Simon Willison’s Weblog
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16th May 2026
In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November.
Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer, according to the Git history of the OpenClaw README, is:
Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw
Or in detail (the output from the tool):
2025-11-24T11:23:15+01:00 16dfc1a # Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-24T11:41:37+01:00 d4153da # 📡 Warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-24T17:47:57+01:00 343ef9b # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio) 2025-11-25T04:44:10+01:00 14b3c6f # 📡 warelay — WhatsApp Relay CLI 2025-11-25T12:48:40+01:00 4814021 # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp—Twilio-backed or QR-linked. 2025-11-25T13:50:18+01:00 d51a3e9 # warelay 📡 - Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp via Twilio or QR-linked WhatsApp Web; webhook setup in one command 2025-11-25T13:51:13+01:00 4d2a8a8 # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp—Twilio-backed or QR-linked. 2025-11-25T14:52:43+01:00 1ef7f4d # 📡 warelay — Send, receive, and auto-reply on WhatsApp. 2025-12-03T15:45:32+00:00 a27ee23 # 🦞 CLAWDIS — WhatsApp Gateway for AI Agents 2025-12-08T12:43:13+01:00 17fa2f4 # 🦞 CLAWDIS — WhatsApp & Telegram Gateway for AI Agents 2025-12-19T18:41:17+01:00 7710439 # 🦞 CLAWDIS — Personal AI Assistant 2026-01-04T14:32:47+00:00 246adaa # 🦞 CLAWDBOT — Personal AI Assistant 2026-01-10T05:14:09+01:00 cdb915d # 🦞 Clawdbot — Personal AI Assistant 2026-01-27T13:37:47-05:00 3fe4b25 # 🦞 Moltbot — Personal AI Assistant 2026-01-30T03:15:10+01:00 9a71607 # 🦞 OpenClaw — Personal AI Assistant
Posted 16th May 2026 at 8:23 pm