A little back story. Over Christmas break, like so many people, I was given some extra usage of Claude Code by Anthropic. So I started playing with it. And after a few days of use, I was impressed and wanted to build something difficult.
I was always fascinated by social simulations. (Little-known fact: my MA thesis (2004, Political Science, I also have one in Survey Research from 2010) was an agent-based model simulating societal outcomes of various game-theoretic cooperation strategies.) The idea of having LLMs simulate the agents in simulations seemed intriguing. They can surely act like people. But all examples I have come across were quite rigid with a fixed number of players, very rigid worlds, and very old-school turn-based timing structures. I wanted something a little more free-flowing and a little more flexible. By this time, I have been following The Nerdy Novelist on YouTube and learning about the rhythm of LLM-assisted fiction writing, and I wondered if Sudowrite’s “beats” are possibly a better way to more fluidly handle turns in a social simulation. LLMs can invent dialogue. All we need to know is who is where, who they are with, and what they are doing. At the back of my mind, of course, were social scientific applications: simulations of societal disruptions like a natural disaster, the death of a society member, etc. But the idea could easily have been an art project too, where we just let agents live their lives and see if any interesting story emerges.
At the time, my AI server wasn’t running anything. So it also seemed like a good technical exercise. We have three NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs. I can definitely do this well with a smaller (Ministral 3 14b) model that fits into one of these (even unquantized with a decent context window). Let’s make sure they run parallel, simulating the beats taking place simultaneously. So, early January, right around the release of Claude Code 2.1, I started building.
It was insane. I only had the 17 EUR version of Claude, so for every 45 minutes of use, I waited 4 hours. Still, a few days later, I was simulating space-fantasy stories, urban interactions, and small-village life. I realized I needed to stop this vanity project and start building something for my current research. I had one use case where I needed to do quite slow but repetitive AI synthetic data simulation tasks. I conducted many experiments comparing the performance of various models, quantizations, and simulation approaches. After a quick upgrade to the (cheaper) Claude Max account, the next thing I knew, I was building general tools that went beyond my immediate use cases. (I am still on the cheaper accounts and have not hit a limit yet, though today I got to 99% building this blog.) Soon, I had more data than I knew what to do with, and I still wanted to run more and more case studies. The world felt like it had changed. And I had no idea how much.
Still in January, this was around the time OpenClaw (or ClawdBot, as it was called at the time – definitely not to be confused with Claude or Claude Code) exploded. The little open source AI assistant that stitched together a few AI functionalities and produced magic. (Dangrous magic, but magic nevertheless.) And I wondered if a ClawdBot / Moltbot / OpenClaw could do what Claude Code did for me, supervised, but do it autonomously, handle data generation, run analyses, and organize and visualize the results based on a few already-working examples. If it could, that would be amazing.
Around this time, I had to make a cross-continent move. And I quickly grew wary of all the OpenClaw horror stories: API accounts running up into the 1000s overnight, Anthropic accounts being blocked for terms-of-service violations, and OpenClaw randomly deleting their “watcher’s” emails or accessing their APIs and credit cards without permission. I figured it is better to wait, watch, and learn a little bit, understand the problems, and see if the security of OpenClaw improves. I have done this, and I feel now that it is time. A few days ago, I searched for academic (social-scientific) applications of OpenClaw. I found nothing. So I decided to document the journey.
The question is, can OpenClaw also become a useful research (and academic admin) assistant? Let’s find out. Join me for the journey.
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