How to Choose (Without Getting Burned)

The fork is not about intelligence or autonomy. It is whose keys are in the lock.

flowchart TD
    A[New agent] --> B{Each user must see only their own data?}
    B -->|Yes| C[Assistant — OAuth per user]
    B -->|No| D{Team resource, schedule, or public channel?}
    D -->|Yes| E[Claw — scoped service account]
    D -->|No| F[Re-evaluate: mixed model or inbox HITL]
    C --> G[Per-user memory + private inbox]
    E --> H[Shared memory + editor-only inbox]

Pick an Assistant when

• Each user must see only their own data
• Audit trails should read "Alice did X," not "the bot did X"
• Personalization is the point

Examples: onboarding agent, personal Notion assistant, per-user Rippling lookup.

Pick a Claw when

• The agent is a team resource (@vendor-intake, @it-help, @product-bot)
• It runs on a schedule or listens on a channel without a logged-in human
• You want a deliberately scoped service account — not the union of every user's access

Examples: email agent, competitor monitor, vendor intake bot, weekly-numbers Slack agent.

Common mistake

Building a Claw with your personal OAuth.

Anyone who can message the bot inherits everything you can see. The fix is not "make it an Assistant" — it is give the Claw its own account with only the permissions the job needs.

Run the anti-pattern demo: avc-slack or pytest tests/test_anti_patterns.py -q

Beyond credentials

Concern	Assistant	Claw
Memory	Per-user threads	Shared team resource
Inbox	Private per-user for sensitive work	Editor-only review before sensitive actions
Channels	Needs user ID mapping (Slack → LangSmith user)	Can drop into more surfaces — only needs the message, not who you are

See src/identity_models/memory.py and src/identity_models/inbox.py.

Fleet mapping

See FLEET_MAPPING.md for how these patterns map to LangSmith Fleet primitives.

One sentence

Whose identity should execute that task — the human in the loop, or the agent we provisioned for the job?

Assistants work for you, as you.
Claws work as themselves, on behalf of the team.