养龙虾

What does 养龙虾 mean?

养龙虾 is what people now call an evening spent installing OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, and teaching it to sort your files, answer your emails or draft your weekly report. The farming metaphor is half joke, half pride. Owners ask each other whether their lobster is grown up yet, and refer to themselves as 养虾人, lobster farmers. The standard brag runs “my lobster works while I rest”, which is a 躺平 daydream with extra steps. It began in tech circles and has since reached ordinary office workers.

Where does 养龙虾 come from?

Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer, published OpenClaw in November 2025. The framework is open source, its logo is a red lobster and the name ends in a claw. When it caught fire in China in early 2026, users needed a verb for the whole business of deploying and taming it, and 养龙虾 filled the gap. By March 2026 the phrase had a Baidu Baike entry and Xinhua coverage, having travelled from AI communities to the general public.

How to use 养龙虾

• 我最近在养龙虾，周报都让它写了。
  Wǒ zuìjìn zài yǎng lóngxiā, zhōubào dōu ràng tā xiě le.
  I've been raising a lobster lately — I even let it write my weekly reports.
• 你的龙虾养好了吗？能帮我整理文件吗？
  Nǐ de lóngxiā yǎng hǎo le ma? Néng bāng wǒ zhěnglǐ wénjiàn ma?
  Is your lobster all set up yet? Can it sort out my files?