OpenClaw: Five Names Before Finding the Right One

An open source project in the Claude ecosystem that is now called OpenClaw went through five different names in just six months of existence. Simon Willison documented this on May 16th on his blog before giving a lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, and the result is a small snapshot of how a project evolves in its early weeks: with plenty of experimentation and little attachment to any given name.

The repository's first commit dates from November 24, 2025. Since then, the README has recorded this sequence of identities: Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot → 🦞 OpenClaw. Willison used his own tool `first_line_history.py` — whose code is available on GitHub — to extract the first line of the README at each commit and reconstruct the complete timeline.

From WhatsApp relay to Claude client

What stands out most is not the number of name changes, but the starting point. The first name, Warelay, came with the subtitle WhatsApp Relay CLI (Twilio), suggesting the project wasn't built with Claude in mind at all. It was a utility for relaying WhatsApp messages through Twilio's API. Somewhere between November 2025 and now, the focus pivoted toward the Claude ecosystem and the project found both its final name and its community.

This kind of shift is not uncommon in projects orbiting LLM APIs: many start as convenient integrations and eventually become something more specific once the author discovers the use case that really interests them. What stands out here is that Git history preserves everything, and that someone took the trouble to recover it with an automated tool.

Why the Git trail matters

Beyond the anecdote, what Willison demonstrates with this exercise is the value of commit history as an archive of product decisions. In open source projects, it's common for the README to be the first document a potential contributor sees. Each time the first line of that README changes, so does the signal received by anyone arriving at the repository for the first time.

Reconstructing that timeline with a tool like `first_line_history.py` requires no special access: anyone can run it against any public repository. It's a reminder that Git doesn't just store code, but also the history of how a team or individual has reframed what they're building.

For those maintaining projects in the Claude ecosystem — MCP servers, skills, plugins for Claude Code, various integrations — this has a practical takeaway: frequent name changes in the first few weeks are normal and almost inevitable, but they leave a trace. If the project grows, that trace can be useful for understanding its evolution, or simply for telling a good story in a five-minute talk at PyCon.

Who's following OpenClaw

OpenClaw has a presence on GitHub under the homonymous organization and, judging by the attention Willison gives it, is on the radar of the developer community working with Claude. It's not an Anthropic project nor institutionally backed; it's exactly the kind of independent tool that emerges when there's enough critical mass of users building on top of an API.

We're unsure of its current development status beyond what Willison documented, but the fact that it made it to PyCon US as the subject of a lightning talk indicates it's gained enough traction to be worth explaining publicly.

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From our perspective, what's most worth taking from this post isn't the project itself, but the method: using Git history as a source of truth about a project's identity is a habit any maintainer should adopt. The name matters, and knowing when and how much it changes matters too.