Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw

We started a direct OpenClaw fork, but we didn't want to always push upstream updates manually. So now we are completely detached from it. The GitHub says its a fork because it was originally forked, but now we have completely separated ourselves from it.

Now instead of bundling and patching from inside it, we just ship alongside OpenClaw so you can use the latest OpenClaw CLI separately yourself.

Especially considering this project is 2 days old and has 580 stars. 500 seems like it would be a nice round number if one were to purchase bot engagement. Not confident enough to make that claim directly, but something about this project doesn't sit right in general.

Thank you, I'll be here for everyone to try it out, let me know how it goes!

Eventually there will just database tables, some skill files, and an agent

Data gathering / creating / updating / filtering / creating reports, Doing certain action on every data entry (like sending email), etc.

Telling DenchClaw to "make it less robotic" on 300+ personalised drafts is still better than me actually making it less robotic myself imo

Customer Relationship Management.

Broad term for tools used to manage interactions with existing customers and/or sales prospects.

This is a pretty widely known acronym

Sorry! It's basically a database for normies.

Oh yea

Ha, I get why it looks that way from the CRM angle, but outreach is maybe 5% of what I actually use DenchClaw for day to day.

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.

This is an OpenClaw framework, so it installs / relies on your existing OpenClaw codebase. I think there has been a ton of requests on Claude Code support, someone has been working on a PR for exactly this, I'll update you here if it ships.

To make this easier we could develop some kind of… query or… command language for this.

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!

> created 17 minutes ago

Is this a bot lol, use words not buzzwords

Nice, this seems interesting. I don't use Obsidian (I use Logseq) but this has given me a couple of ideas for a CRM I am building (it's currently in a Personal Relationship manager phase which I've found useful for about a year or two).

Thanks for sharing.

Love this setup! I also use Obsidian, but after DenchClaw I usually just open my Obsidian directory into DenchClaw so I can do anything with it. It has all the needed primitives for me like the markdown editor, graphs, etc.

That's a simple but useful set up, thanks for sharing.

I get why it looks that way from the CRM angle, but outreach is maybe 5% of what I actually use DenchClaw for day to day.

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.

Become? I believe that’s the point.

[astronaut with gun meme] Neal Stephenson depicts this outcome in his novels as "The Miasma" and introduces a zero knowledge biometric based cryptography scheme used by everyone to validate content, and everyone has to have advanced AI filters in order to pluck out tiny tidbits of signal from among the noise.

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.

... or disastrous comedy?

> 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.

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

Yea, it has been a little shocking to me that the rising narratives around "AI agents everywhere" and "enable the web for AI agents" requires what we've all been wanting for awhile on the web (openness and interoperability) but that the same big players in tech have been clearly against for a long time. Like the fact that Google recently released that Google Workspace CLI (https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli) is a perfect example.

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.

Sounds like a great name for a chaos-fork for Openclaw.

That's... not a bad idea. The downside is the bot would be doing a lot of these and false-positives would be... embarrassing (like a real investor outreach).

I'm in.

It also does all or most knowledge work there is, the goal is for it to be smartly be able to do anything you ever do on your machine.

I've taken that bit out of the text above. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314105 for more.

I've taken that bit out of the text above - I originally advised Kumar to put it in there (it's actually from the opening of the demo video), but in hindsight, I should have known it would backfire with the HN audience.

100% :-/

The way imports work in DenchClaw is a bit unconventional, when you tell it to "import my HubSpot", the agent literally opens your browser (using the copied Chrome profile), navigates to HubSpot, triggers the export, and then ingests the downloaded files into the workspace DuckDB. So the bottleneck isn't really a fat in-memory ETL... it's more like processing a CSV/JSON export file on disk.

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.