Three different jobs
Coze: web UI bots published to Lark, Discord, etc. — customer-facing or playful assistants.
n8n: wired nodes on a schedule — pull RSS, hit APIs, call models behind the scenes.
OpenClaw-style gateways: your hardware, your models, chat apps as the front door — privacy-first tinkering.
How I started
First Coze bot only answers about tools we list — knowledge base is our own guides, no hallucinated products.
n8n morning job: RSS → filter → Notion digest.
OpenClaw on a spare machine with domestic APIs for local-file tasks, separate from public bots.
Common pitfalls
Don’t launch “fully autonomous social accounts” on day one — policy and uptime will break you.
Write boundaries into the system prompt: allowed actions, forbidden actions, escalation.
Don’t pipe user PII into random SaaS bots; keep sensitive flows self-hosted.
Open-source agent frameworks
Frameworks move fast; maintenance costs time. For cron + webhooks, n8n is often enough.
Browse the AI Agents category for more — filter by self-hosted vs China-friendly first.