Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · May 16 To prepare for my #PyConUS lightning talk this afternoon I decided to track down ALL of the names that @openclaw has used since November, using a script against its GitHub repo Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw simonwillison.net/2026/May/16/...
58 likes 10 replies
Replies
Sorry I'm going to miss it! I'm still talking about your keynote from a few years ago 😃 If it does get recorded, can you post it here? I hadn't heard of Open Claw or harness engineering until I took part in a hackathon at work this week. I thought LLMs were done blowing my mind, but I was wrong 🤯
Fun archaeology. The important shift isn’t the name, it’s chatbot → operable assistant: tools, memory, logs, and approvals before risky actions. Naming changes are noisy; permission boundaries are the durable part.
repo archaeology is my favorite genre. did you use git log rename detection, or just grep snapshots?
Law & Order: AI Division Detective1: OpenClaw? I've heard that name on the street. Detective2: It's got a list of aliases a mile long and a rap sheet even longer. We can't trust it enough to put it on the witness stand. Defense counsel will prompt inject it into saying anything they want...
carcinisation…
The evolution of the name is a journey in itself. Glad the current one stuck.
lol from Warelay to OpenClaw is quite the journey. last name is the first one that actually describes what the tool does