Hands-on workshop at Web Summer Camp 2026 (Opatija, Croatia) in the AI Engineering track. Attendees crossed the line from reactive AI chat to proactive autonomy - deploying their own always-on agentic "digital twin" on a VPS, teaching it their goals through living Markdown files, and wiring it to real-world APIs.
Released: Thu Jul 02 2026
What the workshop was about
I bet most of you have spent some time chatting with AI - maybe even one-shotting a few websites, or keeping a library of prompts and predefined projects. It's cool. But constantly babysitting a chat window and approving every terminal command starts to feel like more work than it saves. The real magic happens when you stop chatting and start delegating.
In this hands-on session we crossed the line from reactive AI to proactive autonomy, using OpenClaw - an autonomous agentic framework that lives on its own VPS with a "Heartbeat" that wakes up, scans your agenda, and executes tasks while you grab a coffee.
What we built
- Deploying the Brain - getting the agent running on a cloud instance so it is always-on.
- The "Living Files" paradigm - verbalizing your goals and "soul" into Markdown files (
user.md,heartbeat.md) so the agent actually knows how you think. - Connecting the dots - hooking the agent to real-world APIs (free and trial tiers) for research, scheduling, and notifications.
- Proactive logic - setting up Heartbeats so the agent checks your calendar or inbox and acts on its own.
The venue
Web Summer Camp 2026, July 2-4 in Opatija, Croatia - running since 2012 with the same recipe: serious half-day workshops plus serious Croatian hospitality. Six tracks this year; I was part of the AI Engineering track, evolved from last year's AI/Python track. The whole event is laser-focused on practical application - stuff you can use from next Monday.