forms, takes screenshots.
  • Frontend engineering. frontend-engineer builds, tests, and verifies web work before calling it done.
  • Builds & runs software. Claude Code native — it writes and runs real code, not pseudocode.
  • Companion agents. create_agent births long-lived agents that message each other under ACLs.
  • Rich conversation. Asks you structured questions with rich cards; sends and edits messages, files, reactions.
  • Self-customizing. Add skills, MCP servers, or code by asking it.package installs on hosted: coming
  • Scheduled work. One-shot and cron schedules, with script gates that skip waking when there's no work.
  • Approvals, roles, permissions. Privileged actions are held until an admin approves; per-user roles.
  • Credential gateway. Email, calendar, GitHub — creds injected at request time, never stored in the agent's workspace.connect via dashboard → Integrations

The part people underestimate is create_agent: your assistant can birth long-lived companion agents — a researcher, a builder, a monitor — each in its own cell, talking to each other under explicit ACLs. You end up with a small staff, not a chatbot.

Why it can't die

  • A private cell. Each agent group lives in its own gVisor-isolated OnCell cell.
  • Survives your laptop. Close the lid, lose the machine, reinstall the OS — memory and files live in the cell.
  • ~$0 idle. Pauses when quiet, wakes on your next message.
  • Snapshot & fork. Capture or duplicate your assistant's entire world in one call.
  • Runs anywhere. One-command hosted bootstrap, or full local Docker mode.
  • Templates & flavors. Agent templates to start from; Claude Code native, with Codex, OpenCode, and Ollama via skills.
  • Guided migration. Moving from OpenClaw or NanoClaw is a guided path, not a rewrite.

Where it is today, honestly

Web chat, CLI, and Telegram pairing are live right now — Telegram pairs at runtime with a BotFather token, no webhook. The other channels ship as skills you (or your claw) can install; on hosted, more one-click pairings are coming next. The credential gateway — email, calendar, GitHub with credentials injected per-request, never stored in the agent's workspace — connects on your OnCell dashboard under Integrations. Package installs during hosted self-customization are coming. Everything else above works today.

Run it

Hosted: one click in the OnCell dashboard gets your own instance in a private cell — bring an Anthropic API key, wait a few minutes for the first boot, and chat. Or self-host the same code:

git clone https://github.com/anupsinghinfra/oncellclaw.git
cd oncellclaw
bash nanoclaw.sh   # add ONCELL_API_KEY to .env for cloud cells

Same open source either way — read it on GitHub. Docker remains a fully supported local runtime, and migrating from OpenClaw or NanoClaw is a guided path.