Building consumer / power-user software always gave me more joy than FDEing into an enterprise. It did not give me joy to manually add AI tools to a cloud harness for every small new thing, at least not as much as completely local software that is open source and has all the powers of OpenClaw (I can now talk to my CRM on Telegram!).
A week ago, we launched Ironclaw, an Open Source OpenClaw CRM Framework (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2023518514120937672?s=20) but people confused us with NearAI’s Ironclaw, so we changed our name to DenchClaw (https://denchclaw.com).
OpenClaw today feels like early React: the primitive is incredibly powerful, but the patterns are still forming, and everyone is piecing together their own way to actually use it. What made React explode was the emergence of frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js that turned raw capability into something opinionated, repeatable, and easy to adopt.
That is how we think about DenchClaw. We are trying to make it one of the clearest, most practical, and most complete ways to use OpenClaw in the real world.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfACTbc3Bh4#t=43
npx denchclaw
On Dench, everything sits in a file system, the table filters, views, column toggles, calendar/gantt views, etc, so OpenClaw can directly work with it using Dench’s CRM skill.
The CRM is built on top of DuckDB, the smallest, most performant and at the same time also feature rich database we could find. Thank you DuckDB team!
It creates a new OpenClaw profile called “dench”, and opens a new OpenClaw Gateway… that means you can run all your usual openclaw commands by just prefixing every command with `openclaw --profile dench` . It will start your gateway on port 19001 range. You will be able to access the DenchClaw frontend at localhost:3100. Once you open it on Safari, just add it to your Dock to use it as a PWA.
Think of it as Cursor for your Mac (also works on Linux and Windows) which is based on OpenClaw. DenchClaw has a file tree view for you to use it as an elevated finder tool to do anything on your mac. I use it to create slides, do linkedin outreach using MY browser.
DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.
Just ask it “hey import my notion”, “hey import everything from my hubspot”, and it will literally go into your browser, export all objects and documents and put it in its own workspace that you can use.
We would love you all to break it, stress test its CRM capabilities, how it streams subagents for lead enrichment, hook it into your Apollo, Gmail, Notion and everything there is. Looking forward to comments/feedback!
One commenter said "the real time save is the agent pulling the right info from 5 different sources before a human writes anything" - that's exactly it. The enrichment layer upstream of the CRM is where agents can do the most good with the least risk, because it's read-only.
Giving an agent write access to your CRM + email + browser is a big trust leap. But having a script that ingests a list of company names and returns homepage, emails, phone, LinkedIn, HQ, and key contacts as a CSV - then you paste that into your CRM manually - sidesteps the whole problem. No credentials, no writes, no blast radius if something goes wrong.
The robotic email problem goes away too, because the human is still the one reviewing context and deciding what to say. The agent's job is to make sure that context is comprehensive before the human touches it.
And the design principals are already pretty well established (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, custom object model, stages, etc.). It just needs to be turned into a database boilerplate with a bunch of agent tools. Excited to try this out.
Responding to some HN comments, I understand the focus on Sales Automation and Outreach can be worrysome.
But for me personally, this is where I do all knowledge work. For me it acts like Cursor, Happenstance, News Aggregator, Fun games creator like Pacman (it has an App Store), I can import Notion into editable MD files, create reports and presentations, etc.
I think that a much cleaner messaging on what this tool is for would help.
Also a question about the implementation, why DuckDB for a CRM?
Something like SQLite feels like a much natural fit for a CRM where you primarily create, update and maybe delete records and you really care for the integrity of the data model.
From a quick look on the data model, everything seems to be a VARCHAR, if this is the case, why not just store everything in the file system instead? You do that with the md files and whatever is getting extracted from the SaaS tools.
Telling DenchClaw to "make it less robotic" on 300+ personalised drafts is still better than me actually making it less robotic myself imo
We're going to need local AI to sift through the trash. Platforms have been more or less useless at curating content, and it's only smaller sites like HN that have retained a high SNR at this point. It doesn't even matter what media, at this point, video has passed the 2-3 second sniff test. We're seeing boomers get completely sniped by AI videos, even with watermark, showing absurd spin on current events. Text, music, podcasts, video, cartoons, whatever, it's all been infested, and the quality keeps increasing. I've seen a couple 2+ minute seedance productions that have been actually enjoyable, but by June that sort of thing will be one-shot prompting instead of someone gluing together the outputs from 4 difference SoTA AI tools.
It's getting weird, and we're not ready for it, at all.
Yesterday I asked it to pull up all my meeting notes from last week, cross-reference them with my task list, and draft follow-ups. Before that I had it reorganize a messy folder of research PDFs into a structured workspace. I use it to build slides, write code (DenchClaw literally built DenchClaw), manage my calendar, search through old Notion pages I forgot existed.
The CRM part gets attention because that's what people asked for when we talked to power users. But the actual product is just "OpenClaw with a good UI, a file system, and DuckDB, running locally on your Mac." It does whatever you'd normally do on your computer. The browser is yours, the files are yours, the data never leaves your machine.
Think of it less as a sales tool and more as what happens when your entire Mac becomes programmable through natural language. The CRM is one app that runs on top of that. People are already using it for project management, research, personal knowledge bases, all kinds of stuff we didn't plan for.
will you be enforcing the same for the users of your product?
if not, i am not sure how this statement addresses the above concerns.
The DuckDB choice is smart for local-first. I use ClickHouse for production analytics and the difference in operational complexity is night and day — DuckDB just works for single-node use cases without any infrastructure overhead.
Curious about the Chrome profile cloning approach. That's clever for importing auth state, but does it create any issues with cookie/session conflicts if both profiles try to access the same service simultaneously?
[1]: https://xcancel.com/kumareth/status/2023534527113818625
[1] https://www.ssp.sh/brain/managing-my-business-with-obsidian/
Thanks for sharing.
I think a better solution would be to bring in one of the many Openclaw alternatives like NullClaw, ZeroClaw, etc. The magic of Openclaw is the heartbeat and cron modules so bringing in that piece should not be too difficult? I'll fork and hack away at it as well but the less dependent you are on other projects, the longer the longevity.
Now instead of bundling and patching from inside it, we just ship alongside OpenClaw so you can use the latest OpenClaw CLI separately yourself.
I really don't want to yuck anybody's yums or step on dev work that I had nothing to do with, because I've been there and I know it sucks, but OpenClaw is barely secure enough to even play with in a sandbox. Giving it private information about your real business and real business contacts feels like an absolutely insane thing to do.
At best OpenClaw is like a toy... if the toy was a gun and it shot real bullets. This feels like playing Russian roulette with your livelihood.
As someone that has worked in the automotive space, an enormous amount of regulation and effort is spent making sure you cannot do something like forgetfully remote start the car with your garage door closed and gas yourself. Nevermind securing it so that others cannot do this to you.
And these people are plugging it into ... this, which will happily go "oh, the car turned off after 15 minutes, let me turn it back on!"
There are realistic odds that someone is rotting in their house while their lobster pays the bills and writes blog posts for them.
This is a month-old project by someone how has been suckling at the YC teat of release as early as possible; #YOLO. There's no "engineering" here.
It seems to me many infosec best practices that have been built over decades have been forgot in the last few months like nothing happened. People really do give this kind of software full system access, plus access to their emails, their private chats, most likely their passwords too and who knows what else via plugins. I couldn't really imagine this happening one year ago.
I'm 100% confident that any state actor and cybercrime groups are currently heavily focusing their research on these tools. You compromise the right person and you can access all kind of critical information, it would basically be the same as having some remote control software on their system with full permissions.
And everyone on the hype train seems to be absolutely unaware of this. Maybe I'm missing something, but all of this feels so odd to me.
Aren't hallucinations mathematically impossible to be _solved_? Cannot believe how so many people just willy nilly give everything they have to a lying parrot.
Yesterday I asked it to pull up all my meeting notes from last week, cross-reference them with my task list, and draft follow-ups. Before that I had it reorganize a messy folder of research PDFs into a structured workspace. I use it to build slides, write code (DenchClaw literally built DenchClaw), manage my calendar, search through old Notion pages I forgot existed.
The CRM part gets attention because that's what people asked for when we talked to power users. But the actual product is just "OpenClaw with a good UI, a file system, and DuckDB, running locally on your Mac." It does whatever you'd normally do on your computer. The browser is yours, the files are yours, the data never leaves your machine.
Think of it less as a sales tool and more as what happens when your entire Mac becomes programmable through natural language. The CRM is one app that runs on top of that. People are already using it for project management, research, personal knowledge bases, all kinds of stuff we didn't plan for.
It sees everything you do, really? What's it gonna do with that data? You don't know.
Put all your customer data in there, all your customer relationships. It's fine, it couldn't leak all that information, it couldn't screw up any sensitive business details I'm sure. This is gonna go great.
Sorry AFK everybody I'm gonna go get myself a VibeMBA.
Anyway, good luck, I'm really looking forward to the user stories in a few weeks! I'm sure this won't go badly at all.
Wow that sounds great. Hey don't worry these things never blackmail anyone. Let it know if you're gonna turn it off, I bet it'll make some REAL interesting choices based on your browsing history
I feel like the average person is going to be like "oh no it'd be terrible if everyone found out I really like the 'big boobs' category on pornhub"
You may be legally entirely above board (though Cardinal Richelieu wouldn't let that get in the way) but you still might not want your S&M kink to be known or to be outed to conservative friends and family or have your bank account details spread around or have a $$$$$ bill run up in your AWS or LLM logins...
Finally we'll want to know about disputes you've had with intimate partners, employers and other service providers, especially powerful ones like healthcare, insurance and financial organisations.
And, along with all the credentials as you suggest, including private parts of PGP keys etc, accurate impressions/clones of any and all physical security/privacy devices they use such as keys to house and car and safe and gun safe and relatives' crypt, etc, etc...
So basic automation and forcing the web to be "open"...
No one is talking about how AI is going to destroy business models that are dependent on dark patterns, on walled gardens, on poorly designed one size fits all implementations (so many things wedged sideways into sales force).
They could've released something like that years ago (the discovery service it's built on has existed for over a decade) but creating a simple, accessible, unified CLI for general integration apparently wasn't worth it until agents became the hot thing.
I wonder when / if there will be a rug pull on all of this. Because I really don't see what the long-term incentives are for incumbent tech platforms to make it easy for automated systems to essentially pull users away from the actual platform. I guess they're focused on the short term incentives. And once they decide the party's over, promising upstarts and competition can get absorbed and it'll be business as usual. Idk, we'll see.
I first tried OpenClaw with a local model, it gave poor performance. Then I tried it with Claude - great but it blew through hundreds of dollars in tokens in about an hour.
Or is everybody a billionaire now?
I mean, ultimately why would you even need a CRM if not to sell something? And if you are going to sell something ultimately you want to get that done without any additional layers of abstraction. So the interface is the definition of the goal and the output is measured in results.
"Hey claw, I want to sell my product. Go figure it out!"
You don't need a UI for that.
Take OPs example…
> I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees”
Now how could that command language look like, maybe something like…
PICK * of COMPANIES if EMPLOYEE_COUNT >10;
We could call this DCCL: Dench Claw Command Language!
Fight fire with fire.
Sigh.
Fuck me, it's going to get worse before it gets better, isn't it?
For the DuckDB side specifically: we shell out to the duckdb CLI binary for every query rather than embedding it in the Node process. So each operation gets its own memory space and dies when it's done. the web server at localhost:3100 stays lean regardless of what you're ingesting. DuckDB's out-of-core execution also means it can handle datasets larger than available RAM natively, which is one of the reasons we picked it over SQLite.
For really large exports (think full HubSpot instance with 100k+ contacts), the practical limit is more about the browser export step than DuckDB. HubSpot itself chunks its exports, and we process those chunks as they land. The DuckDB insert is the fast part.
Honestly for CRM-scale data, even a large sales org's full HubSpot, DuckDB eats it for breakfast. Where it would get interesting is if someone tries to throw analytics-scale data at it, but that's not really the use case. Would love to hear how IndexedDB holds up for you at scale in AccIQ, different trade-offs for sure.
What’s stopping the agent from doing literally any other thing in HubSpot? You know, small stuff like editing/deleting records, sensing emails, launching marketing campaigns, deleting reports, etc.
Ideally for these pursposes, I would ALWAYS use Claude Opus 4.6 for this stuff, personally I have never seen it do unintended things to that extent.
Also, when the browser opens you can supervise it doing the thing, since you can see what its doing, you can always stop it if it ever goes wrong.
Prompt injection as a service.