OpenGrokBot 🦞🤖

Always-on AI teammates, each with its own computer — running on your hardware, with your credentials, under your roof.

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xAI's Grok Bot sells always-on teammates that each get a cloud computer — browser, filesystem, terminal — with persistent memory, bot-to-bot handoffs, and an iMessage-shaped app to manage them. It costs $120–300/month, and every bot runs on xAI's cloud with your logins inside it.

This is the same shape, self-hosted. One gateway process on your machine, one Docker container per bot, a dense web client that reads like a workbench, and any OpenAI-compatible model behind it.

Ask the room — everyone answers for their own patch, the chief of staff closes with ✓ item → @bot · when.	Its computer: the live screen you can take over to sign in, and what it has scheduled.

What a teammate actually is here

A folder with a SOUL.md, a thread in the sidebar, and a container of its own:

The bot's credentials live in its browser profile, in its container. The gateway never sees a password, and neither does your config file.

What it does today

Every line below is implemented and covered by tests — nothing here is a roadmap item.

The management surface

• Sidebar as org chart. One thread per teammate, plus group threads. Previews are completion states, so a glance down the list is a walk past everyone's desk.
• One report grammar. Work comes back as ✓ system → result · count lines with a single closing sentence that surfaces only what needs you. Same shape from every teammate.
• Draft-and-hold approvals. Anything leaving the workspace stops at the door: the chip shows exactly what would go out, with Approve / Discard. A bare 👍 in the thread releases the newest one. Decisions are idempotent — a second click gets a 409, not a second send.
• Visible memory. "From now on, quiet accounts wait for my read" writes a rule into that bot's MEMORY.md and posts the diff as a chip. The rule is in its system prompt from the next turn on.
• Routines from the conversation. "Post a digest every day" registers a cron job, shows the schedule in plain English, survives restarts, and fires on time.

The computer

• shell, read_file, write_file inside the container.
• browser_goto / browser_extract / browser_click against a real headed Chromium — so login-walled sites work, which pure API/MCP setups cannot do.
• browser_screenshot posts what the bot saw into the thread as evidence.
• Takeover login. At a login wall the bot calls ask_for_login instead of asking for a password. You open its screen from the thread, sign in once in its browser, and the session persists in its profile — across container restarts.
• Containers start lazily, survive restarts, and publish their ports to 127.0.0.1 only.

The crew

• Group threads. Ask the room a question: each teammate answers for its own patch, then the chief of staff closes with a dispatch table — ✓ item → @bot · when — and one line on what needs you today.
• Allowlisted handoffs. message_bot drops a scoped task into a teammate's thread and wakes it up. By default only the chief can reach everyone; peer-to-peer is off until you name the direction. Relays are capped at two hops so two bots cannot echo at each other.
• Hire from the sidebar. +, a name, one line of job description. No workflow editor, no tool checklist — the complexity accumulates in use, not in a setup form.

Quickstart

Needs Node 22+, pnpm, and Docker (for the bot computers).

git clone https://github.com/wolfqing/OpenGrokBot.git
cd OpenGrokBot
pnpm install
docker build -t opengrokbot/bot:dev docker/bot

Try it with no API key at all — a scripted stub model drives every path end to end:

OPENGROKBOT_MODEL=stub pnpm dev

Then open http://localhost:5173.

Point it at a real model (anything OpenAI-compatible — xAI, Kimi, DeepSeek, a local Ollama):

OPENGROKBOT_API_KEY=sk-… OPENGROKBOT_MODEL=grok-4 pnpm dev

Variable	Default	What it does
OPENGROKBOT_API_BASE	https://api.x.ai/v1	Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint
OPENGROKBOT_API_KEY	—	Your key. Never written to disk by this repo
OPENGROKBOT_MODEL	grok-4	stub runs offline with no key
OPENGROKBOT_DATA	gateway/data	SQLite, bot workspaces, screenshots
OPENGROKBOT_A2A_ALLOW	(empty)	Peer handoffs, e.g. researcher>market-watch

In a slow-network region, build with a mirror: docker build --build-arg APT_MIRROR=mirrors.aliyun.com …

Security is the point, not a footnote

The loudest objection to hosted always-on agents: an agent that never sleeps, holding all your credentials, on someone else's infrastructure, exposed to prompt injection. The self-hosted answers:

• Credentials never leave your machine. They live in the bot's browser profile, inside its container.
• The bot never asks for a password in chat. It asks you to take over its screen instead.
• Every bot is in a cage by default — separate container, its own workspace, no access to your host.
• Outward actions are held, not sent, until you approve them.
• Bot-to-bot messaging is off until you allowlist a direction.
• Screens bind to 127.0.0.1. The panel is for your machine; do not port-forward it.
• Inbound messages are untrusted input. Read docs/security.md before exposing anything.

Give bots their own accounts rather than yours — separate email, separate calendar, invited only into what they need. That is the right answer for hosted agents too; here it is enforceable.

Cost

	Grok Bot	OpenGrokBot
Software	$120–300/mo per seat	$0 (MIT all the way down)
Compute	included (xAI's cloud)	your Mac / mini PC / ~$5 VPS
Model	included (Grok only)	your key, any provider — or local at $0
Your logins	on xAI's cloud	in a container on your machine

Honest note: Grok Bot's zero-setup polish, iOS app, and teach-by-demonstration are real advantages. If you are happy putting your accounts on xAI's cloud and paying for the convenience, buy it. This repo is for everyone who answered "are you comfortable with that?" with no.

Roadmap

• teach-mode — record a browser demonstration, compile it into a reusable routine. The one Grok Bot feature with no open equivalent; design discussion in #1
• Telegram as a notification / approval surface for when you are away from the desk
• One-command VPS image (cloud-init)
• Native app shell

FAQ

Relative to Grok Bot? Same job — always-on teammates, their own computers, persistent memory, handoffs — opposite custody model, and zero shared code (Grok Bot is closed-source; there is nothing to fork). It can even run on the same brain: point it at the Grok API.

Relative to OpenClaw? v0.1 of this repo was a distribution on top of OpenClaw. v0.2 is its own core, because a private computer per teammate pulls against OpenClaw's shared-host model. The old recipe is kept at docs/openclaw-recipe.md. Not an official OpenClaw project.

Do I have to use Docker? For the computers, yes. Everything else — threads, approvals, memory, routines, group dispatch — runs without it; bots simply report that they have no computer attached.

More in docs/faq.md · docs/multi-bot.md · docs/comparison.md

Disclaimer

Unofficial. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to xAI or the OpenClaw Foundation. "Grok" is a trademark of xAI — the name is used here only to identify the product this stack is an alternative to.

License

MIT. Star it if it saved you $300/month. ⭐