> for some reason they want it to live under your user account

The entire idea of Openclaw (i.e., the core point of what distinguishes it from agents like Claude Code) is to give it access to your personal data, so it can act as your assistant.

If you only need a coding agent, Openclaw is the completely wrong tool. (As a side note, after using it for a few weeks, I'm not convinced it's the right tool for anything, but that's a different story.)

I tried this with Claude code on macOS. I created a new agent user and a wrapper do run Claude has that user, along with some scripts to set permissions and ownership so that I could run simple allow/deny commands. The only problem was that the fancy oauth flow broke. I filed an issue with Anthropic and their ticket bot auto closed it “for lack of interest” or whatever.

I fiddled with transferring the saved token from my keychain to the agent user keychain but it was not straightforward.

If someone knows how to get a subscription to Claude to work on another user via command line I’d love to know about it.

Oh that’s an idea. I was going to argue that it’s a problem that you might want multiple instances in different contexts but sandboxing processes (possibly instanced) is exactly what systemd units are designed to deal with.

Exactly!