Glossary

The openclawOS vocabulary.

A quick reference for the terms used across the architecture, channels, and use cases.

openclawOS

The Neul Labs distribution of the open-source openclaw multi-channel AI agent gateway. A self-hosted daemon that connects AI agents to messaging channels on hardware you control.

Gateway (kernel)

The single long-running daemon at the core of openclawOS. It routes messages, isolates agent processes, and persists state — behaving like a microkernel. It dispatches to agents rather than calling LLMs directly.

Channel

A messaging integration — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, iMessage, Slack and 30+ more. Each channel is a separate process supervised by the Gateway, so a crash in one cannot take down another.

Pi

The default agent that ships with openclawOS. Pi has real tools — shell, browser, file system, and vector memory — so it can act, not just chat.

Agent

The unit that reasons and acts. openclawOS ships Pi and supports sub-agents and bring-your-own agents. Agents receive dispatched messages from the Gateway and reply through the originating channel.

Sub-agent

A specialised agent that a primary agent can delegate to for a focused task, keeping the main conversation clean while offloading work.

Tool use

An agent calling a capability — a shell command, a browser action, a file read, a vector lookup — to accomplish a task instead of only generating text.

Binding

The glue that connects a message or event to the tools and actions an agent should run. Bindings turn a messenger into a control surface for the rest of your stack.

Session

A per-sender conversation context. openclawOS isolates sessions so one sender's context never bleeds into another's, even within the same group.

Session isolation

The guarantee that each sender gets a separate, private session. It keeps context and memory scoped per person across channels.

Vector memory

Durable, searchable memory stored in SQLite with a sqlite-vec index. It lets an agent recall relevant context semantically and survives restarts.

sqlite-vec

The vector-search extension for SQLite that openclawOS uses to store and query embeddings for session memory — no external vector database required.

Self-hosted

Running openclawOS on your own hardware and your own LLM account, so messages, credentials, and derived data never leave your infrastructure.

Control UI

An optional web interface that connects to the Gateway over a WebSocket to manage agents, channels, and sessions from a browser.