Zoidberg

Your own Claude, running on your own hardware, that you talk to from Telegram and that gets on with scheduled work while you are not looking.

It runs on your Claude subscription rather than metered API credit. That is the whole reason it is built the way it is: one long-lived interactive session that every message and scheduled task is fed into, instead of a new API process per request. Leave it running all day without watching a meter.

It runs as a Docker container on any Linux box or a Mac. A single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi is plenty; a Mac mini works equally well.

• A Claude you message on Telegram. Ask it things, hand it work, get answers back. It remembers the conversation.
• Scheduled tasks. Anything you can describe: a morning briefing, a report, a check that something is still up. Some need Claude to read and reason, some are just a script on a timer. Both are supported.
• Optional WhatsApp triage, off by default.

Nothing is scheduled when you install it. You tell it what you want, and it writes that for you.

You need a Linux host or a Mac, and curl. Everything else the installer offers to fetch for you: apt-get on Linux, Homebrew on macOS.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zkrige/zoidberg/main/install.sh | bash

That is the whole install. It checks prerequisites, sets the framework up, then builds and starts everything. It stops for you twice, both times for something only you can do:

• A bot token. Create a bot with @BotFather in Telegram (/newbot) and paste the token in. Then send your new bot a message so it can learn which chat is yours.
• Signing in to Claude. It prints a URL. Open it anywhere, approve, paste the code back. Your server needs no browser.

When it finishes, Zoidberg messages you on Telegram. Reply /setup and it will ask what you want automated and write your schedule for you.

If anything is interrupted, cd /opt/zoidberg && ./setup.sh run picks up from wherever it stopped. Provisioning a host now and configuring it later? Set SKIP_SETUP=1 and the installer stops once the filesystem is ready.

Want it somewhere other than /opt? Set REPO_PATH and nothing else changes:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zkrige/zoidberg/main/install.sh | REPO_PATH=~/zoidberg bash

Your config and skills directories default to siblings of it, the installer records all three in the repo's .env, and docker compose reads that. No file needs editing. CONTENT_PATH and SKILLS_PATH move those two independently.

This repo is the engine, and it is deliberately empty of opinions: no tasks, no prompts about your life, no credentials. All of that lives in a separate directory of your own at /opt/zoidberg-config, which the installer creates and which is never part of this repo.

Keep it as a plain directory, or make it a private git repo if you want your own config version-controlled and synced. Either works.

A cron job on the host checks git every five minutes and applies what it finds, so pushing to your fork deploys it. Updates that only change code reload in place; the bot keeps running.

OpenClaw is the lobster in this space: a self-hosted personal AI assistant with a lobster mascot, and by some distance the most-starred repository on GitHub. This does much the same job at a fraction of the ambition, so it is also a crustacean, just a lesser one.

Dr. John A. Zoidberg is Futurama's Decapodian: lobster-adjacent, employed as a doctor, not notably good at being one, and permanently "the option nobody picked".

Needed a name. Why not Zoidberg?

MIT. See LICENSE.