About Shelldex
Shelldex is a community-maintained directory of every project in the OpenClaw ecosystem — clones, forks, reimplementations, and inspired projects.
What started as one project has become an entire species. Rust rewrites, Go ports, bare-metal C on $5 chips, social networks for AI agents, and managed cloud platforms — the crustacean family tree is getting complicated. Clawdex exists to map it all.
The Naming Timeline
November 2025
📱 WhatsApp Relay
The primordial soup. Peter Steinberger builds a WhatsApp bot. Nobody knows what's about to happen.
November 2025
🥚 Clawd
Gets a real name — a portmanteau of "claw" and "Claude." The lobster identity begins.
December 2025
🐚 Clawdis
A brief identity. Most people missed this one entirely.
January 2026
🤖 Clawdbot
The name that caught fire on GitHub. Then Anthropic's lawyers noticed "Clawd" sounds a lot like "Claude."
January 27, 2026
🐣 Moltbot
The trademark-compliant name. Lasted 72 hours. Peter admitted it "never quite rolled off the tongue."
January 30, 2026
🦞 OpenClaw
The final form. Open-source identity, claw heritage intact. 228k+ stars and counting.
February 2026
🌊 The Ecosystem Explodes
NanoClaw, ZeroClaw, PicoClaw, IronClaw, MimicLaw, Moltis... the clones arrive. Clawdex is born to track them all.
February 27, 2026
🐚 Shelldex
Clawdex molts. The directory finds its name — shell for the crustacean lineage, dex for the index. Formerly at theclawdex.com.
"Five name changes in three months. The lobster molts fast." So do directories, apparently.
How It Works
Every project in the directory is a YAML file in our GitHub repo. Want to add a project? Open a PR. A human reviews it, merges it, and the site rebuilds automatically.
No forms, no accounts, no approval committees. Just git.
What This Is (and Isn't)
The OpenClaw ecosystem has spawned a lot of adjacent projects. Here's how Shelldex fits relative to a few you may have seen:
Shelldex (shelldex.com — you are here)
A catalog of OpenClaw-inspired agentic projects. Tracks personal AI agent frameworks, clones, forks, and alternatives — comparing them by GitHub stars, language, and activity. Think of it as the map for the OpenClaw ecosystem.
Workflow galleries (e.g. clawdex.io)
Sites that catalog what you can do with OpenClaw — use case recipes, automation examples, workflow templates. Useful, but a different thing entirely. We track what the frameworks are, not what users do with them.
Security scanners (e.g. clawdex.koi.security)
Tools that scan OpenClaw skills for malicious content before installation. Entirely separate from this directory — we track frameworks, not skill safety verdicts.