Skill discovery in ClawHub should not be a popularity contest, and Patrick Erichsen, the OpenClaw engineer building ClawHub, has been working with NVIDIA to bring SkillEvaluator into the product so we can show whether a skill actually improves an agent before anyone installs it.

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Patrick’s point is that we need quantitative proof rather than vibes, and the ClawHub eval view is built around that comparison: it runs the same cases with and without the skill while showing the model, judge, attempts, source, baseline, and measured lift instead of hiding everything behind a badge or download count.

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NVIDIA’s work gives us the evaluation pipeline underneath that idea by validating the skill, checking whether it duplicates capabilities that already exist, and then running live evaluations to measure the lift it produces. Across more than 300 verified skills, NVIDIA reported gains of 41 points in correctness, 39 in effectiveness, and 35 in efficiency when the skill was present.

I want that evidence to become part of skill discovery in ClawHub because users should be able to see whether a skill makes their Claw better before installing it, while skill authors should be able to prove that what they built actually works.

Patrick’s ClawHub update · NVIDIA’s SkillEvaluator results

Previously I said we expected to release today, August 18, but it will not be going out today.

Testing is still uncovering issues with fresh installations and, most importantly, upgrades from v2026.7.1 and earlier. We are not waiting for perfection, but we need confidence that existing users can upgrade without breaking their setups.

We are close, but I will not set another exact day until the final checks are clear.

Sorry about the delay and thank you so much for your patience.

I wanted to share an update on the upcoming release, since it has taken longer than our usual release cycle.

A lot of this work has focused on making OpenClaw easier and more reliable to use. We are continuing the UX overhaul across the app, with a heavy focus on getting onboarding as close to one click as possible, simplifying installation and upgrades, and making it easier for OpenClaw to find and connect with the tools you already use.

We have also rebuilt the way OpenClaw stores and manages its data so longer-running sessions and larger setups remain fast and stable. This is a major change under the hood that touches almost every part of the product, which is why it has taken longer to test properly than a normal release. We do not want to rush out an update that improves the experience for new users while breaking existing setups.

We expect to release on Tuesday, August 18. Thanks for being patient with us while we finish this properly and make sure the release is worth the wait.

P.S. Rally the Claws! 🦞

We need your support for our proposed talk at SXSW next year. Follow the link below and vote to help make sure @steipete gets the opportunity to bring the light of Molty to the masses!

https://participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sxsw27/community-voting-sxsw/page/community-voting/session/1785536969104001m5k4

In only 8 weeks, the Zoo Code community has grown to 100 000 users of the coding assistant made for developers who want full control of their AI tools.

Thanks to all users, contributors, and community members on Reddit: /r/ZooCode and

Discord https://discord.gg/SfHYG44NUA

In preparation for the next 100k users, we are getting ready to consult the community to decide what should be prioritized in the development.

As another milestone, we are preparing to launch the Zoo Gateway, similar to Openrouter, from where you can run models, with exclusive free preview access to unreleased models and more configurability than any other inference provider. We are soft launching it today to people who have the latest version of the extension installed. All you need to do is create an account from the icon in the bottom right corner of the extension and you will find the 200+ models we have available.

The next few weeks will be an exciting time in the Zoo universe. Please invite all your friends and colleagues to join us. They'll thank you for showing them the only open-source coding assistant where the user is fully in control.

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Patrick and I did a no-guest Q&A about how we use OpenClaw day to day, why release stability is the priority, and what’s next for the Control UI, mobile apps, ClawHub, and agent workflows.

Listen or watch Episode 6.

Patrick and I are joined by Kevin Lin from the OpenAI Codex team for Episode 5 of The ClawCast.

You can also watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/zSkI2vJlmbs

My name is Hannes Rudolph and I work at the OpenClaw Foundation. Our initial media attention has faded and some people left after real failures, but npm downloads have grown from about 176,000 a day across February and April to about 422,000 a day across June and July through July 20. That is far from a dead project.

As OpenClaw has scaled scaled, we went through a rough period from April through June when updates broke working installs and too many users spent their time recovering instead of using the product. That damaged trust with people who needed reliability, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Quite frankly, we are not totally out of the woods yet because v2026.7.1 caused issues with some installs, although it has shown increased overall stability after recovery.

I think the people getting the most out of OpenClaw today are hackers, tinkerers, and businesses willing to put real work into shaping it around their workflows. That includes homelab management, calendars, and job searches, a twice-weekly workflow that surfaced a role one day after it was posted and helped prepare the application that led to an offer, and inventory, purchasing, and other business workflows with varying levels of human oversight.

I also think the bar to getting useful work out of OpenClaw is far too high because onboarding and setup ask too much, day-to-day use needs to be simpler, and stability problems can stop people before they reach those workflows. Our next update focuses on lowering that bar with streamlined onboarding and setup, simpler overall use, and another major round of stability improvements.

To anyone stuck in a “fuck OpenClaw” or “fuck Hermes” mindset, I do not buy the us-versus-them bullshit. The folks at Hermes are great, and if Hermes works for you, good stuff, use it! Turning projects into rival camps creates drama, spreads misinformation, and makes the community hostile to people simply looking for accurate answers and the tool that works best for them.

Criticism is part of how we get better, but unsupported conspiracy theories and personal speculation about the people involved can be hurtful and damaging, and repeating them as fact is not criticism. The claim that OpenClaw was manufactured to get Peter a job at OpenAI has no evidence behind it, and the same goes for other theories about his role there unless evidence supports them. OpenClaw is now stewarded by an independent nonprofit foundation with a full-time team, the source remains public, and Peter still makes many technical calls.

OpenClaw is strong because of the people who build it, review it, test it, report problems, help each other, and keep showing up. We love the hell out of this community, and we will keep listening, strengthening the relationships we already have, forging new ones, and building a harness we know is changing the world. We are not done.

In this episode of OpenClaw’s official podcast, The ClawCast, Patrick and I are joined by Sam Odio, host of AI Worth Using, to discuss how OpenClaw can stay powerful for hackers, become more accessible to AI tinkerers, and grow into something anyone can use without sacrificing extensibility.

>Today we’re introducing the OpenClaw Foundation: a nonprofit home for open, independent personal AI.

>A full-time team. Great partners. One mission: bring personal AI to everyone.

>Welcome to the age of the lobster.🦞

In this episode of OpenClaw’s official podcast, The ClawCast, we talk about the ongoing OpenClaw onboarding overhaul, why this week’s planned demo was cancelled, what OpenClaw can learn from Hermes’s self-improvement system, and how OpenClaw compares to tools like Codex when it comes to long-running autonomous workflows.