Claw is my Telegram-based personal assistant. This repo is its open skeleton — the full engine and architecture, with my personal data and integrations stripped out so you can build your own.

It's not a wrapper around a chat completion. Each Telegram forum topic spawns a long-lived, resumable Claude Code session with its own persona and memory, so "Coding," "Coach," and "Finance" are genuinely different agents that never bleed into each other. A nightly rollup distills the day's notes into durable memory, a fleet of cron jobs turns the bot from reactive to proactive, and the assistant talks back through Telegram's full native rich formatting — tables, math, live date entities, inline media — by shelling out to its own small CLI toolbelt.

Architecture

flowchart TD
    You(["You · Telegram"]) <--> Router["grammY router<br/>auth · queue · media · streaming"]

    Router -->|"one isolated session<br/>per forum topic"| T1["Coding<br/>Claude Code session"]
    Router --> T2["Coach<br/>Claude Code session"]
    Router --> T3["General<br/>Claude Code session"]

    T1 --> Mem["Layered memory<br/>daily notes → nightly rollup →<br/>MEMORY.md + per-topic"]
    T2 --> Mem
    T3 --> Mem
    Mem -.->|"reinjected at session start"| Router

    T1 -.->|"shells out to"| CLI["CLI toolbelt<br/>post · react · media ·<br/>diagrams · delegate · monitor"]
    CLI -.-> You

    Crons["Cron + heartbeat jobs"] -->|"inbox · calendar ·<br/>proactive nudges"| Router

📖 Deeper dive: ARCHITECTURE.md — turn lifecycle, the memory pipeline, the rich-output path, and the CLI toolbelt, with diagrams.

What makes it interesting

• 🧠 Per-topic isolated agents — each forum topic is its own persistent Claude Code session with its own persona and memory file. No cross-talk, no context soup. Sub-topics in a topic-enabled supergroup get their own isolated session too, keyed by thread.
• 📚 Memory that survives restarts — append-only daily notes get promoted by a nightly LLM rollup into a lean long-term MEMORY.md plus per-topic files. The bot wakes up knowing you.
• ⏰ Proactive, not just reactive — a shared cron runner fires scheduled Claude jobs (inbox triage, calendar, digests, health) and routes the results to the right topic.
• 💬 Native rich Telegram output — replies render as real Telegram rich text: tables, task lists, fenced code, $LaTeX$, spoilers, collapsibles, live timezone-aware date entities, maps, and inline images/video/audio — with an automatic HTML fallback.
• 🧰 A CLI toolbelt the bot wields itself — small standalone CLIs the agent shells out to in order to act in Telegram mid-turn: post/edit a live progress line, drop a reaction, send media, render a Mermaid diagram to an image, host a file, delegate a parallel sub-agent, or arm a watcher that wakes a fresh turn when a long background job finishes.
• 🎭 Personas & guest mode — per-topic personas, prefix routing, and a stub-then-edit guest mode you can @mention from any chat the bot isn't even in.
• ♻️ Self-maintaining — Claw can read and edit its own source, rebuild, and restart; smart auto-clear summarizes idle sessions into memory instead of nuking them mid-thought.
• 🔧 Production-hardened details — model-alias indirection, periodic context re-injection, streaming Telegram message edits, per-topic queueing, and systemd units with reliability drop-ins + failure alerts.

Project structure

claw-skeleton/
├── CLAUDE.md           # the blueprint — what the assistant is and how it remembers
├── .env.example        # the environment variables you fill in
├── src/
│   ├── bot/            # grammY router, middleware, commands, guest mode
│   ├── claude/         # session lifecycle: runner, auto-clear, checkpoints, prompt builder
│   ├── telegram/       # sender — rich Telegram output, streaming edits, HTML fallback
│   ├── tools/          # the CLI toolbelt the bot shells out to (sanitized examples)
│   ├── util/           # logger, sanitizer, graceful shutdown
│   ├── config.ts       # topics, personas, models, constants
│   └── index.ts        # entry point
├── cron-scripts/       # shared cron runner framework + libs
├── cron-prompts/       # example scheduled-job prompts
├── systemd/            # unit + timer patterns (bot, cron, reliability drop-ins)
└── personas/           # example personas (default, coding, coach)

Start with CLAUDE.md — it's the spec that defines what the assistant is, how it remembers, and how it behaves. The TypeScript is the engine; CLAUDE.md is the soul.

Build your own

# 1. create a Telegram bot via @BotFather, make a topic-enabled supergroup
# 2. wire it up
cp .env.example .env          # add BOT_TOKEN, CHAT_ID, OWNER_USER_ID
npm install
#   edit src/config.ts  -> your topic IDs, personas, routing
#   write personas/*.md and cron-prompts/*.txt for your own life
npm run build && npm start
# 3. (optional) install the systemd units to run it 24/7 + on a schedule

This is a sanitized skeleton, not a turnkey app: the personal integrations (email, calendar, finance, health…) and data were removed by design. Point your own Claude Code at the repo and have it flesh out the parts you want — that's the whole idea.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.