Giving Claude Code a Heart

An agent heartbeat, stripped of the branding, is three things: a timer, a state file, and a decision step. That's it. Something wakes up on a schedule, reads a document describing what the world looks like, and decides whether to act. If you squint past the WebSocket plumbing and the always-on process, that's what OpenClaw's heartbeat daemon is doing. I want to be careful here. A lot of people built real work on OpenClaw. Anthropic cutting off OAuth token use for Open Claw on April 4 didn't just remove a product; it stranded workflows, broke muscle memory, and scattered a community that had been coalescing around a specific mental model of how agents should run. This isn't a post about how that was inevitable or deserved. It's a post for the narrower audience of OpenClaw refugees who came for the capability and are now trying to figure out where the capability went. The short answer: the capability is sitting in Claude Code. It has been for a while. You don't need a daemon to get it. W