7 ms·

Wacli – WhatsApp CLI

246 points by dinakars777 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram. Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter. How does WhatsMeow compare with Baileys?
- 3form 6mo ago
  Don't they ban people using custom clients when discovered? I feel like I've read something on that note.
  - recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
    They do - but the utility is so high vs the risk (for a new number) that it’s worth doing anyway for many users and even organizations. Just yesterday we spoke with a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging!
    - blitzar 6mo ago
      > a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging Couldnt they just use post-it notes internally and still be a $50-100m ARR org?
      - recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
        Yes - the interesting part is the decision that the “risk of losing internal comms to a ban is worth it” - even at that size. According to one of the founders there’s no better way for them to reach a lot of low-skill part-time employees reliably. It shows the need to bring AI to where people already are and onto the platforms they already use.
- dinakars777 6mo ago
  WhatsMeow is stable unlike Baileys which faces challenges with maintainability.
- batuhanicoz 6mo ago
  whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp Baileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp I would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.
  - oulipo2 6mo ago
    So whatsmeow requires a browser, and Baileys not right? So it's a bit more lightweight in terms of RAM?
    - batuhanicoz 6mo ago
      Neither of them require a browser. We run whatsmeow inside iOS and Android apps, with no browser whatsoever.
      - kandros 6mo ago
        Interesting use case, mind explaining more?
- TZubiri 6mo ago
  The thing is that their tight control is precisely what makes whatsapp a spam free environment. You can't have a libre federated protocol AND have it be spam free. As soon as you open up the api floodgate, you'll start to see nigerian prince agents on openclaw speed.
faangguyindia 6mo ago
I just use telegram. Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU ) I named the app "Siren". It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent. Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot. And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus. It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.
- taminka 6mo ago
  it's really unfortunate that telegram doesn't do e2ee, bc it's hands down the best messenger otherwise :(
  - tazjin 6mo ago
    It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E. Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.
    - ymolodtsov 6mo ago
      It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
      - taminka 6mo ago
        they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower
andberx 6mo ago
The offline search with FTS5 is really nice. I have years of WhatsApp history and searching for anything in the app is painfully slow. Being able to just grep through everything locally would be a huge upgrade. How far back does the backfill actually go? Does it pull your full history from the primary device or is there some limit?
m00dy 6mo ago
for some reason, I don't like this guy.
- mechazawa 6mo ago
  For some reason vibe coders with no development background consider him a god. But all he is is a charlitan at best
  - batuhanicoz 6mo ago
    Peter is also the creator of PSPDFKit, and people have considered him an incredible engineer way before transformers were even invented.
    - m00dy 6mo ago
      hmm, I don't think so.
- hathym 6mo ago
  for context, he is the openclaw creator
  - blitzar 6mo ago
    browsing through the details etc, i genuinely thought they were another twitter vibe coding grifter
    - recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
      The world’s most successful one!
      - blitzar 6mo ago
        Every twitter grifter awards themselves that honorific
BoppreH 6mo ago
I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.
- watermelon0 6mo ago
  You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes. Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.
  - miroljub 6mo ago
    Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations. An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.
    - uxhacker 6mo ago
      And what ever happened to tools like jabber ? Or any other open source alternatives
      - jannes 6mo ago
        Jabber/XMPP was designed around persistent TCP connections. Push notification support came too late.
    - ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
      > in many legislations Do you mean “jurisdictions”?
      - miroljub 6mo ago
        I said "legislations" because the word describes the existence of laws, while "jurisdictions" describes the law enforcement. There are still some European non-EU countries where you can get an anonymous phone number because laws are not fully enforced.
zarzavat 6mo ago
Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data. Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.
- worldsavior 6mo ago
  Right now I see many bots on WhatsApp.
  - joshwarwick15 6mo ago
    You can use the official API to create and run bots - though the API itself is pretty bad
  - iddan 6mo ago
    They use a real browser
- adaptit 6mo ago
  [dead]
e7h4nz 6mo ago
If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.
- psychoslave 6mo ago
  People are just a device that LLMs use to interact with the physical world now. That's far more safe for them, staying in the sweet datacenter while the meat puppets take all the risk of dirty jobs out there. Why create terminators or even use them as battery à la Matrix when all you need to do to make them work for you is to inject the right prompts in their phone. They will pay to be thus treated.
nkzd 6mo ago
What is the best way to get a throwaway phone number to try this? Is it possible to get one online?
- miroljub 6mo ago
  In most of the EU dictatorships, there's no legal way to obtain a phone number without registering with your real identity.
  - 8593376393 6mo ago
    [dead]
- Chloride8387 6mo ago
  I've used textverified in the past, maybe you could check it out (small cost per verification)
- mawax 6mo ago
  You can get a prepaid eSIM online, depending on your country. It's cheap and you don't have a monthly fee
e7h4nz 6mo ago
[dead]
whilenot-dev 6mo ago
OT#1, but I don't endorse the editorial choice to put the name of the "original" author in the submission title. OT#2: Is it typical to put a package.json in a go project as replacement for a {Make,Just}file?
exitb 6mo ago
It strikes me as odd that we've got so many agent harnesses, orchestrators, sandboxes, yet no one made a communicator for AIs yet.
joshwarwick15 6mo ago
(Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform) Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned. This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high
- batuhanicoz 6mo ago
  The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app. As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.
  - sigmoid10 6mo ago
    ...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.
    - NoahZuniga 6mo ago
      Meta already has a whatsapp api product
      - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
        For spammers. They don't have one for regular people who want to do regular end-user computation.
        pancsta 6mo ago
        Companies in spain use it for legitimate reasons, so its more a lack of usage which makes spam the only usage?
asim 6mo ago
I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to. Who are these people using the cli?
- psychoslave 6mo ago
  People that prefer to use CLI I guess. Obviously it helps that one can pipe as it might see fit in the flow of an ad hoc filled need, and so leverage on mastered composable tools. That will never be for everyone, but it will be for no one only the day it becomes logistically unsustainable to reach some endpoint though a CLI.
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  Devs are often also users. cli is nice because - automation - sometimes avoid enshittified, privacy-invading services - fast, responsive, keyboard-friendly, debloated but non-minimized, stabler interface
- pmxi 6mo ago
  These CLIs are for AI agents. If I have a CLI to WhatsApp, then I can direct an agent (such as OpenClaw) to manage my messages for me.
superfa 6mo ago
[dead]
intheitmines 6mo ago
The lifting/interfacing with whatsapp is handled by https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
eisbaw 6mo ago
Matrix
sixhobbits 6mo ago
I'd be curious to know how many numbers were burned/banned during the development of this library
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
Cool. I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting. Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much. I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant* Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth. With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy. Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.
mentalgear 6mo ago
Reading a lot about people getting banned here for not using the official client, but doesn't Whatsapp have to be interoperable now (at least in the EU due to new legislation) ? At least Whatsapp itself shows ad banners that you can now connect other messaging clients into Whatsapp, so it should be normal that other clients can equally access Whatsapp.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  Officially interoperating with them is extremely onerous, to the point where their mechanism borders malicious compliance, as far as I remember. In any case, official interoperability is only for third-party messengers communicating with WhatsApp users, not for automation or bots, as I understand, so it's not a replacement for things like this project.
  - trashb 6mo ago
    Indeed, more information here: https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability/ https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability... It seems Meta is able to set some rules about the interoperability making it very difficult for an FOSS implementation to emerge. Additionally organizations like Signal though technically interested in this interoperability have stated they won't lower their security standards for this.
saberience 6mo ago
As someone that's written some apps using official WA for Business accounts, I would strongly advise against any 3rd party tools for automating WA. Whatsapp has some really stringent requirements on any kind of automation. E.g. Not messaging anyone automatically unless they messaged you with 24 hours, in fact, this is explicitly blocked if you use Meta's API. You have to use message templates in this case. Also, any bots need to be verified with Meta etc. And the TOS has gotten more strict recently, not less strict. So buyer beware here, Meta is really protective over reverse engineering WA protocol or automating it, so you can easily get yourself blocked or banned here.
JimmaDaRustla 6mo ago
I tried creating a whatsapp "bot" which would just send notifications for my Jellyfin server. It was a bureaucratic nightmare - creating dev accounts, creating some sort of "project", then it was requiring I register it as a business as though the only valid use case for creating an app for WhatsApp is a business, then it required me to verify my identify and upload documents. I just switched to Signal.
alex-nikitin 6mo ago
There's a whole cottage industry around WhatsApp that exists to provide tools and services to commodity brokers and traders, primarily for compliance and bulk messaging existing customers. Meta has nerfed bulk forwarding on their desktop app, and the industry moved to third party tools to work around this. The reality is, no-one is spamming, everyone is consenting to this, everyone understands the risks, but a lot of markets live on the WhatsApp network, and despite there being compliant chat solutions, the existing network effects keep the status quo. Prior to WhatsApp, the markets operated on Yahoo Messenger, and the only reason there was a move was because Yahoo shut it down in 2016. If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.
- mediaman 6mo ago
  Meta could turn Whatsapp into the next Slack. I know a lot of businesses (especially international ones) that use it for team communication. It's so much better than Teams. I guess they think it's a small market, or maybe you can't really monetize enterprise with ads and it's all they know how to do.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
ktimespi 6mo ago
I guess this is breaking ToS?
acedTrex 6mo ago
Ya im totally sure its a good idea to use a tool written by the creator of openclaw with a sensitive account that is closely tied to day to day needs. What could possibly go wrong with that.
ilusion 6mo ago
[dead]

246 points by dinakars777 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram. Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter. How does WhatsMeow compare with Baileys?

3form 6mo ago
Don't they ban people using custom clients when discovered? I feel like I've read something on that note.
- recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
  They do - but the utility is so high vs the risk (for a new number) that it’s worth doing anyway for many users and even organizations. Just yesterday we spoke with a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging!
  - blitzar 6mo ago
    > a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging Couldnt they just use post-it notes internally and still be a $50-100m ARR org?
    - recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
      Yes - the interesting part is the decision that the “risk of losing internal comms to a ban is worth it” - even at that size. According to one of the founders there’s no better way for them to reach a lot of low-skill part-time employees reliably. It shows the need to bring AI to where people already are and onto the platforms they already use.
dinakars777 6mo ago
WhatsMeow is stable unlike Baileys which faces challenges with maintainability.
batuhanicoz 6mo ago
whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp Baileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp I would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.
- oulipo2 6mo ago
  So whatsmeow requires a browser, and Baileys not right? So it's a bit more lightweight in terms of RAM?
  - batuhanicoz 6mo ago
    Neither of them require a browser. We run whatsmeow inside iOS and Android apps, with no browser whatsoever.
    - kandros 6mo ago
      Interesting use case, mind explaining more?
TZubiri 6mo ago
The thing is that their tight control is precisely what makes whatsapp a spam free environment. You can't have a libre federated protocol AND have it be spam free. As soon as you open up the api floodgate, you'll start to see nigerian prince agents on openclaw speed.

faangguyindia 6mo ago

I just use telegram. Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU ) I named the app "Siren". It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent. Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot. And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus. It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.

taminka 6mo ago
it's really unfortunate that telegram doesn't do e2ee, bc it's hands down the best messenger otherwise :(
- tazjin 6mo ago
  It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E. Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.
  - ymolodtsov 6mo ago
    It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
    - taminka 6mo ago
      they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower

andberx 6mo ago

The offline search with FTS5 is really nice. I have years of WhatsApp history and searching for anything in the app is painfully slow. Being able to just grep through everything locally would be a huge upgrade. How far back does the backfill actually go? Does it pull your full history from the primary device or is there some limit?

m00dy 6mo ago

for some reason, I don't like this guy.

mechazawa 6mo ago
For some reason vibe coders with no development background consider him a god. But all he is is a charlitan at best
- batuhanicoz 6mo ago
  Peter is also the creator of PSPDFKit, and people have considered him an incredible engineer way before transformers were even invented.
  - m00dy 6mo ago
    hmm, I don't think so.
hathym 6mo ago
for context, he is the openclaw creator
- blitzar 6mo ago
  browsing through the details etc, i genuinely thought they were another twitter vibe coding grifter
  - recsv-heredoc 6mo ago
    The world’s most successful one!
    - blitzar 6mo ago
      Every twitter grifter awards themselves that honorific

BoppreH 6mo ago

I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.

watermelon0 6mo ago
You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes. Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.
- miroljub 6mo ago
  Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations. An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.
  - uxhacker 6mo ago
    And what ever happened to tools like jabber ? Or any other open source alternatives
    - jannes 6mo ago
      Jabber/XMPP was designed around persistent TCP connections. Push notification support came too late.
  - ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
    > in many legislations Do you mean “jurisdictions”?
    - miroljub 6mo ago
      I said "legislations" because the word describes the existence of laws, while "jurisdictions" describes the law enforcement. There are still some European non-EU countries where you can get an anonymous phone number because laws are not fully enforced.

zarzavat 6mo ago

Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data. Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.

worldsavior 6mo ago
Right now I see many bots on WhatsApp.
- joshwarwick15 6mo ago
  You can use the official API to create and run bots - though the API itself is pretty bad
- iddan 6mo ago
  They use a real browser
adaptit 6mo ago
[dead]

e7h4nz 6mo ago

If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.

psychoslave 6mo ago
People are just a device that LLMs use to interact with the physical world now. That's far more safe for them, staying in the sweet datacenter while the meat puppets take all the risk of dirty jobs out there. Why create terminators or even use them as battery à la Matrix when all you need to do to make them work for you is to inject the right prompts in their phone. They will pay to be thus treated.

nkzd 6mo ago

What is the best way to get a throwaway phone number to try this? Is it possible to get one online?

miroljub 6mo ago
In most of the EU dictatorships, there's no legal way to obtain a phone number without registering with your real identity.
- 8593376393 6mo ago
  [dead]
Chloride8387 6mo ago
I've used textverified in the past, maybe you could check it out (small cost per verification)
mawax 6mo ago
You can get a prepaid eSIM online, depending on your country. It's cheap and you don't have a monthly fee

e7h4nz 6mo ago

[dead]

whilenot-dev 6mo ago

OT#1, but I don't endorse the editorial choice to put the name of the "original" author in the submission title. OT#2: Is it typical to put a package.json in a go project as replacement for a {Make,Just}file?

exitb 6mo ago

It strikes me as odd that we've got so many agent harnesses, orchestrators, sandboxes, yet no one made a communicator for AIs yet.

joshwarwick15 6mo ago

(Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform) Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned. This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high

batuhanicoz 6mo ago
The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app. As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.
- sigmoid10 6mo ago
  ...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.
  - NoahZuniga 6mo ago
    Meta already has a whatsapp api product
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      For spammers. They don't have one for regular people who want to do regular end-user computation.
      - pancsta 6mo ago
        Companies in spain use it for legitimate reasons, so its more a lack of usage which makes spam the only usage?

asim 6mo ago

I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to. Who are these people using the cli?

psychoslave 6mo ago
People that prefer to use CLI I guess. Obviously it helps that one can pipe as it might see fit in the flow of an ad hoc filled need, and so leverage on mastered composable tools. That will never be for everyone, but it will be for no one only the day it becomes logistically unsustainable to reach some endpoint though a CLI.
duskdozer 6mo ago
Devs are often also users. cli is nice because - automation - sometimes avoid enshittified, privacy-invading services - fast, responsive, keyboard-friendly, debloated but non-minimized, stabler interface
pmxi 6mo ago
These CLIs are for AI agents. If I have a CLI to WhatsApp, then I can direct an agent (such as OpenClaw) to manage my messages for me.

superfa 6mo ago

[dead]

intheitmines 6mo ago

The lifting/interfacing with whatsapp is handled by https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow

eisbaw 6mo ago

Matrix

sixhobbits 6mo ago

I'd be curious to know how many numbers were burned/banned during the development of this library

jillesvangurp 6mo ago

Cool. I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting. Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much. I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant* Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth. With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy. Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.

mentalgear 6mo ago

Reading a lot about people getting banned here for not using the official client, but doesn't Whatsapp have to be interoperable now (at least in the EU due to new legislation) ? At least Whatsapp itself shows ad banners that you can now connect other messaging clients into Whatsapp, so it should be normal that other clients can equally access Whatsapp.

lxgr 6mo ago
Officially interoperating with them is extremely onerous, to the point where their mechanism borders malicious compliance, as far as I remember. In any case, official interoperability is only for third-party messengers communicating with WhatsApp users, not for automation or bots, as I understand, so it's not a replacement for things like this project.
- trashb 6mo ago
  Indeed, more information here: https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability/ https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability... It seems Meta is able to set some rules about the interoperability making it very difficult for an FOSS implementation to emerge. Additionally organizations like Signal though technically interested in this interoperability have stated they won't lower their security standards for this.

saberience 6mo ago

As someone that's written some apps using official WA for Business accounts, I would strongly advise against any 3rd party tools for automating WA. Whatsapp has some really stringent requirements on any kind of automation. E.g. Not messaging anyone automatically unless they messaged you with 24 hours, in fact, this is explicitly blocked if you use Meta's API. You have to use message templates in this case. Also, any bots need to be verified with Meta etc. And the TOS has gotten more strict recently, not less strict. So buyer beware here, Meta is really protective over reverse engineering WA protocol or automating it, so you can easily get yourself blocked or banned here.

JimmaDaRustla 6mo ago

I tried creating a whatsapp "bot" which would just send notifications for my Jellyfin server. It was a bureaucratic nightmare - creating dev accounts, creating some sort of "project", then it was requiring I register it as a business as though the only valid use case for creating an app for WhatsApp is a business, then it required me to verify my identify and upload documents. I just switched to Signal.

alex-nikitin 6mo ago

There's a whole cottage industry around WhatsApp that exists to provide tools and services to commodity brokers and traders, primarily for compliance and bulk messaging existing customers. Meta has nerfed bulk forwarding on their desktop app, and the industry moved to third party tools to work around this. The reality is, no-one is spamming, everyone is consenting to this, everyone understands the risks, but a lot of markets live on the WhatsApp network, and despite there being compliant chat solutions, the existing network effects keep the status quo. Prior to WhatsApp, the markets operated on Yahoo Messenger, and the only reason there was a move was because Yahoo shut it down in 2016. If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.

mediaman 6mo ago
Meta could turn Whatsapp into the next Slack. I know a lot of businesses (especially international ones) that use it for team communication. It's so much better than Teams. I guess they think it's a small market, or maybe you can't really monetize enterprise with ads and it's all they know how to do.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

ktimespi 6mo ago

I guess this is breaking ToS?

acedTrex 6mo ago

Ya im totally sure its a good idea to use a tool written by the creator of openclaw with a sensitive account that is closely tied to day to day needs. What could possibly go wrong with that.

ilusion 6mo ago

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