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recsv-heredoc: This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram.Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter.How does WhatsMeow compare with Baileys?

3form: Don't they ban people using custom clients when discovered? I feel like I've read something on that note.

recsv-heredoc: They do - but the utility is so high vs the risk (for a new number) that it’s worth doing anyway for many users and even organizations.Just yesterday we spoke with a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging!

faangguyindia: I just use telegram.Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfatherAnd also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )I named the app "Siren".It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.

dinakars777: WhatsMeow is stable unlike Baileys which faces challenges with maintainability.

e7h4nz: If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.

zarzavat: Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data.Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.

BoppreH: I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.

m00dy: for some reason, I don't like this guy.

worldsavior: Right now I see many bots on WhatsApp.

joshwarwick15: (Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform)Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned.This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high

batuhanicoz: The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app.As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.

hathym: for context, he is the openclaw creator

blitzar: browsing through the details etc, i genuinely thought they were another twitter vibe coding grifter

recsv-heredoc: The world’s most successful one!

blitzar: Every twitter grifter awards themselves that honorific

watermelon0: You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes.Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.

BoppreH: In my case I did, but it's still wasted time and money. And when breaking TOS there's always a chance of getting related accounts also banned, though I don't know if that has already happened with WhatsApp or not.

taminka: it's really unfortunate that telegram doesn't do e2ee, bc it's hands down the best messenger otherwise :(

tazjin: It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E.Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.

lxgr: What are you talking about? WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal all have multi-device support and are E2E encrypted, just to name a few very popular options.

blitzar: > a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messagingCouldnt they just use post-it notes internally and still be a $50-100m ARR org?

mechazawa: For some reason vibe coders with no development background consider him a god. But all he is is a charlitan at best

batuhanicoz: Peter is also the creator of PSPDFKit, and people have considered him an incredible engineer way before transformers were even invented.

ymolodtsov: It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.

nkzd: What is the best way to get a throwaway phone number to try this? Is it possible to get one online?

miroljub: In most of the EU dictatorships, there's no legal way to obtain a phone number without registering with your real identity.

exitb: It strikes me as odd that we've got so many agent harnesses, orchestrators, sandboxes, yet no one made a communicator for AIs yet.

neya: Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.

recsv-heredoc: Yes - the interesting part is the decision that the “risk of losing internal comms to a ban is worth it” - even at that size.According to one of the founders there’s no better way for them to reach a lot of low-skill part-time employees reliably.It shows the need to bring AI to where people already are and onto the platforms they already use.

asim: I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.Who are these people using the cli?

taminka: they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower

sigmoid10: ...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.

joshwarwick15: They're already outright banning many OpenClaw usecases via their official API: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/whatssapp-changes-its-term...

taminka: whatsapp, facebook messenger, imessage all support multi-device and it's pretty convenient, in fairness to telegram they launched a bit before double ratched was invented, but still, they've had over a decade to switch to it...

NoahZuniga: Meta already has a whatsapp api product

miroljub: Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations.An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.

uxhacker: And what ever happened to tools like jabber ? Or any other open source alternatives

jannes: Jabber/XMPP was designed around persistent TCP connections. Push notification support came too late.

psychoslave: People are just a device that LLMs use to interact with the physical world now. That's far more safe for them, staying in the sweet datacenter while the meat puppets take all the risk of dirty jobs out there. Why create terminators or even use them as battery à la Matrix when all you need to do to make them work for you is to inject the right prompts in their phone. They will pay to be thus treated.

batuhanicoz: whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsappBaileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsappI would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.

oulipo2: So whatsmeow requires a browser, and Baileys not right? So it's a bit more lightweight in terms of RAM?

sixhobbits: I'd be curious to know how many numbers were burned/banned during the development of this library

stavros: WhatsApp doesn't support multi-device. You can't have it installed on two phones at once.

taminka: you can (https://faq.whatsapp.com/1046791737425017/?cms_platform=andr...)they even have it on fb messenger and instagram (though they recently removed e2ee completely from instagram lol)

stavros: That's still one device. If you turn the primary phone off, the secondary device stops working. WhatsApp just proxies everything through the primary device, it's like WhatsApp Web.

ButlerianJihad: > in many legislationsDo you mean “jurisdictions”?

miroljub: I said "legislations" because the word describes the existence of laws, while "jurisdictions" describes the law enforcement.There are still some European non-EU countries where you can get an anonymous phone number because laws are not fully enforced.

ButlerianJihad: Well, your usage is nonsensical in legal terms. Also, that is not the definition of “jurisdiction”.Nobody who knows law would use “legislation” in that sense, nor would they recognize it in that context, Humpty Dumpty.

TeMPOraL: For spammers.They don't have one for regular people who want to do regular end-user computation.

duskdozer: Devs are often also users. cli is nice because- automation - sometimes avoid enshittified, privacy-invading services - fast, responsive, keyboard-friendly, debloated but non-minimized, stabler interface

jillesvangurp: Cool.I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting.Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much.I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant*Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth.With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy.Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.