A fun weekend project exploring how to run a personal AI agent in the background on an old M1 MacBook Air without draining the battery.

Recently, I decided to play around with the [OpenClaw AI agent](https://openclaw.ai) and see if I could get it running 24/7 on my trusty fanless M1 MacBook Air. Instead of just running it normally, I wanted to treat this as a learning experience to dive deeper into macOS internals—figuring out how to keep the agent out of the way, prevent it from eating up all my space, and having it run quietly in the background.

Here’s a look at what I learned and how I threw this setup together!