Bring Your Own Lunch

#AI#Productivity

In my last post it was OpenAI’s Dots: the launch event was barely ten-odd minutes old when an open source version showed up. This time it’s Grok Bot’s turn.

On August 11, xAI’s Grok Bot went into closed beta: a team of always-on AI coworkers, each with its own cloud computer. You hand them the work, and they go get it done inside your various accounts. The catch: you have to be a paying SuperGrok or Cursor user, and the only model on the menu is Grok.

The same day, an open source version popped up on GitHub. These days it goes by OpenMausBot.

Cartoon: on the left, a chat app window titled “My bot friends.” Three bot friends sit in the sidebar: a blue “Analyst” labeled Claude, an orange “Writer” labeled Codex and a teal “Gofer” labeled Grok, each with a little computer next to its name. In the chat on the right, the Gofer says “Email drafted, on my PC.” Below that is an approval card, “Send this email?”, with a green “Allow” button and a grey “Deny” button, and under it my reply: “Let me look first.” To the right of the window, lzbob in a black baseball cap holds a three-tier lunchbox in both hands, the tiers labeled Claude, Codex and Grok, with a speech bubble saying “BYO lunch.” Overhead, a cloud holds a computer with a tag hanging off it that says “For rent.”
The stove’s free. Bring your own lunch. Computer rental extra.

What it is

OpenMausBot is by Milind Soni. It used to be called OpenGrokBot, and also MausBot. In under three months it has racked up 17,000 stars on GitHub (17,201 when I looked), 2,400-plus forks and over 100 contributors. It’s written in TypeScript under the Apache 2.0 license. It updates at a frightening clip: the version number is already 0.1.148, and three releases went out today alone.

It calls itself “the open source Grok Bot” and has nothing to do with xAI. And it isn’t only gunning for Grok Bot. The README casually name-checks Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, Manus’s Cue, and Instinct too, five in all, and points out that four closed-source personal agents like these came out within seven weeks in 2026.

The open-duet I covered last time name-dropped six. This one does five. These days an open source project that doesn’t name-drop a few big tech companies in its description is too embarrassed to leave the house.

What it looks like

It’s just a chat app, a lot like Telegram. The sidebar has a row of “friends,” and every friend is a real AI agent with its own temper, its own model, its own computer and its own apps. You chat with them, watch them work, and make the call on anything that matters.

Bring your own lunch

The project’s biggest feature is that meals are not included:

  • Your own agents: each bot runs on the claude, codex or grok command-line tool you’ve already installed and logged into on your machine, on the accounts and subscriptions you already have. No new sign-ups, and no middleman passing it along to you. If you want to hook up other models like OpenRouter or DeepSeek, you can configure that too.
  • Everything stays local: the little server that runs all the agents lives on your own machine at 127.0.0.1; chat history, keys and events are all stored in a ~/.openmausbot folder on your computer.
  • A computer for every bot: you can give it a Linux desktop in the cloud, or an isolated virtual machine on your own machine. On macOS it can even drive the computer you’re sitting at, but only if you explicitly switch that on.
  • Asks before it acts: before running a command or changing a file, it pops a card into the chat. Allow or deny, your call.

What else it does

  • One sign-in, whole team: through Composio it connects to 500-plus apps like Gmail, Slack, GitHub and Notion. Authorize once and every bot can use them.
  • Channels: open one for work, one for personal stuff, one for each project. The same crew of bots splits up and works them separately, and the chat histories don’t bleed into each other.
  • A whole team in one file: a single Markdown file can install an entire bot team, complete with channels, roles and recurring tasks. It shows you the list before installing, connections are off by default, and recurring tasks start out paused.
  • It talks: replies can be read out loud, and you can even call a bot on the phone. It reports to you while it works, and when it needs approval it just asks.
  • Schedules and triggers: summarize your inbox at 9 a.m. every weekday, or draft a reply whenever a certain client emails. That kind of thing you can leave it to keep an eye on.

Installing it

The easiest way is to grab an installer: Mac (Apple silicon and Intel both, signed), Windows, or Ubuntu 24.04. First you need at least one of the claude, codex or grok command-line tools installed and logged in on your machine.

Don’t want the desktop app? If you have Node.js 24, you can run it straight up:

npx openmausbot

If you’ve got a computer at home that’s always on, like a NAS, or a cloud server, run npx openmausbot serve to turn it into a service and connect from your phone.

The bill

The software itself is free. The meal, though, you’re paying for item by item:

  • The brains: the Claude, ChatGPT or Grok subscription is your own.
  • The cloud computer: provided by Boat. A 7-day trial with 25 hours thrown in, then from $20 a month, billed by the second, and only while the machine is running. If you don’t want to pay for that, use a local virtual machine or the computer in front of you.
  • Other services: Composio for hooking up apps, ElevenLabs for reading replies out loud and so on each come with their own accounts and their own prices.

Fair warning

  • It’s early: the README itself says “early, but usable.” The Ubuntu build is still in beta, and the phone and remote connection side is still being built.
  • Not all of it is open source: the enterprise/ folder in the repo has its own license. You can read the source, but using it for real takes a license; delete that folder and what’s left is the purely open source version. The name and the mascot are trademarks registered by a company.
  • Keys are stored in plain text: API keys you enter through the command line sit in a local config file, unencrypted, protected only by file permissions.
  • The Windows installer isn’t signed: during install, your system will warn you about an “Unknown publisher.”
  • Watch out for scam coins: the README says it outright. The project has never issued any coin, and coins using the names OpenMausBot, Maus or SupaMaus have nothing to do with it.

Last words

Grok Bot is a cafeteria with a meal plan, billed by the month. OpenMausBot gives you the stove for free; you bring your own lunch and rent the computer separately.

If you already have Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions at home and a computer that’s always on, this meal costs you next to nothing extra. If your cupboard is bare, go ask the cafeteria what a meal plan runs first.

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