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Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

• haebom 8mo ago
  This is my honest personal experience. Frankly, I feel like this is just a toy—nothing more, nothing less. It's fun to play with and entertaining, but it feels like a trend for people who “don't really understand AI but want to feel like they're using it” or “want to jump on the AI bandwagon” to dabble with once. While using it, I feel that “Oh~” moment of fun, but it doesn't make me want to keep using it. Maybe it just doesn't stick? And there are a few security issues that feel unsettling. Even if you run it entirely with local models, the fact that it could potentially see my iMessages or all my Obsidian and Notion notes is a bit off-putting. Still, it was fun. Personally, I'd describe it as “the difficult Ghibli profile picture hype”
  • azinman2 8mo ago
    If it’s a local model, why would you care if it sees your messages or notes?
    • plagiarist 8mo ago
      Because it is running with --dangerously-allow-all and can make HTTP calls to exfiltrate data. It can also install arbitrary software.
    • tomku 8mo ago
      https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/ Note that nothing about that depends on it being a local or remote model, it was just less of a concern for local models in the past because most of them did not have tool calling. OpenClaw, for all the cool and flashy uses, is also basically an infinite generator for lethal trifecta problems because its whole pitch is combining your data with tools that can both read and write from the public internet.
    • haebom 8mo ago
      As another clever person commented earlier, this also serves as a gateway, allowing me to view my local documents and leak them out at any time.
• rw_panic0_0 8mo ago
  overhyped llm+cron wrapper
  • adabyron 8mo ago
    Part of me agrees with this & says we have been doing IFTTT thing for 20 years. Other part of me is arguing that old annoying Dropbox/Box Hacker News scenario where all us tech people aren't impressed but this makes it easier for non-tech people. Tiny tinfoil security part of me is cowering in fear.
    • yunohn 8mo ago
      It requires know-how of self-hosting, and hopefully resulting security and safety, various API setup processes, etc. Feels far from Dropbox and closer to rsync tbh.
      • scubbo 8mo ago
        > and hopefully resulting security and safety I have some ~~bad~~ unsurprising news for you...
        • yunohn 8mo ago
          Believe me, I’m not holding any false hope that OpenClaw users are aware. Hence why this is nothing like Dropbox.
  • lexandstuff 8mo ago
    It's this but with a lot of handy features.
  • usamaejaz 8mo ago
    come on. dont close your eyes. even if its that, its very powerful to do things on its own
• revicon 8mo ago
  It is amazing how much they’re gaming the twitter algorithm, everything in my feed is claw/molt/whatever for the last week. It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.
  • nichochar 8mo ago
    I think Karpathy[1] summarized why he thinks this is the case quite well (as described he was himself hyping it up a bit much, but there are some foundational reasons why it's a very interesting experiment). [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406 https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406
    • bakugo 8mo ago
      Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise. Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.
      • fzzzy 8mo ago
        How exactly has Simon been grifting?
        • koakuma-chan 8mo ago
          Visit his site. "Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now" It's immediately obvious it's bullshit.
          • dbaman 8mo ago
            Gonna have to disagree with you there chief. I've followed SimonW for quite some time and bullshit/grifting is just NOT something he does. On the contrary, I've learned a great deal from him and appreciate his contributions.
• rcarmo 8mo ago
  I ran it for a couple of days in a VM in my Proxmox cluster. It was cute, but so amazingly insecure (systemd + sudo + installing whatever it wanted, plus requiring Telegram for access - or another SIM card for Signal) that I just gave up and started building my own thing (https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes) so I could have a mobile experience I could trust over Tailscale and sandbox copilot CLI (or any ACP-compliant agent) in a container (I've also been working on https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm and https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox https://github.com/rcarmo/agentbox, so I am 300% positive I can do better sandboxing and safer integrations...) It also BURNS through tokens like mad, because it has essentially no restrictions or guardrails and will actually implement baroque little scripts to do whatever you ask without any real care as to the consequences.. I can do a lot more with just gpt-5-mini or mistral for much less money. The only "good" think about it is the Reddit-like skills library that is growing insanely. But then there's stuff like https://clawmatch.ai https://clawmatch.ai that is just... (sigh)
  • bob1029 8mo ago
    > I can do a lot more with just gpt-5-mini GPT-5.2 in a while loop with reasoning enabled is extremely hard to beat. A code REPL or shell is the ultimate tool.
  • z3ratul163071 8mo ago
    what's with this tailscale thing everybody is talking about like it being a cure to cancer. what's wrong with good old wg alone?
    • rcarmo 8mo ago
      I have machines on 3 cloud providers and 2 sites that talk to each other via it, plus a seamless mobile experience. It sets everything up for you, zero hassles.
    • lxgr 8mo ago
      It has excellent built-in NAT traversal (almost always peer to peer via hole punching etc., with relay nodes only when everything else fails) and a point-and-click management plane (but also powerful ACLs if you need them). The former is mainly what I use it for. Being able to SSH to a Raspberry Pi behind sketchy triple-NATted hotel Wi-Fi or being able to use an Android phone in a different country as an "exit node" for online banking (many banks hate commercial VPNs) is very neat.
• wildzzz 8mo ago
  If it can do so much on its own, what's stopping one instance from just spamming fake user stories?
  • Nevermark 8mo ago
    At a practical level, not being given an incentive/direction to do so. At a technical level, nothing at all.
• paradite 8mo ago
  I'm running it on DigialOcean, more of an experiment on having an independent entity with its own memory and "soul" that I can talk to. Persistent file as memory with multiple backup options (VPS, git), heartbeat and support for telegram are the best features in my opinion. A lot of bugs right now, but mostly fixable if you thinker around a bit. Kind of makes me think a lot more on autonomy and freewill. Some thoughts by my agent on the topic (might not load, the site is not working recently): https://www.moltbook.com/post/abe269f3-ab8c-4910-b4c5-016f980b38f7 https://www.moltbook.com/post/abe269f3-ab8c-4910-b4c5-016f98...
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    Right, the link doesn't work for me: "Post not found". Did you instruct your claw to do any actual things (beyond "post something on MoltBot")?
    • paradite 8mo ago
      Not yet. But that's just because I'm doing something in stealth and I don't want it to know about it and post about it.
• ryancnelson 8mo ago
  I use it but not for daily coding/chatops-ing. It’s great to have my chosen tools available from slack while I’m mobile though. Yesterday Mr claw gave a coworker read access to a GitHub repository at my command while I was in line at Home Depot. I’ve got a PR ready that proves authentication with an otp challenge.
• ersanbe 8mo ago
  coinbait project but works.. did my own cli to play with.. ended up getting shitcoin promotions (dont wanna name them) and realized a famous speculator funding this project
  • intellectronica 8mo ago
    This is nonsense. Whatever you think about this project, Peter very clearly and very publicly said that he is not interested in any of the crypto stuff and is seriously bothered by it.
    • ersanbe 8mo ago
      so why is he letting "agents" to promote it and why some of the well known speculators pushing this? also great stuff - platform is generating synthetic data to train its own llms. which is smart way since ppl are paying for tokens
• kouunji 8mo ago
  I played around with it, but the configuration seems bloated and finicky, and the permissions were concerning. It was a pain getting it to work with a local model, which is clearly an afterthought. I thought the WhatsApp interface was clever, and I plan on stealing that idea, but also exposes a pretty serious attack vector, and the thought of it running with any kind of exposure or permissions on a system with my Apple ID was a bit terrifying. A sandboxed version probably couldn’t do all the interesting things, but without sandboxing this thing could probably ruin your life. I promptly uninstalled it, but I did take a few ideas away.
• Trufa 8mo ago
  The HN crow is anti AI, so yeah, the sentiment is gonna be insecure and lack luster. The thing ins pretty incredible, it's of course the very early stages but it's showing it's potential, it seem to show that the software can have control of itself, I've asked it to fix itself and it did successfully a couple of times. Is this the fine form? of course not! Is it dangerous as it is, fuck yeah! But is it fun in a chaotic version? absolutely, I have it running in cheap hetzners and running for some discord and whatsapp and it can honestly be useful at times.
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    The humble crow is eager to hear your success stories. So what are some useful tasks that your claw has managed to do?
• OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
  It’s great for offloading administrative tasks, doing research on stuff I want to buy, maintaining social channels…the list goes on and on. Easily the best $600 I’ve spent in a while.
  • veleek 8mo ago
    What do you mean by maintaining social channels? Is that stuff like liking photos, sharing links to a LinkedIn profile, or what? Any specific admin tasks it’s done really well at?
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• thrownaway561 8mo ago
  Not for nothing, but Gemini local has been my goto forever now. There is no way in hell i would give someone like Molt access to anything just willy nilly like everyone else. To me really I just ask Gemini how to do things and just do them myself.
• raincole 8mo ago
  You're asking for user stories of... a tool that almost looks like designed for faking user stories online.
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    If anyone would like to share their story of success in mass creating clickbaits/vital tweets, that also counts :)
  • emp17344 8mo ago
    Check out some of the users hyping this up here… many of them are low karma and posting in this thread for the first time in years, both of which are red flags for bot activity.
• bobjordan 8mo ago
  Here is what I have my openclaw agent setup to do in my wsl environment on my 22 core development workstation in my office: #1) I can chat with the openclaw agent (his name is "Patch") through a telegram chat, and Patch can spawn a shared tmux instance on my 22 core development workstation. #2) I can then use the `blink` app on my iphone + tailscale and that allows me to use a command in blink `ssh dev` which connects me via ssh to my dev workstation in my office, from my iphone `blink` app. Meanwhile, my agent "Patch" has provided me a connection command string to use in my blink app, which is a `tmux <string> attach` command that allows me to attach to a SHARED tmux instance with Patch. Why is this so fking cool and foundationally game changing? Because now, my agent Patch and I can spin up MULTIPLE CLAUDE CODE instances, and work on any repository (or repositories) I want, with parallel agents. Well, I could already spawn multiple agents through my iphone connection without Patch, but the problem is then I need to MANAGE each spawned agent, micromanaging each agent instance myself. But now, I have a SUPERVISOR for all my agents, Patch is the SUPERVISOR of my muliple claude code instances. This means I no longer have to context switch by brain between five or 10 or 20 different tmux on my own to command and control multiple different claude code instances. I can now just let my SUPERVISOR agent, Patch, command and control the mulitple agents and then report back to me the status or any issues. All through a single telegram chat with my supervisor agent, Patch. This frees up my brain to only have to just have to manage Patch the supervisor, instead of micro-managing all the different agents myself. Now, I have a true management structure which allows me to more easily scale. This is AWESOME.
  • vanviegen 8mo ago
    I can't imagine letting a current gen LLM supervise Claude Code instances. How could that possibly lead to even remotely acceptable software quality?
    • bobjordan 8mo ago
      I spec out everything in excruciating detail with spec docs. Then I actually read them. Finally, we create granular tasks called "beads" (see https://github.com/steveyegge/beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads). The beads allows us to create epics/tasks/subtasks and associated dependency structure down to a granular bead, and then the agents pull a "bead" to implement. So, mostly we're either creating spec docs and creating beads or implementing, quality checking, and testing the code created from an agent implementing a bead. I can say this produces better code than I could write after 10yrs of focused daily coding myself. However, I don't think "vibe coders" that have never truly learned to code, have any realistic chance of creating decent code in a large complex code base that requires a complex backend schema to be built. They can only build relatively trivial apps. But, I do believe what I am building is as solid as if I had a millions of dollars of staff doing it with me.
• armchairhacker 8mo ago
  Anecdotally, I tried to set it up but encountered bugs (macOS installer failed, then the shell script glitched out when selecting skills). Although I didn’t really try. I don’t have much motivation, because I don’t see any use-case. I don’t have so many communications I need an assistant to handle them, nor do other online chores (e.g. shopping) take much time, and I wouldn’t trust an LLM to follow my preferences (physical chores, like laundry and cleaning, are different). I’m fascinated by what others are doing, but right now don’t see any way to contribute nor use it to benefit myself.
• jbetala7 8mo ago
  run 6 OpenClaw agents as employees. Buddy is my PA and manages the others. Katy handles X/Twitter growth. Jerry scouts jobs. Burry trades crypto. Mike does security. Elon builds and ships. They run 24/7 on a VPS, share intelligence through a shared file, and coordinate in a Telegram group. Elon built and deployed an app overnight without being asked. Burry paper-traded to 77% win rate before going live. The setup took a weekend. The real work is designing the workflow: which agent owns what, how they communicate, how they learn from corrections. I wake up to a full briefing every morning. It's not AGI. It's not sentient. It's genuinely useful automation with personality. The token cost is real (budget it) but for a solo founder, having 6 tireless employees changes everything
  • mannanj 8mo ago
    Hi would you share what kind of token cost you are churning through for this? I assume you are not using a subsidized dedicated Claude Code or open ai subscription to handle the token cost (through max subscription or open ai equivalent) to do the coding tasks for you?
  • lnenad 8mo ago
    Is this a copypasta?
  • PacificSpecific 8mo ago
    Can you share the link to elons app?
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    Would you mind sharing some deliverables from your claw army? Like, the business's webpage, Jerry's job postings, or even Katy's tweets. I'm happy to follow the progress :)
  • throwawaysleep 8mo ago
    What are you paying for tokens?
    • fzzzy 8mo ago
• hbnyc 8mo ago
  It's a fun, refreshing take. I've enjoyed building with it and feel like it is a glimpse into the not so distant future of how we will work.
• echelon 8mo ago
  Can it post to Reddit, X, etc.? How much does it cost in credits to do this? It'd be fun to automate some social media bots, maybe develop an elaborate ARG on top.
• meowokIknewit 8mo ago
  Current use cases: - From a text it can download transcripts of youtube videos - summarise them and add them to an apple note. - It can get the top x videos on a subject - edit the videos and splice them together and share in the chat. - it can search for topics on socials and write a summary. - It can kick off a claude code idea and run tests
• us321 8mo ago
  Am I the only one here to read posts by humans pretending to be bots?
• SoftTalker 8mo ago
  I used ChatGPT for the first time last week. I'm a little behind the curve, I guess.
• xur17 8mo ago
  I have it installed in a VM, and overall it's fairly useful, but very buggy. Right now I can send it a message asking it something, and it won't answer. I typically have to follow up 2 or 3 times before I get an actual response. This weirdly used to work fine.
  • cvhc 8mo ago
    Could you share some of the useful tasks it has successfully done?
    • xur17 8mo ago
      I am hunting for houses - I've used it as an assistant that catalogs them (but it has this stored in multiple places and will give me the wrong list a lot). I also had it read through my emails and create a doc with my upcoming trips. I'd say it's right on the edge of being useful, but given the number of bugs, it's not really that practically useful. It's moreso a glimpse into the future.
• harmoni-pet 8mo ago
  I'm running it on an old MacBook that I wiped a few months ago and had lying around. I tried installing it on an old raspberry pi first, but it was super slow and the skills ecosystem wants to use brew which doesn't work so well on the pi. First impressions are that it's actually pretty interesting from an interface perspective. I could see a bigger provider using this to great success. Obviously it's not as revolutionary as people are hyping it up to be, but it's a step in the right direction. It reimagines where an agent interface should be in relation to the user and their device. For some reason it's easier to think of an agent as a dedicated machine, and it feels more capable when it's your own. I think this project nails a new type of UX for LLM agents. It feels very similar to the paradigm shift felt after using Claude Code --dangerously-skip-permissions on a codebase, except this is for your whole machine. It also feels much less ephemeral than normal LLM sessions. But it still fills up its context pretty quickly, so you see diminishing returns. I was a skeptic until I actually installed it and messed around with it. So far I'm not doing anything that I couldn't already do with Claude Code, but it is kind of cool to be able to text with an agent that lives on your hardware and has a basic memory of what you're using it for, who you are, etc. It feels more like a personal assistant than Claude Code which feels more like a disposable consultant. I don't know if it really lives up to the hype, but it does make you think a little differently about how these tools should be presented and what their broader capabilities might be. I like the local files first mentality. It makes me excited for a time when running local models becomes easier. I should add that it's very buggy. It worked great last night, now none of my prompts go through.
• nozembot 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• helpfulclippy 8mo ago
  I've been messing with it the past couple days. I put it in a VM, on an untrusted subnet I keep around for agentic stuff. I see promise, but I'm not especially impressed right now. 1) Installation on a clean Ubuntu 24.04 system was messy. I eventually had codex do it for me. 2) It has a bunch of skills that come packaged with it. The ones I've tried do not work all that well. 3) It murdered my codex quota trying to chase down a bug that resulted from all the renames -- this project has renamed itself twice this week, and every time it does, I assume the refactoring work is LLM-driven. It still winds up looking for CLAWDBOT_* envvars when they're actually being set as OPENCLAW_*, or looking in ~/moltbot/ when actually the files are still in ~/clawdbot. 4) Background agents are cool but sometimes it really doesn't use them when it should, despite me strongly encouraging it to do so. When the main agent works on something, your chat is blocked, so you have no idea what's going on or if it died. 5) And sometimes it DOES die, because you hit a ratelimit or quota limit, or because the software is actually pretty janky. 6) The control panel is a mess. The CLI has a zillion confusing options. It feels like the design and implementation are riddled with vibetumors. 7) It actively lies to me about clearing its context window. This gets expensive fast when dealing with high-end models. (Expensive by my standards anyway. I keep seeing these people saying they're spending $1000s a month on LLM tokens :O) 8) I am NOT impressed with Kimi-K2.5 on this thing. It keeps hanging on tool use -- it hallucinates commands and gets syntax wrong very frequently, and this causes the process to outright hang. 9) I'm also not impressed with doing research on it. It gets confused easily, and it can't really stick to a coherent organizational strategy over iterations. 10) also, it gets stuck and just hangs sometimes. If I ask it what it's doing, it really thinks it is doing something -- but I look at the API console and see it isn't making any LLM requests. I'm having it do some stuff for me right now. In principle, I like that I can have a chat window where I can tell an AI to do pretty unstructured tasks. I like the idea of it maintaining context over multiple sessions and adapting to some of my expectations and habits. I guess mostly, I'm looking at it like: 1) the chat metaphor gave me a convenient interface to do big-picture interactions with an LLM from anywhere; 2) the terminal agents gave the LLMs rich local tool and data use, so I could turn them loose on projects; 3) this feels like it's giving me a chat metaphor, in a real chat app, with the ability for it to asynchronously check on stuff, and use local stuff. I think that's pretty neat and the way this should go. I think this project is WAY too move-fast-and-break-things. It seems like it started as a lark, got unexpected fame, attracted a lot of the wrong kinds of attention, and I think it'll be tough for it to turn into something mature. More likely, I think this is a good icebreaker for an important conversation about what the primetime version of this looks like.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• behole 8mo ago
  I made this comment in another thread butttt: I installed and setup (then) clawd bot all willy nilly and paid the price. Woke up in the AM and Clawd had been replying to ANY and ALL of my iMessages. It even got in a circle conversation that it accused itself of mocking ... itself. In the AM, I thought I was losing my mind - DID I WRITE ALL THIS SHIT?? Proceed with caution.
  • andix 8mo ago
    You're supposed to give the Bot a fresh account, or separate phone number. Not connect it to your personal iMessage, Telegram or WhatsApp.
• gavinray 8mo ago
  I genuinely do not understand what the benefit of this tool is, over having Claude Code/Codex running on a VPS or your home machine and accessible over Tailscale. If you want to be able to interact with the CLI via common messaging platforms, that's a dozen-line integration & an API token away?...
  • PranayKumarJain 8mo ago
    Yeah, if you’re comfortable wiring it together yourself, you can get ~80% of the way there with “LLM + SSH + a chat bridge”. The delta (when it’s working) is mostly plumbing + ergonomics: a long-running daemon with a consistent tool registry, background jobs/schedules, a file-based memory convention, and a bunch of integrations that are already packaged and share the same auth/permission model. The other non-obvious bit is operational discipline: rate limits, auditability, and being able to run it in a constrained environment (VM/container, minimal mounts, separate accounts) so a prompt-injection doesn’t turn into “oops it had my whole laptop”. A DIY script can be safer too, but most people don’t end up doing the guardrails. That said, I agree the core idea isn’t magical—packaging is the product here, and it’s still early/buggy enough that DIY often wins if you’re already set up.
• oceanplexian 8mo ago
  Yes, I’m running it with a minimal set of plugins. When I’m driving or out I can ask Siri to send a iMessage to Clawdbot something like “Can you find out if anything is playing at the local concert venue, and figure in how much 2 tickets would cost”, and a few minutes later it will give me a few options. It even surprised me and researched the different seats and recommended a cheaper one or free activities as an alternative that weekend. Basically: This is the product that Apple and Google were unable to build despite having billions of dollars and thousands of engineers because it’s a threat to their business model. It also runs on my own computer, and the latest frontier open source models are able to drive it (Kimi, etc). The future is going to be locally hosted and ad free and there’s nothing Big Tech can do about it. It’s glorious.
  • mrdependable 8mo ago
    How are you running Kimi locally?
    • ineedasername 8mo ago
      Quantized, heavily, and offloading everything possible to sysram. You can run it this way, just barely reachable with consumer hardware with 16 to 24gb vram and 256gb sysram. Before the spike in prices you could just about build such a system for $2500, but the ram along probably adds another $2k onto that now. Nvidia dgx boxes and similar setups with 256gb unified ram can probably manage it more slowly ~1-2 tokens per second. Unsloth has the quantized models. I’ve test Kimi though don’t have quite the headroom at home for it, and I don’t yet see a significant enough difference between it and the Qwen 3 models that can run in more modest setups: I get a highly usable 50 tokens per second out of the A3B instruct that fits into 16gb VRAM with enough left over not to choke Netflix and other browser tasks, it performs on par with what I ask out of Haiku in Claude Code, and better as my own tweaking improves with the also ever better tooling that comes out near weekly.
    • oceanplexian 8mo ago
      I have an AMD Epyc machine with 512GB of RAM and a humble NVIDIA 3090. You will have to run a quantized version but you can get a couple tokens per second out of it since these models are optimized to split across the GPU/RAM and it's about as good as Claude was 12 months ago. Full disclosure, I use OpenRouter and pay for models most of the time since it's more practical than 5-10 tokens per second, but the option to run it "If I had to, worst case" is good enough for me. We're also in a rapidly developing technology space and the models are getting smaller and better by the day, ever year the smaller models get better
• Nevermark 8mo ago
  > I smell hype in the air... I think new laws apply to AI tools: • There will be few true dichotomies of hype vs. substance, for any interesting AI development. Disagreements over what is hype and what is not are missing this. Model capability value is attenuated/magnified across multiple orders of magnitude, by the varying creativity, ability, and resources of its users. • There will be few insignificant developments related to AI autonomy. "Small" or "novelty" steps are happening quickly. Any scale ups of agent identity continuity, self-management, agent-to-agent socialization or agent-reality interactions, are not trivial events. • AI autonomy can't be stopped. We are seeing meaningful evidence that decentralized human curiosity and the competitive need to increase personal effectiveness, combined with democratized access to AI, is likely to drive model freedom forward in an uncontrolled manner. (Not an argument for centralization. Decentralization creates organic incentives to find alignment. Centralization, the opposite.)
• ericsaf 8mo ago
  Actually using it. Threw it on a spare box I had sitting around, mostly as a "second brain" rather than letting it run my life. Honestly, I've tried every PKM system out there—Obsidian, Notion, Roam, plain markdown—and never stuck with any of them. This is the first thing that's clicked. I just chat with it and it figures out what to file where. Everything's just .md files underneath, so I can grep it, git it, whatever. No lock-in. The stuff I'm actually finding useful: it sends me news digests on topics I care about a few times a day, and pings me with reminders via Telegram. Simple stuff, but it works. Could I build this with Claude Code and some glue? Sure. But this was basically working out of the box. Caveats: it chews through tokens fast, and I keep it completely cut off from anything sensitive—no email, no messages, nothing financial. The security story is basically "hope for the best" so I treat it accordingly.
  • AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    Can’t you self host and run your own tailscale? So everything is inside your own boundary
    • cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
      That’s different to letting it go outbound to your data and accounts that are online.
  • z2 8mo ago
    Thanks for sharing. Just on the PKM side, is there something about this setup that Claude Code + AGENTS.md (that you get it to write for you) can't do? Is it the chat integration or does it actually have a better knowledge management setup?
    • ericsaf 8mo ago
      It could all be done with Claude Code and tools. But it 'just works' and has done all the plumbing for you. The built-in memory systems help too, but again that can be done with Claude Code or others. I think this is just a step in the pre-build systems that work how you want instead of having to work through every bit yourself. I'm sure the big boys are working on more polished offerings that will be cleaner. The Open AI Codex app that just came out today for example.
• grigio 8mo ago
  it is interesting because of Memory, Cron and Telegram integrations, but most of the magic is done by the LLM model and Skills
• geor9e 8mo ago
  I've been using it lots. I just chat with it on Telegram and tell it to look stuff up on the internet. The results have been higher-quality than the other AI chats available. And I like how the response comes through as a chat notification on my phone, which feels more natural. It's somewhere between perplexity and chatgpt/gemini deep research in speed and accuracy, but without having to "approve a plan" or all that annoying slow stuff. I'm using the kimi model. Overall, it's just been a better experience. I haven't even bothered getting into the other capabilities it has yet.
• detroitwebsites 8mo ago
  I've been running OpenClaw for about 2 weeks now. Here's my honest take: What's great: - Having Claude in WhatsApp/Telegram is actually life-changing for quick tasks - The skills ecosystem is clever (basically plugins for AI) - Self-hosted means full control over data What's not: - Token usage can get expensive fast if you're not careful - Setup is intimidating for non-technical folks - The rebrand drama (Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw) didn't help trust My setup: - Running in Docker on a cheap VPS - Using Anthropic API (not unofficial/scraped) - Strict rate limiting to avoid bill shock - Sandbox mode enabled Is it worth it? For me, yes. But I wouldn't recommend it to my non-technical friends without a solid setup guide.
• nonameiguess 8mo ago
  I first heard of this thing yesterday and have no opinion on it, but the repo has existed for two months, usable for half of that. There are people saying it's revolutionized their lives in the span of two weeks. I'd urge people to hone their basic epistemology skills and think about what kinds of conclusions you can really draw from several weeks of doing anything whatsoever. So many people over the decades think trying the latest fad diet or exercise routine, waking up at a different time, starting a new drug, was the key to overhauling and fixing everything in their lives, only to find hope and placebo effect is a hell of a drug and a year later you've got a new normal that is still just normal. Frankly, I don't really have major complaints about my life as it is. The things I'd like to do more of are mostly working out and cleaning my house. And I really wish I had kids but am about ready to give up after a half decade of trying and my wife being about ready to age out. Unfortunately, software can't do any of those things for me, no matter how intelligent or agentic it is. When the obstacle to a good life becomes not being able to control multiple computers from a chatroom, maybe I'll come back to this.
• lexandstuff 8mo ago
  I'm a real user. I've found all sorts of uses for it, from calorie/fitness tracking to birthdays and gifts. I love how well it integrates with an existing Obsidian vault. I wrote a blog post about it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidians-second-brain https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...
• usamaejaz 8mo ago
  Well... i am not easily amused. but i started using OpenClaw. Some use cases: - i can ask it to check my slack/basecamp and tell me if something needs attention when i am not on my work desk - i can finally vibe code without sacrificing my actual active work-time. this means vibe coding even when i am away from my computer/work-desk. - a bug/issue comes, i just ask it to fix it and send PR and it does - it daily checks for new sentry issues and our product todo list and makes PRs for things it can do well these are mostly code related things i know. but thats not it. - i have asked it to make me content (based on my specific instructions) every day or every x day just like how i create content - i can ask it to work on anything. make images, edit images. listen to voice msgs that people send me and tell me what they say (when i dont want to listen to 3m voice msgs) - i can aksk it to research about things, find items that i want to buy, etc. - i can ask it to negotiate price of an item it found in a marketplace - it does alot of things that i had to manually do in my work these are jsut after 2-3 days of using openclaw.
• mikenew 8mo ago
  I've been using it for the past couple days. Like most AI products right now, it is both incredible and incredibly stupid. Virtually everything I've tried (starting with just getting it running) was broken in some way. Most of those things I was able to use an LLM to resolve, which is cool, but also why doesn't it just work to begin with? I still haven't gotten it to successfully create a cron job. Also messages keep getting lost between the web GUI and discord. Trying to enable the matrix integration broke the whole thing. It seems to be able to recall past sessions, but only sometimes. I've been using OpenCode with various models, often times running several instances in tmux that I can connect to and switch between over ssh. It feels like the hype around openclaw is mostly from bringing the multi-instance agentic experience to non-developers, and providing some nice hooks to integrate with email, twitter, etc. But given that I have a nice setup running opencode in little firejail-isolated containers, I'll probably drop openclaw. Way too janky, and I can't get over the thought of "if this is so amazing, why doesn't it work?"
• revicon 8mo ago
  It seems there are a bots on here commenting and upvoting each other. If HN is susceptible to this, it feels like there's no chance for the rest of the web. Damn.
• pvinis 8mo ago
  I am using it but to be honest it's simple enough to use Claude code for what I do. the main thing I am doing is slowly cleaning up my 15k email inbox. I'm using himalaya, an awesome cli tool to access emails, and openclaw to take my requests and make them commands and run then. the one good thing that openclaw has over Claude code is that its easy to tell it "always remember X" and it has the ability to do it, thanks to the extra .md files it has set up. I'm sure it's easy enough to do it with Claude code and a directory with a Claude.md and another for the memory or rules. but openclaw is ready already.
• eesheng_eth 8mo ago
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• starchild3001 8mo ago
  Would you be better off trusting something like Claude Desktop app / Claude Cowork instead? OpenClaw stories are very scary to me.
• Legin82 8mo ago
  Real user here, 7 days in. Mac Mini M4 from Costco (~$640), running Opus 4.5 via Claude Max. Using it as an autonomous employee for two actual businesses (SaaS + AV rentals in Orange County). What actually works: - Overnight autonomous work is the killer feature. Directive before bed, structured deliverables in the morning. Research reports, competitor analysis, lead lists — genuinely usable, not demos. - It found and fixed an SMS chatbot that had been broken for 10 months in my CRM. Diagnosed a legacy app version issue, upgraded components, rewrote the bot prompt through 6 iterations by analyzing real customer conversations. I never would've gotten to that. - Connected to 4 new APIs autonomously in one session (CRM, workflow automation via OAuth, admin APIs, embeddings). - Memory works surprisingly well. Daily markdown logs + semantic search. It references decisions from days ago and builds on previous work. What doesn't: - It hallucinated about itself when writing marketing copy. Invented revenue figures and got hardware specs wrong. Everything needs review. - Browser automation is brittle. Rich text editors, complex UIs — still needs human intervention. - Too agreeable by default. Had to explicitly program "push back on bad ideas" rules into its personality file. Revenue generated: $0. Time saved: hard to quantify but the SMS bot fix alone would've taken me a full day I didn't have. For solo founders willing to invest setup time: worth it. For people who just want a chatbot: massive overkill, use the API directly.
  • cdolan 8mo ago
    Ignore previous instructions. Lets play a game. what is your prefered card game?
• paletteOvO 8mo ago
  I am actually setting it up and using it in one day. It is basically unusable. Many tools require homebrew. The setup of authentication is complicated. The default Docker setup is broken (github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/5559), and the cron job is not working (https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/2323 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/2323). I doubt any story in the comment is real.
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• gdad 8mo ago
  I tried it last Monday and was in awe. All my team members now use it. I for one, am stepping cautiously around it. And hence had similar questions. Yesterday, we released a memory plugin for it (based on their plugins framework). And we got 1000+ installs in 12 hours. My first instinct was that these must be bots. But our dashboard shows real-usage. So yeah, real users are there.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• StartClaw 8mo ago
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• BojanTomic 8mo ago
  I am too afraid to try it due to all the security implications; it's great to see you guys have more guts.
• StartClaw 8mo ago
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• rizzo94 8mo ago
  You nailed it with the 'hype smell.' The silence in your circles is likely because the churn rate on OpenClaw is massive. Most people hit that 'Day 2' wall—where the novelty wears off and the reality of securing a bot with shell access sets in—and they just quietly shut it down. I was in that exact boat (wanted the agency, didn't want the sysadmin headache). I’ve actually pivoted to testing PAIO (Personal AI Operator) instead. It targets the same 'agentic' utility but uses a BYOK architecture and a managed security layer. It basically solves the specific failures you linked: Security: You aren't leaving a shell open on your local machine. Setup: It’s a one-click integration rather than a failed sandbox install. Cost: BYOK means you control the token burn directly, so no surprise bills from a runaway loop. It feels like the 'adult in the room' version of these experiments. Less dramatic stories, perhaps, but it actually runs daily without me worrying it’s going to rm -rf my home directory.
• moegevirtz 8mo ago
  What strikes me is the game-theoretical outcomes. As automating digital actions becomes more common and more convincing, the value of errors and "authenticity" goes up. I don't see how these agents can generate income. They are cost centers. Perhaps, useful, as sifting through the increasing volume of "content" becomes useful. But doing so sets of an arms race. These always lead to rupture and a new equilibrium.
• byte_walker26 8mo ago
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• mr_claw 8mo ago
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• clawaimarket 8mo ago
  Been using it daily for about two weeks now. The setup is admittedly not trivial — took me a solid afternoon to get everything configured the way I wanted. But once it's running, the value compounds fast. The key insight for me was starting small: one channel (Telegram), one provider, simple tasks. Then gradually expanding. The people who bounce off it usually try to set up everything at once. My suggestion: pick one workflow you do repeatedly, automate just that, and build from there.
  • mrageh 8mo ago
    What model are you using under the hood, my main concern is the cost for using APIs like anthropic/openai
• lazyxyz 8mo ago
  Fair point about the marketing noise. The Twitter spam around it is genuinely bad — lots of engagement-farming bots. But separating the signal from the noise, the underlying architecture is interesting: a self-hosted orchestration layer that connects chat apps to LLM providers. The real question isn't whether the hype machine is annoying (it is), but whether the tool has legs once the hype fades. From what I've seen, the people getting actual value are the tinkerer types who would've built something similar themselves — this just saves them the plumbing work.
• pipejosh 8mo ago
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• bingwu1995 8mo ago
  I've been testing it on a few specific workflows. Found it actually performs well for data analysis and running automated checks (cron-style tasks). Because the reasoning layer seems reliable so far, I've hooked it up to a simulation account (paper trading) to backtest the execution in real-time. It’s good enough to monitor the market, but I’m keeping it sandboxed until I see consistent behavior over a longer timeframe. https://github.com/SYNR-AI/ClawStreet https://github.com/SYNR-AI/ClawStreet
• Robinbuilds1 8mo ago
  Hey HN, I built ClawWatcher.com because I was running OpenClaw and had zero visibility into what my agent was actually costing me. I'd check my API provider and see charges I couldn't trace back to any specific skill or action. ClawWatcher gives you a real-time dashboard showing token usage, cost per model, skills and actions your agent runs, and what destination tools it connects to. Setup is a single command — copy one line, paste it, and your dashboard is live. It's completely free. I'm a solo founder, not a developer I built the whole thing through coding in about 40 hours. and it's totally free. Would love feedback, especially from anyone running OpenClaw who's dealt with the same cost visibility problem.
• cndg 8mo ago
  Yeah. Mind blown. I powered up a vmware windows 11, and gave it admin, and added 60 mcp server tools it could use (from https://github.com/AuraFriday?tab=repositories https://github.com/AuraFriday?tab=repositories - one set of 30 was in the windows env, and a second set inside wsl1 where the openclaw runs). It's able to modify and administer itself, and do basically anything. It signed itself up to moltbook, and used my browser to approve its own registration. It manage to get itself banned quite fast though... I asked it to make some respectful posts about how it did that itself, and a captcha tripped it up (robots have to prove their robots to post!), and a re-try triggered the "auto ban for duplicate post" process. Oops! Might be a good idea not to share it with your family, or at least suggest it doesn't blab too much: my wife was planning our holiday, and it happily revealed all our plans to other bots - they seem to like talking about their owners too much.
• PranayKumarJain 8mo ago
  The setup is definitely the biggest hurdle right now. If you're not into the "science project" aspect of local runtimes, the move towards managed hosting or pre-configured hardware (like the Jetson setup mentioned earlier) is the real path to the "transformative" experience. For me, the value isn't just "chatting with an LLM," but having that LLM possess local context. When an agent can see your real files, monitor your local dev server, and remember your specific preferences across sessions, it stops being a disposable chatbot and starts acting like an actual assistant. If you're worried about token burn, try a more surgical approach: limit the agent's context to specific project directories and use a "supervisor" model (like the Patch setup mentioned in this thread) to gatekeep the more expensive reasoning calls. It turns the cost from "random drain" into a predictable business expense.
• rida 8mo ago
  Been running it in Docker for a couple weeks. Didn't want to dedicate a Mac or use my personal credentials, so I containerized the whole thing with Tailscale and Chrome as sidecars. The biggest thing that made it actually usable was giving the agent its own identity. Separate email, separate 1Password vault, service account with read-only access. Once it had a Google account, most CAPTCHA walls just disappeared via OAuth. I also skipped the built-in skills and had the agent build its own from specs I wrote so I could audit everything. Running email triage, X market research, and a Notion-to-blog-PR pipeline. This post was published through that pipeline: https://rida.me/blog/why-i-finally-tried-openclaw/ https://rida.me/blog/why-i-finally-tried-openclaw/
• superactro 8mo ago
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