Testing ZeroClaw, Part 3: Social noise no more

In which ZeroClaw becomes a note taker for this blog

May 25, 2026 · 2 min read

I wrote some time ago about how I was testing ZeroClaw, a self-hosted agent in the Claw-like ecosystem, and how I wanted to build a workflow for sending links and ideas through Telegram to turn into structured notes that I could later use to write posts for this blog. At the time, the ZeroClaw project was having some issues and had been temporarily taken offline by GitHub. Everything was eventually fixed.

I finally sat down and upgraded to the the latest version of the binary. Since the last time I used it, the structure had changed so much that I couldn’t even open the dashboard with my current config. So I just wiped everything and started over using the install script and onboarding process, which are much smoother than before. The previous issues with tool use in chat also seem to be fixed: the bot can actually do useful things out-of-the-box.

I sat down and co-developed a new note-taking skill with ChatGPT. The workflow is simple:

  • Invoke with /note in chat
  • Draft a concise note of the provided content (using web fetching for links)
  • Present the note to the user and go back-and-forth until the user approves
  • Run a Python script to write the note to the local blog repo, commit it, and push it
  • The resulting note is now visible in Sveltia CMS under ‘Notes’

I thought DeepSeek V3.2 would be a good model to pilot OpenClaw and this skill, but I was wrong. The chat would frequently hang and the bot would stop responding, sometimes giving me dry orchestration messages like the following instead of actual responses:

Chat screenshot showing these messages: “Hello!” and “[No reply sent: The user’s “Hello” is a greeting; the assistant’s last message was a reply, and no new query is present. This is likely social noise.]”

Initially, I was stuck on trying to debug the skill, but these issues went away when I switched models to Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite.

It’s not quite magic, but it feels like a step up from the current workflow of “keep in my bookmarks folder until I get around to writing a half-baked draft”.