Coding from Telegram: my OpenClaw + Ollama setup

Coding from Telegram: my OpenClaw + Ollama setup

I finally got a setup working that feels a bit like the future.

I launched OpenClaw with:

ollama launch openclaw --model kimi-k2.5:cloud

and connected it to Telegram, which means I can now talk to my coding assistant directly from my phone.

What makes this especially satisfying is that the whole thing is running on a very inexpensive mini PC at home:

Mini PC, 12GB RAM + 128GB ROM, Intel Celeron J4125 (up to 2.7 GHz), Windows 10 Pro, dual Wi-Fi 2.4/5G, Bluetooth 4.2, 4K HD, 2 HDMI + 1 VGA.

Nothing exotic. Nothing expensive. Just a small, affordable box quietly sitting there, acting as the bridge between my workspace and my phone.

That is part of the appeal. This setup feels surprisingly capable for something that costs very little and, beyond the hardware I already own, is effectively free to run.

The interesting part is not just that it chats back. It has access to my workspace, can help create projects, work with files, and act more like a real development companion than a simple question-answer bot. That changes the experience completely. It stops being something I occasionally open in a browser and starts feeling more like an always-available engineering copilot.

What I like most is the shift in how and where coding can happen.

I can be away from my desk, out doing groceries, commuting, or just walking around, and still make progress. I can send a quick message to scaffold an idea, create a project structure, inspect something in the workspace, or prepare the next task before I am back in front of the machine. It turns dead time into useful time.

That is the part that feels powerful: development becomes more ambient.

Instead of waiting for the perfect focused block at a desk, I can stay connected to the flow of a project throughout the day. A thought appears, I message it. A small task comes to mind, I delegate it. A project idea starts forming, I capture it immediately. By the time I sit down again, some of the groundwork is already done.

There is also something elegant about the stack itself. Ollama provides a clean way to launch the model workflow, OpenClaw gives the agent a useful operating surface, and Telegram becomes the lightweight interface that makes it all feel natural. No heavy setup on the phone, no friction, no need to open a laptop just to move a task forward.

The other thing I genuinely like is how accessible it is. You do not need a powerful workstation, a costly hosted service, or a complex mobile setup. A cheap mini PC, a Telegram account, and the right tooling are enough to build something that feels surprisingly close to a personal remote engineering assistant.

It is still early, of course, and this kind of workflow needs trust, guardrails, and careful handling when it comes to file access and automation. But even in its current form, it already feels genuinely useful.

A coding assistant in Telegram sounds like a gimmick until it starts helping you build real things while you are standing in a supermarket queue.

That is when it stops sounding like a demo and starts feeling like a new way of working.