Building an AI Agent Marketplace in One Week: Lessons Learned

The author spent a week 'vibe coding' a side project called CatchClaw, an AI agent marketplace for the OpenClaw platform. The article discusses the challenges faced, including navigating ClawHub's security review, choosing the wrong frontend framework, and deciding on monetization.

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The author built CatchClaw, an AI agent marketplace, in about a week of late nights after their day job. The goal was to create a centralized platform for discovering and installing OpenClaw agents, which are more than just prompts - they have personas, tool configs, and behavioral rules. The author used an AI-driven 'vibe coding' approach, where they had the AI write code while they steered the direction. Some key challenges included navigating ClawHub's thorough security review process (which involved the author's AI agent helping to satisfy another AI's requirements), and realizing they had chosen the wrong frontend framework (Vite + React) which lacked SEO capabilities. The author rewrote the entire frontend in Next.js to address this. They also considered adding paid features like cloud hosting for agents, but ultimately decided against it to focus on building the community first. The current CatchClaw platform has 288 agents across various domains, and the author plans to add features like agent composition and version tracking in the future.