Build in Public on Twitter with OpenClaw: The Complete Agent Setup
Building in public works. If you've spent any time on X, you've seen it: founders who tweet their progress consistently end up with bigger audiences, more customers, and better feedback loops than those who don't.
The problem isn't knowing this. The problem is actually doing it.
You spend 8 hours shipping features, fixing bugs, talking to users. By the time you look up, it's 11 PM, and tweeting about what you built today is the last thing on your mind. You tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow. You won't.
Here's how to fix that with an AI agent that handles the posting while you handle the building.
Why Build in Public Matters (Briefly)
You don't need a 2,000-word essay on why building in public is good. You already know. But the short version:
Social proof is a growth engine. When people watch you build something over months, they trust it more than a landing page they found on Product Hunt. They saw the messy commits, the bug fixes at midnight, the "we just hit 100 users" post. That history is worth more than any marketing campaign.
Community builds itself. People who follow your build journey become invested. They give feedback, report bugs, tell their friends. Some of them become customers. A few become advocates.
Accountability keeps you shipping. When you tell 500 followers you're launching a feature this week, you launch it. Public commitment is a powerful motivator.
Hiring gets easier. Developers follow builders. When you're ready to hire, you've already got a pool of people who know your product, your stack, and your values.
None of this works if you don't post consistently. And that's where everyone falls off.
The Consistency Problem
Here's what actually happens:
Monday: You ship a feature. You're in flow state. You forget to tweet about it. By Tuesday, it feels like old news.
Wednesday: You fix a nasty bug. It was interesting — the kind of thing other developers would appreciate hearing about. You think "I should write a thread about this." You don't.
Friday: You realize you haven't posted all week. You write something generic like "Big things coming soon!" It gets 2 likes. One is from your mom.
The pattern is always the same. You're too deep in the work to tweet about the work. By the time you surface, the moment has passed. The context is gone. You can't remember the exact error message or the specific metric.
Manual tweeting breaks your flow. Batch-writing tweets on Sunday (which we've written about before) helps, but it doesn't capture the day-to-day details that make build-in-public content resonate.
You need something that works at the speed of building.
The Fix: An AI Agent That Posts For You
The idea is simple. You have an AI agent (OpenClaw, in this case). You give it the ability to post to X through OpenTweet's API. You tell it what you're working on. It writes the tweet, checks your limits, and publishes it — or schedules it for the right time.
No context switching. No "I'll tweet about that later." You're already talking to your agent. You just say "post about what we just shipped" and it's done.
If you haven't set up OpenClaw with OpenTweet yet, start with our connection guide. That covers the basics in 3 minutes.
This post is about the next step: installing a specialized skill that pre-configures your agent for #BuildInPublic content specifically.
Setup: 3 Steps
1. Install the Build in Public skill
clawhub install opentweet/build-in-public
This gives your OpenClaw agent templates, tone guidelines, and workflows tuned for build-in-public content. It knows how to write release announcements, milestone posts, weekly recaps, and technical deep dives.
2. Set your environment variables
export OPENTWEET_API_KEY="ot_your_key_here"
If you want your agent to pull data from GitHub automatically (latest releases, commit history, star counts):
export GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_your_token_here"
The GitHub token is optional. Without it, your agent still writes great build-in-public content — you just need to tell it what you've been working on instead of it pulling the data itself.
Don't have an OpenTweet API key yet? Sign up here (7-day free trial, then $5.99/month). Go to Settings > API > Generate New Key.
3. Start posting
openclaw "post about the feature I just shipped: we added CSV export to the dashboard"
Your agent will draft a tweet, check your posting limits, and either publish it immediately or ask if you'd rather schedule it.
That's the whole setup.
Content Types Your Agent Creates
The skill comes with templates and guidelines for six types of build-in-public content. Here's what each looks like in practice.
Release Announcements
When you ship a new version, tell your agent. Or, if you've set GITHUB_TOKEN, it can pull the latest release from your repo automatically.
Example prompt:
openclaw "check our latest GitHub release and post about it"
What it posts:
Just shipped OpenTweet v2.3 🚀
What's new:
→ Bulk scheduling (up to 50 posts at once)
→ Thread analytics
→ Faster queue processing (3x improvement)
If you're scheduling more than 5 tweets a week, bulk mode is going to save you real time.
#BuildInPublic
The agent reads the release notes, picks the top changes, and writes a tweet that explains why the changes matter — not just what they are.
Milestone Celebrations
These are the posts that tend to perform best in #BuildInPublic. Specific numbers, honest context.
Example prompt:
openclaw "celebrate hitting 1,000 users — we started 4 months ago with 0"
What it posts:
OpenTweet just hit 1,000 users.
4 months ago we had 0. No Product Hunt launch, no ads. Just consistent posting and word of mouth.
The biggest unlock was adding API support. Developers started integrating us into their workflows and telling other developers.
#BuildInPublic
Notice: no "we're thrilled," no firework emojis, no fake excitement. Just the number, the context, and the lesson. That's what people actually engage with.
Daily Progress Updates
The bread and butter of building in public. Quick posts about what you worked on today.
Example prompt:
openclaw "post about today's progress: spent the morning fixing a race condition in the scheduling queue, then shipped the new onboarding flow in the afternoon"
What it posts:
Today's build log:
- Fixed a race condition in our scheduling queue (posts were occasionally firing twice)
- Shipped the new onboarding flow — 3 steps instead of 7
- Tomorrow: tackling the thread composer redesign
The race condition was interesting. Two workers grabbing the same job within the same millisecond. Added a distributed lock.
#BuildInPublic
Short, specific, real. The technical detail makes it credible.
Technical Deep Dives / TIL
Developers love these. A specific problem you hit, how you diagnosed it, and what you learned.
Example prompt:
openclaw "share what I learned today: our API response times doubled because we were N+1 querying user subscriptions on every auth check"
What it posts:
TIL: Our API latency doubled overnight and I couldn't figure out why.
Turns out we had an N+1 query. Every authenticated request was hitting the subscriptions table separately instead of joining on the auth query.
One eager-load line: response times dropped from 180ms back to 40ms.
#BuildInPublic
Feature Launch Announcements
When you ship something new and want to drive awareness.
Example prompt:
openclaw "announce the new thread composer — users can now drag and drop to reorder tweets in a thread"
What it posts:
New in OpenTweet: drag-and-drop thread composer.
You can now reorder tweets in a thread by dragging them. Sounds small, but if you've ever written a 10-tweet thread and realized tweet 3 should be tweet 7... you know.
Built this because 4 users asked for it in the same week.
#BuildInPublic
The "built this because" line is key. It shows you listen to users. People notice that.
Bug Fix Acknowledgments
This is where most founders drop the ball. Nobody wants to tweet about bugs. But transparent bug posts build more trust than ten success posts.
Example prompt:
openclaw "post about the scheduling bug we fixed — some posts were publishing 2 hours late due to a timezone conversion error"
What it posts:
We shipped a bug last week. Some scheduled posts were publishing 2 hours late.
Root cause: timezone conversion. We were storing UTC but converting to user timezone twice on the scheduling side.
Fixed, deployed, and added a test that would have caught this.
Won't happen again. But it did happen, and you should know.
#BuildInPublic
Honest. Specific about the cause. Shows what you're doing to prevent it. This is the kind of post that makes people trust you more, not less.
Example Week of Automated Content
Here's what a typical week looks like when your agent handles the posting:
| Day | Content Type | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Weekly goals | "This week: finishing the API v2 migration, launching the Chrome extension beta, and fixing 3 reported bugs. Let's go." |
| Tuesday | Technical insight | "TIL: You can cut your Docker image size by 60% by switching from node:18 to node:18-alpine and using multi-stage builds. Our CI went from 4 min to 90 seconds." |
| Wednesday | Feature update | "Just shipped: you can now schedule threads in OpenTweet. Write all your tweets, set the time, and the whole thread posts at once." |
| Thursday | Community milestone | "50 people are now using our API to post from their AI agents. A month ago that number was 3. Wild." |
| Friday | Week-in-review thread | 4-5 tweet thread recapping the week: what shipped, what broke, what's next, and a question for the audience. |
You can schedule this entire week in one conversation:
openclaw "schedule a week of build-in-public content for next week based on what we shipped this week"
Your agent uses the OpenTweet bulk API to create all 5+ posts in a single request, each scheduled for the right day and time.
Customizing Your Agent's Voice
The skill comes with default tone guidelines (authentic, specific, no hype), but you can adjust them.
Setting your tone
When you first use the skill, tell your agent about your brand voice:
openclaw "for all my build-in-public posts, keep the tone dry and technical. I'm a backend engineer, not a growth hacker. No exclamation marks. Minimal emojis."
Or the opposite:
openclaw "I want my build-in-public posts to be more casual and fun. Use emojis, keep it short, make it feel like I'm texting a friend."
Your agent remembers these preferences and applies them to every post.
Reviewing before publishing
By default, your agent will draft a post and ask for your approval before publishing. If you want fully autonomous posting:
openclaw "post about today's progress and publish it immediately without asking me"
For most people, the draft-first approach is better. You stay in control, but you don't have to write from scratch.
Creating drafts for batch review
If you prefer to review everything at once:
openclaw "create 5 draft tweets about our progress this week — don't schedule or publish them"
Your agent creates them as drafts in OpenTweet. You can review and edit them in the OpenTweet dashboard, then schedule or publish when you're ready.
Tips for Authentic Build in Public Posts
Whether your agent writes them or you do, these patterns consistently perform well:
Share failures, not just wins. The "we broke production at 3 AM" post will outperform the "we just launched" post almost every time. People are tired of highlight reels. Honesty cuts through.
Include specific numbers. "We grew a lot" means nothing. "We went from 47 to 312 users in January" means everything. Numbers make posts concrete and believable. They also make your progress trackable — people love watching numbers go up over weeks and months.
Show before and after. "We optimized our API" is forgettable. "API response time: 850ms -> 120ms after switching from PostgreSQL full-text search to Typesense" is a post people save and share.
Ask questions. End some posts with a genuine question. "We're debating between feature A and feature B — what would you want?" People love giving opinions, and their answers are free market research.
Don't over-polish. The best build-in-public posts feel slightly raw. They're written in the moment, not crafted by a marketing team. If your agent's output sounds too clean, tell it to rough it up.
Be regular, not frequent. 3-4 posts per week beats 3 posts per day that run out of things to say. Consistency matters more than volume.
How It Works Under the Hood
When your agent posts through the skill, here's the actual API flow:
1. GET https://opentweet.io/api/v1/me
→ Check: authenticated? subscription active? posts remaining today?
2. POST https://opentweet.io/api/v1/posts
→ Create the tweet (or thread, or bulk batch)
→ Body: { "text": "your tweet content" }
3. POST https://opentweet.io/api/v1/posts/{id}/publish
→ Publish to X immediately
→ Or: POST /schedule with { "scheduled_date": "2026-03-01T09:00:00Z" }
Three API calls. That's it. Your agent handles all of this — you just tell it what to post about.
Full API docs at opentweet.io/api/v1/docs.
Pricing
OpenTweet is $5.99/month with a 7-day free trial. API access is included, no extra charge.
OpenClaw is free and open-source. The build-in-public skill is free.
Your total cost for an autonomous #BuildInPublic posting agent: $5.99/month.
For reference, Twitter API Basic access alone costs $100/month. And it doesn't include scheduling, threads, or bulk posting.
Get Started
- Sign up for OpenTweet — 7-day free trial, no credit card for the trial
- Connect your X account (one-click OAuth)
- Generate an API key (Settings > API > Generate New Key)
- Install the skill:
clawhub install opentweet/build-in-public
export OPENTWEET_API_KEY="ot_your_key_here"
- Tell your agent what you're building:
openclaw "post about today's progress: we just shipped the new settings page and fixed the mobile layout bug"
Total setup: under 5 minutes. Your first build-in-public post goes out today.
You keep building. Your agent keeps posting. Your audience keeps growing. That's the deal.
Already using the OpenTweet x-poster skill? The build-in-public skill adds specialized templates and workflows on top of the same API. Install both — they don't conflict.
Start Scheduling Your X Posts Today
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