Remote is great for the vibe coders. I suspect OpenClaw is still better for the vibe workers — which is everyone else.
Remote, if it’s Anthropic’s Remote Control, arrived last week as a research preview for Max subscribers. That feature lets you carry on a Claude Code session from a phone, a tablet or a browser, and the distinction Anthropic draws is where the work happens: unlike Claude Code on the web, “Remote Control sessions run directly on your machine and interact with your local filesystem.” A fine thing if your work is a repository. Most people’s work is an inbox, a calendar, a CRM and a pile of documents.
That’s OpenClaw’s territory. Its own description is “your AI assistant, on your own hardware, in every chat app you already use,” with skills that “teach the agent repeatable procedures it loads on demand.” But I doubt Anthropic is far from a virtual computer product that’s effectively OpenClaw. The distance between running your code from your phone and running your day from it is a product decision more than a research problem.
What I’m most interested in right now, though, are the MCP tools that get plugged into OpenClaw and its ilk. MCP stopped being Anthropic’s protocol and became everyone’s when it moved to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation in December, by which point, about a year in, it had more than 97 million monthly SDK downloads and some 10,000 active servers. Skills are the other socket. Anthropic’s definition is “folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed.” Tools the agent can call, and procedures the agent can learn. A CRM connector is the first kind. How this particular company qualifies a lead is the second.
A couple of folks now have my OpenClaw + Opinion: MCP services for RAG, CRM, project management and communications. It’s absurdly useful. An orchestrator on its own is a very clever switchboard with nothing wired to it.
Basically, you’ve got an orchestrator — now what can, or do, you orchestrate, via MCP or Skills?
