FIELD NOTES / CUSTOM CODE LABS
Ideas worth
building on.
Lessons from the work.
Practical thinking on software, AI,
and the business of building things.
THE JOURNAL / BY RICHARD GABELA
The OpenClaw USER.md File: A Complete Guide With Real Examples
USER.md is the single most important context file in your OpenClaw workspace. It teaches your AI agent who you are so every session does not start cold. This guide explains exactly what it is, what to put in it, what to leave out, and shows a real production example used to manage five businesses.
Read the storyOpenClaw: How to Set Up Your Own Self-Hosted AI Assistant on a Cloud VPS
A comprehensive, real-world guide to deploying OpenClaw — the open-source AI gateway with 68K+ GitHub stars — on a cloud VPS. Covers architecture, secure SSH tunneling, Telegram integration, browser automation, Gmail webhooks, and the hard lessons we learned along the way.
Read the story