As a startup founder, I’m always looking for ways to improve my productivity. The promise of OpenClaw is enticing, however I couldn’t get past the security model, or lack thereof. I was already using Claude Code heavily and am a heavy WhatsApp user, so I wanted something that brings both together: WhatsApp for messaging my AI assistant and Claude Code as the agentic brain. The benefit of using Claude Code: I’m already paying for a Claude Max subscription, so this covers the cost. Not to mention the fact I trust Anthropic’s runtime more. The stack is a local relay server for WhatsApp webhooks, an MCP server bridging to Claude Code, and Arcade for scoped auth to Google Calendar, Gmail, and Slack. The piece that made it actually useful was Skills. Just markdown files that encode workflows. “When someone asks for meeting prep, pull calendar events, cross-reference email threads, check Slack for internal context, format it like this.” Anyone on the team can write one. No code deployment. Wrote up the full build with working code at every step. Repo is on GitHub too. Article: https://www.arcade.dev/blog/secure-openclaw-alternative-arcade-claude-code Github: https://github.com/manveer/whatsapp-assistant submitted by /u/manveerc
Originally posted by u/manveerc on r/ClaudeCode