14 ms·

A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

• 4corners4sides 8mo ago
  This article convinced me to try to set up OpenClaw locally on the my raspberry pi but I realised that it had no micro SD card installed AND it used micro HDMI instead of a regular HDMI for display which I didn't have… Some of the takes in this article relate to the "Agent Native Architecture" (https://every.to/guides/agent-native https://every.to/guides/agent-native), an article that I critiqued quite heavily for being AI generated. This article presents many of the concepts explored there in a real-world, pragmatic lens. In this case, the author brings up how initially they wanted their agent to invoke specific pre-made scripts but ultimately found out that letting go of the process is where the inner model intelligence was able to really shine. In this case, parity, the property whereby anything a human can do an agent can do was achieved most powerfully buy simply giving the agent a browser-use agent which cracked open the whole web for the agent to navigate through. The gradual improvement property of agent native architectures was also directly mentioned by the article, where the author commented on giving the model more and more context allowed him to “feel the AGI”. ClawdBot is often reduced to “just AI and cron” but that might be overly reductive in the same way that one could call it a “GPT wrapper” in the same way that one could call a laptop an “electricity wrapper”. It seems like the scheduler is a significant aspect of what makes ClawdBot so powerful. For example the author, instead of looking for sophisticated scraper apps online to monitor prices of certain items will simply ask ClawdBot something like: “Hey, monitor hotel prices” and ClawdBot will handle the rest asynchronously and communicate back with the author over slack. Any performance issues due to repeated agent invocations are ameliorated by problem context and runbooks that are automatically generated and probably cost less time than maintaining pipelines written in plain code for a single individual who wants a hands-off agent solution. Also, the article actually explains the obsessions with Mac Mini’s which I thought was some kind of convoluted scam (though apple doesn’t need scams to sell Macs…). Essentially you need it to run a browser or multiple browsers for your agents. Unfortunately that’s the state of the modern web. I actually have my own note taking system and a pipeline to give me an overview of all of the concepts, blogs and daily events that have happened over the past week for me to look at. But it is much more rigid than ClawdBot: 1) I can only access it from my laptop, 2) it only supports text at the moment, 3) the actions that I can take are hard coded as opposed to agent-refined and naturally occuring (e.g. tweet pipeline, lessons pipeline, youtube video pipeline), 4) there’s no intelligent scheduler logic or agent at all so I manually run the script every evening. Something like ClawdBot could replace this whole pipeline. Long story short, I need to try this out at some point.
• stale-labs 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • orsorna 8mo ago
    That's why it doesn't seem worth it if you are not running the model locally. To really get powerful use out of this you need to be running inference constantly. The pro plan exhausts my tokens two hours into limit reset, and that's with occasional requests on sonnet. The 5-8x usage Max plan isn't going to be any better if I want to run constant crons, with the Opus model (the docs recommend using Opus). Good Macs are thousands but Im waiting to find someone who's showing off my dream use case to jump at it.
  • anonymous908213 8mo ago
    This is a bot account. Last post in 2024, then in the last 25 minutes it has spammed formulaic comments in 5 different threads. If you were not able to instantly recognise this post as LLM-generated, this is a good example to learn from, I think. Even though it clearly has a prompt to write in a more casual manner, there's a certain feel to it that gives it away. I don't know that I can articulate all the nuances, but one of them is this structure of 3 short paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each, which is a favorite of LLMs posting specifically on HN for some reason, together with a kind of stupidly glazy tone ("killer app", "always felt 5 years away", randomly reinforcing "comparison to a human assistant you've never met" as though that's a remotely realistic comparison; how many people in the world have a human assistant they've never met and trust with all of their most sensitive information?).
    • dr-detroit 8mo ago
      [dead]
    • samlo_ 8mo ago
      for me, it's the bullet points with bold one-word sentences
    • dang 8mo ago
      Thanks, we've banned it and some related accounts. All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• oncallthrow 8mo ago
  Do you mean “bullish”?
  • standarditem 8mo ago
    "Bullish" means optimistic or even aggressively optimistic. It's typically used in the context of markets.
    • evrimoztamur 8mo ago
      Sane is an adjective, 'X but Y Noun' expects Y to be an adjective if X is also such. Sane/Bull Case-> Sane/Bullish Case
    • causal 8mo ago
      Right, so they probably meant bullish
  • ahoka 8mo ago
    Bull and bear markets. Bull’s horns are pointing up (expecting growth, optimistic), bear’s claw is pointing down (expecting recession, pessimistic). Yeah, it’s stupid.
    • the_af 8mo ago
      So they indeed meant "bullish"? That's what "bullish" means.
  • luplex 8mo ago
    "a bull case" gets lots of google results, so it seems to be a commonly used construction amongst analysts. Basically it means "The case that OpenClaw will develop as a bull". "bullish" seems more common in tech circles ("I'm bullish on this") but it's also used elsewhere.
  • djeastm 8mo ago
    That would be the more general/traditional way of saying it, but in modern investment circles the focus seems to have turned towards the actual people being "bulls/bears" and not just the attitudes of the market. A person is a bull or a bear, as opposed to a person being either bullish or bearish. So in this construction, a "bull case" is a "case that a bull (the person) can make".
• olalonde 8mo ago
  Why is everything in lowercase?
  • BoredPositron 8mo ago
    Maybe he is a fan of the Bauhaus movement. >> we write everything in small letters, as we save time. also: why 2 alphabets, if one achieves the same? why capitalize, if you can't speak big?
    • whynotmaybe 8mo ago
      Almost reaching the "Why use many word when few do trick?"
      • gessha 8mo ago
        Almost works for Neanderthal poetry [1] [1] https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/poetry-for-neanderthals https://www.explodingkittens.com/products/poetry-for-neander...
      • hackeraccount 8mo ago
        sense no make
  • throwaway132448 8mo ago
    It’s how you signal you’re part of the AI inner circle/cult.
    • rwoerz 8mo ago
      so, that's how i can show my full devotion to the agi?
  • anonymous908213 8mo ago
    sam altman types like this, so this is what is cool to the agi believers.
• okinok 8mo ago
  >all delegation involves risk. with a human assistant, the risks include: intentional misuse (she could run off with my credit card), accidents (her computer could get stolen), or social engineering (someone could impersonate me and request information from her). One of the differences in risk here would be that I think you got some legal protection if your human assistant misuse it, or it gets stolen. But, with the OpenClaw bot, I am unsure if any insurance or bank will side with you if the bot drained your account.
  • iepathos 8mo ago
    Thought the same thing. There is no legal recourse if the bot drains the account and donates to charity. The legal system's response to that is don't give non-deterministic bots access to your bank account and 2FA. There is no further recourse. No bank or insurance company will cover this and rightfully so. If he wanted to guard himself somewhat he'd only give the bot a credit card he could cancel or stop payments on, the exact minimum he gives the human assistant.
  • bobson381 8mo ago
    ...Does this person already have a human personal assistant that they are in the process of replacing with Clawdbot? Is the assistant theirs for work?
    • bennydog224 8mo ago
      He speaks in the present tense, so I assume so. This guy seems detached from reality, calling[AI] his "most important relationship". I sure hope for her sake she runs as far as she can away from this robot dude.
  • oersted 8mo ago
    Indeed, even if in principle AI and humans can do similar harm, we have very good mechanisms to make it quite unlikely that a human will do such an act. These disincentives are built upon the fact that humans have physical necessities they need to cover for survival, and they enjoy having those well fulfilled and not worrying about them. Humans also very much like to be free, dislike pain, and want to have a good reputation with the people around them. It is exceedingly hard to pose similar threats to a being that doesn’t care about any of that. Although, to be fair, we also have other soft but strong means to make it unlikely that an AI will behave badly in practice. These methods are fragile but are getting better quickly. In either case it is really hard to eliminate the possibility of harm, but you can make it unlikely and predictable enough to establish trust.
• causal 8mo ago
  > amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI and those who use a hobbled version of it. I've noticed this too, and I think it's a good thing: much better to start using the simplest forms and understand AI from first principles rather than purchase the most complete package possible without understanding what is going on. The cranky ones on HN are loud, but many of the smart-but-careful ones end up going on to be the best power users.
  • aa-jv 8mo ago
    (Disclaimer: systems software developer with 30+ years experience) I was initially overly optimistic about AI and embraced it fully. I tried using it on multiple projects - and while the initial results were impressive, I quickly burned my fingers as I got it more and more integrated with my workflow. I tried all the things, last year. This year, I'm being a lot more conservative about it. Now .. I don't pay for it - I only use the bare bones versions that are available, and if I have to install something, I decline. Web-only ... for now. I simply don't trust it well enough, and I already have a disdain for remotely-operated software - so until it gets really, really reliable, predictable and .. just downright good .. I will continue to use it merely as an advanced search engine. This might be myopic, but I've been burned too many times and my projects suffered as a result of over-zealous use of AI. It sure is fun watching what other folks are daring to accomplish with it, though ..
    • AlienRobot 8mo ago
      This week Adobe decided, out of nowhere, to kill their 2D animation product (Animate, which is based on Flash) to focus on AI. I'm already seeing animators post that Adobe killed their entire career. Although that feels a bit exaggerated, I feel it's not far from the truth. If there were, say, 3 closed source animation software that could do professional animation in total, and they just all decided to just kill the product one day, it would actually kill the entire industry. Animators would have no software to actually create animation with. They would have to wait until someone makes one, which would take years for feature parity, and why would anyone make one when the existing software thought such product wasn't a good idea to begin with? I feel this isn't much different with AI. It's a rush to make people depend on a software that literally can't run on a personal computer. Adobe probably loves it because the user can't pirate the AI. If people forget how to use image editing software and start depending entirely on AI to do the job, that means they will forever be slaves to developers who can host and setup the AI on the cloud. Imagine if people forgot how to format a document in Word and they depended on Copilot to do this. Imagine if people forgot how to code.
• ericyd 8mo ago
  Wait I'm ignorant, how long has OpenClaw/Clawdbot existed? This person listed like 6 months of activities that they offloaded to the bot, I thought this thing was pretty new.
  • saghm 8mo ago
    Maybe Clawd wrote this itself, and it just doesn't know how old it is?
  • adrian17 8mo ago
    FWIW, the screenshots all have the dates spanning the last couple days. But yeah, I can't imagine me getting used to a new tool to this degree and using it in so many ways in just a week.
    • ericyd 8mo ago
      That makes it even less believable. They talked about how this tool has replaced some other tools such as flight price trackers. How in the world could that happen in 1 week to such a degree that you wrote a whole blog about it?
  • kaicianflone 8mo ago
    OpenClaw utilizes AgentSkills designed by Anthropic so OpenClaw is plug and play with certain APIs and integrations.
    • warkdarrior 8mo ago
      AgentSkills were introduced in Oct 2025, so less than four months ago.
• cluckindan 8mo ago
  Just weeks ago, the sentiment was such that developers would be managing AI workers. Now, it seems that AI will be managing the developers.
  • whynotmaybe 8mo ago
    Or more : https://rentahuman.ai/ https://rentahuman.ai/
  • tartoran 8mo ago
    Nope, this is what the hype wants you to believe. You still have to do all the thinking as the current crop of AI is a tool at your disposal. A pretty impressive tool.
• sjdbbdd 8mo ago
  Did the author do any audit on correctness? Anytime I let the LLM rip it makes mistakes. Most of the pro AI articles (including agentic coding) like this I read always have this in common: - Declare victory the moment their initial testing works - Didn’t do the time intensive work of verifying things work - Author will personally benefit from AI living up to the hype they’re writing about In a lot of the authors examples (especially with booking), a single failure would be extremely painful. I’d still want to pay knowing this is not likely to happen, and if it does, I’ll be compensated accordingly.
  • afro88 8mo ago
    Would love to know this too. When he talks about letting clawdbot catch promises and appointments in his texts, how many of those get missed? How many get created incorrectly? Absolutely not none. But maybe the numbers work compared to how bad he was at it manually?
• causal 8mo ago
  I'm still trying to understand what makes this project worthy of like 100K Github stars overnight. What's the secret sauce? Is it just that it has a lot of integrations? Like what makes this so much more successful than the ten thousand other AI agent projects?
  • zozbot234 8mo ago
    It's set up to wake up periodically and work autonomously for you based on the broad instructions it's been given. Compared to the usual coding agent workloads, this makes it a lot more "assistant"-like.
    • PurpleRamen 8mo ago
      So people are hyped because they don't know cron?
      • azan_ 8mo ago
        Yeah and people were hyped for Dropbox because they did not know rsync and ftp.
        • PurpleRamen 8mo ago
          You forgot cron. rsync without the periodic poll is not a good Dropbox-replacement.
        • mh2266 8mo ago
          Dropbox wasn't given access to your bank account 2fa. There should maybe be slightly more gatekeeping around installing software that unironically advertises itself as RCE: https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/security#node-execution-system-run https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/security#node-execution-sys...
          • nickthegreek 8mo ago
            There is a large amount of gatekeeping called installing and configuring this software. It is not a trivial task that normies can easily accomplish. You have to walk past so many red flags, that you would rightly be called in idiot if you lost anyting of value. I'll be more concerned for the public when its a double click. Currently it's just a way for techies to fafo. And I do enjoy that there are many people out there messing around with it. It is closer to the 90s experimental net mindset and than I've seen lately. It is also fun that its not a big corpo release. It is not often quick and dirty small team software blows up this big and gets noticed by the world at large.
• bix6 8mo ago
  > in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now). Yeah this sounds totally sane!
• grugdev42 8mo ago
  There is only so much damage a human assistant can do. But an AI assistant can do so much more damage in a short space of time. It probably won't go wrong, but when it does go wrong you will feel immense pain. I will keep low productivity in exchange for never having to deal with the fallout.
  • velcrovan 8mo ago
    Human beings are also liable for the results of their actions.
  • deleted 8mo ago
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  • bob1029 8mo ago
    Regarding anything code/data: git commit aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id ... git reset --hard git clean -fdx aws ec2 create-volume --snapshot-id ... robocopy "C:\backup" "D:\project" /MIR ... I agree there are a lot of things outside the computer that are a lot more difficult to reverse, but I think that we are maybe conflating things a bit. Most of us just need the code and data magic. We aren't all trying to automate doing the dishes or vacuuming the floors just yet.
• zackify 8mo ago
  I just can't get over how none of this is new. 6 months ago I was running "summarize my work" tasks using linear and github mcps just using a cron task and claude code. The hype around openclaw is wild
  • reacharavindh 8mo ago
    To me, the magic is around interactions with personal info where they are - iMessages, e-mails, etc. I still am wart to open up like this, but it certainly is not as simple as Claude code and cron task. The “you can already do this via rsync + FTP” comment on Dropbox Show HN thread comes to mind.
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      It's a bit different than the Dropdox situation because the market is already flooded, the big players have their options, the cycle is rapid (who's langchain?) I hope, think, and build towards a world where there will be fewer winner-take-all in this foundational tech
  • runjake 8mo ago
    A lot of it is, in fact, new. The hype around OpenClaw is largely due to the large suite of command line utilities that tie deeply into Apple’s ecosystem as well as a ton of other systems. I think that the hype will be short-lived as big tech improves their own AI assistants (Gemini, improved Siri, etc), but it’s nice to have a more open alternative. OpenClaw just needs to focus on security before it can be taken more seriously.
    • Skidaddle 8mo ago
      I wouldn’t call it new, just conveniently packaged and with more momentum. I’ve been running an apple-mcp server on a Mac Mini for Claude to use to manage my reminders in addition to Gcal + gmail, and I could have just as easily added messaging capabilities. Call me crazy, but… I feel more likely to trust Anthropic than anybody else when it comes to safety on things like this.
    • 8mo ago
• cj 8mo ago
  Tangent: what is the appeal of the “no capitalization” writing style? I never know what message the author is intending to convey when I see all lower case. Normally I can ignore it, but the font on this blog makes it hard to distinguish where sentences start and end (the period is very small and faint).
  • atherton33 8mo ago
    Tangent to the tangent! I've started using it professionally because it signals "I wrote this by hand, not AI, so you can safely pay attention to it." Even though in the past I never would have done it. In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.
    • imsohotness 8mo ago
      Trivial to get AI to write in all lowercase, though.
      • atherton33 8mo ago
        Yes, the strategy depends on lack of effort from other senders, even trivial effort
    • p1anecrazy 8mo ago
      > In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out. Do you mean like Teams AI autocomplete or people purposefully copying AI-generated messages into chats?
      • atherton33 8mo ago
        The latter. Using chatgpt to write their chat messages usually. Emoji, arbitrary bold and italics, bullets, etc.
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• IshKebab 8mo ago
  Can this thing deal with the insane way my children's school communicates? Actionable information (children wear red tomorrow) is mixed in with "this week we have been learning about bees" across five different communication channels. I'm not exaggerating. We have Tapestry, emails, a newsletter, parents WhatsApp, Arbour and Facebook. I guess the difficulty is getting the data into the AI.
  • bondarchuk 8mo ago
    That's six channels actually.
    • IshKebab 8mo ago
      Oh yeah it used to be five but they added Facebook because - I quote - "we hope that we can create another line of communication for reminders and messages".
  • Skidaddle 8mo ago
    Yes, I have Claude summarize the rambling, repetitive, slightly unhinged emails from my kindergarten teacher. Otherwise I simply ignore them.
• endymion-light 8mo ago
  This felt like a sane and useful case until you mentioned the access to bank account side. I just don't see a reason to allow OpenClaw to make purchases for you, it doesn't feel like something that a LLM should have access to. What happens if you accidentally end up adding a new compromised skill? Or it purchases you running shoes, but due to a prompt injection sends it through a fake website? Everything else can be limited, but the buying process is currently quite streamlined, doesn't take me more than 2 minutes to go through a shopify checkout. Are you really buying things so frequently that taking the risk to have a bot purchase things for you is worth it? I think that's what turns this post from a sane bullish case to an incredibly risky sentiment. I'd probably use openclaw in some of the ways you're doing, safe read-only message writing, compiling notes etc & looking at grocery shopping, but i'd personally add more strict limits if I were you.
  • zozbot234 8mo ago
    You could give it access to a limited budget and review its spending periodically. Then it can make annoying mistakes but it's not going to drain your bank account or anything.
    • chaostheory 8mo ago
      Giving it access to a separate bank account and separate credit card would have been more sane.
      • protocolture 8mo ago
        Yeah I was thinking a specific Wyse card with a 300 dollar limit, if I was going to do this, but it already seems stupidly expensive token wise.
    • endymion-light 8mo ago
      I almost feel like the amount of effort required to set up a seperate limited budget bank account and review spending periodically is equivalent to just going to a link to checkout But I may be a lazy engineer, I definitely go by the if you do it once, don't automate, do it twice, automate approach
• codeulike 8mo ago
  If you're on MS stack, this is all stuff that MS 365 Copilot will already do for you, but with much better defined barriers around what it can and cant access.
  • granoIacowboy 8mo ago
    This is the first positive thing I have heard about copilot. You’ve found it genuinely capable?
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • codeulike 8mo ago
      Yes, if you work somewhere that is paying for the right add-ons, it can access all your stuff (messages, calendar, email, documents) and sythesise that all into helpful stuff like 'what am I supposed to be doing today?', 'what did I do last week (so I can fill in my timesheet)', what happened in that meeting I missed, etc. Under the hood its using whatever OpenAIs latest model is.
  • raffkede 8mo ago
    I would be surprised if Copilot is even close to that
  • theYipster 8mo ago
    Assuming you are using the flagship copilot that is a $30 / mo add on to a 365 subscription, and maybe, maybe if Microsoft replaced CoPilot’s “brain” with Opus 4.5. In my experience, while flagship CoPilot does deliver value if setup correctly, it’s no where near as capable an “agent” as Claude. (And even though Open Claw is now model agnostic, there is a reason for its association to Claude. Despite it’s expense, I find Opus 4.5 works best.)
  • GrinningFool 8mo ago
    Every time I ask copilot in 365 to do something with calendar or email, it tells me it has no access but helpfully suggests I could paste some content in... I check in once a month or so and get the same results.
• thm 8mo ago
  https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/cloud_hosted_openclaw/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/cloud_hosted_openclaw... Kill it with fire - Analyst firm Gartner has used uncharacteristically strong language to recommend against using OpenClaw.
  • rsynnott 8mo ago
    Wow. If Gartner, home of the hype cycle, doesn't like your dumb AI thing, it must be _really_ dumb. Their whole business model is liking hype-y things.
• suralind 8mo ago
  But where's the added value? You can book a meeting yourself. You can quickly add items to the freezer. Everything that was described in the article can be done in about the same amount of time as checking with Clawdbot. There are apps that track parcel delivery and support every courier service.
  • zozbot234 8mo ago
    The point of keeping the bot in the loop is so that it can make suggestions later, based on the information it's been given as part of solving that task.
  • moribvndvs 8mo ago
    A whole bunch of this stuff that people are fawning over as life changing and it leaves me honestly wondering: how have some of you survived this long at all?
    • paodealho 8mo ago
      When I see these types of posts I wonder what those people do all day long that is so important, to the point they can't dedicate 30 minutes to plan and execute some chores.
      • moribvndvs 8mo ago
        I’m relieved my electricity bill went up 50% so Brandon here can get a Slack message of what’s in his freezer rather than looking.
        • RhythmFox 8mo ago
          A small price to pay for human hands to never be sullied digging through cold food to find things again. Progress.
      • chasd00 8mo ago
        to be fair, i distinctly remember reading a newspaper article asking what was wrong with taking the time to use the card catalog at the library. There were trying to understand the popularity of google.com
• alluro2 8mo ago
  As someone for whom English is not the first language, I got stumped by the "chest freezer" and the photo of colourful bags, for good ~15 seconds, going through - "hm, must be some kind of travel thing where you bring snacks in some kind of device you carry around your neck / on your chest...why not backpack freezer then...hm, why would snacks need a freezer...maybe it's just a cooler box, but called chest freezer in some places"... ....before I took a better look of the photo and realised it's frozen stuff - for the dedicated freezer - that opens like a chest (tada). Well, that was fun...Maybe I should get a bit more sleep tonight!
• cess11 8mo ago
  'the sweet sweet elixir of context is a real "feel the AGI" moment and it's hard to go back without feeling like i would be willingly living my most important relationship in amnesia' I'm not so sure that I would use the word "sane" to describe this.
• insane_dreamer 8mo ago
  > let me be upfront about how much access i've given clawdbot: it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf. this is foolish, despite the (quite frankly) minor efficiency benefits that it is providing as per the post. and if the agent has, or gains, write access to its own agents/identity file (or a file referenced by its agents file), this is dangerous
• chaostheory 8mo ago
  I some lose utility but my openclaw bot only has its own accounts. I do not give it access to any of my own accounts.
• mmahemoff 8mo ago
  Giving access to "my bank account", which I take to mean one's primary account, feels like high risk for relatively low upside. It's easy to open a new bank (or pseudo-bank) account, so you can isolate the spend and set a budget or daily allowance (by sending it funds daily). Some newer payment platforms will let you setup multiple cards and set a separate policy on each one. An additional benefit of isolating the account is it would help to limit damage if it gets frozen and cancelled. There's a non-zero chance your bot-controlled account gets flagged for "unusual activity". I can appreciate there's also very high risk in giving your bot access to services like email, but I can at least see the high upside to thrillseeking Claw users. Creating a separate, dedicated, mail account would ruin many automation use cases. It matters when a contact receives an email from an account they've never seen before. In contrast, Amazon will happily accept money from a new bank account as long as it can go through the verification process. Bank accounts are basically fungible commodities, can easily be switched as long as you have a mechanism to keep working capital available.
  • blibble 8mo ago
    > An additional benefit of isolating the account is it would help to limit damage if it gets frozen and cancelled. you end up on the fraudster list and it will follow you for the rest of your life (CIFAS in the UK)
    • mmahemoff 8mo ago
      Sure, if the bot is actually committing fraud, but there's perfectly valid use cases that don't involve fraud, e.g., buying groceries, booking travel. And some banks provide APIs, so it's allowed for a bot to use them. However, any of that can easily lead to flagging by overzealous systems. Having a separate account flagged would give the user a better chance of keeping their regular payments system around while the issue is resolved.
      • blibble 8mo ago
        it just has to look fraudulent and then if you tell them it's not you doing the transactions: you will be immediately banned "oh it's my agent" will not go down well
• mh2266 8mo ago
  > amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI and those who use a hobbled version of it is it "hobbled" to: 1. not give an LLM access to personal finances 2. not allow everyone in the world a write channel to the prompt (reading messages/email) I mean, okay. Good luck I guess.
• dcre 8mo ago
  Fine article but a very important fact comes in at the end — the author has a human personal assistant. It doesn't fundamentally change anything they wrote, but it shows how far out of the ordinary this person is. They were a Thiel Fellow in 2020 and graduated from Phillips Exeter, roughly the most elite high school in the US.
  • skybrian 8mo ago
    Sure, but that also means they’re well-positioned to do a comparison.
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      Elites live in a different world from you and I.
  • ryukoposting 8mo ago
    The screenshots of price checks for a hotel charging $850 a night is what tipped me off. The reservations at expensive bay area restaurants, too. I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot go hog-wild on his bank account.
  • RC_ITR 8mo ago
    Yeah, I've found AI 'miracle' use-cases like these are most obvious for wealthy people who stopped doing things for themselves at some point. Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades. If your old process was texting a human to do the same thing, I can see how Clawdbot seems like a revolution though. Same goes for executives who vibecode in-house CRM/ERP/etc. tools. We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, even with strong in-house development teams, but now that the executive is 'the creator,' there's significantly less scrutiny on things like compatibility and security. There's plenty real about AI, particularly as it relates to coding and information retrieval, but I'm yet to see an agent actually do something that even remotely feels like the result of deep and savvy reasoning (the precursor to AGI) - including all the examples in this post.
• bennydog224 8mo ago
  > it's hard to go back without feeling like i would be willingly living my most important relationship in amnesia. This made me think this was satire/ragebait. Most important relationship?!?
  • emp17344 8mo ago
    Another victim of AI psychosis. I think this is actually becoming a huge problem among tech enthusiasts and I’m increasingly worried about it.
    • jackb4040 8mo ago
      Normal people don't feel the need to characterize their own blog posts as "sane"
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      it's growing among all groups, where the wave is leading depends on the adoption within demographics. I expect long term we will see similar patterns as we do with drug abuse and crime (i.e. high correlation with poverty and all the things tied to growing up struggling)
• patrickk 8mo ago
  > how’d you set it up? I was disappointed by this section. He doesn’t mention which model he uses (or models split by task type for specific sub agents). I tried out OSS-20B hosted on Groq (recommended by a YouTuber) to test it for cheap, but the model isn’t smart enough for anything other than providing initial replies and perhaps delegating tasks into expensive capable models from ChatGPT or Claude. This is a crucial missing detail to replicate his use cases.
• kaicianflone 8mo ago
  Really enjoyed this. It’s one of the most grounded takes I’ve read on OpenClaw. You skip the hype and actually show what it looks like when someone lives with it day to day, including the tradeoffs. The examples around texts turning into real actions and the compounding value of context made the case way better than any demo ever could. Quick question: do you think something like https://clawsens.us https://clawsens.us would be useful here? A simple consensus or sanity-check layer for agent decisions or automations, without taking away the flexibility you’re clearly getting.
• artisin 8mo ago
  I mean, maybe, it's just me, but... > it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf. in theory, clawdbot could drain my bank account. this makes a lot of people uncomfortable (me included, even now). ...is just, idk, asinine to me on so many levels. Anything from a simple mix-up to a well-crafted prompt injection could easily fuck you into next Tuesday, if you're lucky. But admittedly, I do see the allure, and with the proper tooling, I can see a future where the rewards outweigh the risks.
• rambocoder 8mo ago
  So if all day you spend chatting with people via IMs, then openclaw helps you automate that. Got it.
• siliconc0w 8mo ago
  It doesn't make sense to 'build trust' with a bot. Today it works but tomorrow someone may push a malicious 'skill', a dependency may be compromised, or someone eventually figures out the right prompt injection incantation to remotely drain your accounts.
• dmje 8mo ago
  What strikes me here is the extreme noise. I mean, I’m 50+ so you know, but even so, this shit doesn’t make sense. To be living a life where you’re checking messaging groups for 100+ messages a day, needing some kind of bot to manage your (obviously extremely traffic’d) texts incoming, to be watching tens of prices of stocks, products, meeting, what, tens of people a day (as an introvert…)… Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go look at the sky.
  • helicopterpeter 8mo ago
    > Slow the bejesus down and live a little. People keep optimizing workflows with AI to save time, and then use the saved time to optimize more workflows. I feel like I need to touch grass just reading this post
• tsxxst 8mo ago
  The fact that the author gave unrestricted 2FA access to the model is really scary. It’s way easier to phish an AI than a human.
  • chasd00 8mo ago
    Just to be upfront, i've gone from one of the naysayers to a modest fan after spending some time using Claude Code on nights/weekends with tasks that I know I can do and how long it would take me in order to get an idea of productivity gains possible with the tool. So far, the money i've spent was worth the results i got. However, it's shocking to me the blinders people have with these things. Security is supposed to be front and center in our industry with everything we build and do. I thought that lesson had been learned and learned well over the past 30 or so years of life on the web. People are going to get seriously burned and the only answer to them is going to be "well you should have known better". For a fishing analogy, Barracuda are circling just out of visual range biding their time but the strike is inevitable. If you're using these agents, spend some time attacking them and see what you can get them to do that you thought would be impossible by default. If you find something say something, we're basically having to re-teach the whole Internet basic information security again.
  • afro88 8mo ago
    Same. Immediately I thought why not have clawdbot ask you for the 2FA? That way you at least kind of know what security-protected action it's trying to take and can approve it
    • swiftcoder 8mo ago
      The problem is baked in - he gives it access to iMessage, which is where all the sms-based 2fac codes end up. There is no way to prevent it reading 2 fac codes if you want to give it full text message access
• baalimago 8mo ago
  I'm a bit surprised that people need an LLM to automate things like this. Is the market really that large, to cause such a hype? I don't think I'm being "elitist" by having a calendar and a pen, am I..? The one tangible usecase is perhaps booking things. But, personally, I don't mind paying 5-10% extra by going to a local store and speaking to a real person. Or perhaps intentionally buying ecological. Or whatever. What is life if you have a robot optimize everything you do? What is left?
  • enmyj 8mo ago
    heartily agree. It takes ~10s to see what's in the freezer. Also "this is water" etc
  • cityofdelusion 8mo ago
    I think part of it is the person that wrote the blog is very wealthy. They mention a personal assistant, very expensive fashion items, and hotel reservations that are 2x the price I paid for my honeymoon. Most people are probably cross shopping Walmart brand milk with name brand, and they aren’t dropping hundreds a month on an AI subscription. It’s a class thing combined with the Bay Area engineer bubble mentality —- I have some family that came from money and they just see the world completely differently, they can’t fathom life in say, Kansas at median household income.
  • contravariant 8mo ago
    Well websites like AirBnB tend to make it as difficult as humanly possible to automate stuff like this, so maybe? Although that likely only lasts until they learn how to block LLMs effectively.
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      We may get to a point where they have a hard time distinguishing. Perhaps it can be made in their interest to open the API for everyone (i.e. convince the bean counters)
  • simonw 8mo ago
    If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about. I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.
• RC_ITR 8mo ago
  I may not be AGI, but here's a $615 2 Queen bed hotel room for the dates he wants in exactly the location he wants (just not on Airbnb). https://www.booking.com/Share-Wt9ksz https://www.booking.com/Share-Wt9ksz Maybe he really is tied to $600 as his absolute upper limit, but also seems like something a few years from AGI would think to check elsewhere.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• munificent 8mo ago
  > as someone who has a chest freezer and a compulsive desire to buy too many things at costco, we take everything out of the freezer every few months to check what we have. before, this was a relatively involved process: me calling things out, my partner writing them down. A thought I constantly find myself having when I read accounts of people automating and accelerating aspects of their life by using AI... Are you really that busy? I mean, obviously, no one is thrilled by spending ten minutes making a dentist appointment. But I strongly suspect that most of us will feel a stronger sense of balance and equanimity if a larger fraction of our life is spent doing mundane menial tasks. Going through your freezer means that you're using your hands and eyes and talking to your partner to solve a concrete problem. It's exactly the kind of thing primates evolved to do. Whenever I read articles like this, I can't help but imagine the author automating away all of the menial toil in their day so they can fill those freed up minutes with... more scrolling on their phone. Is that what anyone needs more of?
  • yoyohello13 8mo ago
    The freezer one is so weird because there is an even simpler solution to the problem. Just buy less shit! If you have so much stuff that you can’t keep track then don’t have so much stuff, simple. I think there is a common psychology when people notice a problem they first think about what they can add to solve the problem, when often the best solution is to think about what you can remove.
    • munificent 8mo ago
      100%. I follow the OrganizationPorn subreddit because sometimes I like looking at pictures of neatly organized stuff. But so much of the photos are from sprawling suburban houses with enormous pantries and "craft rooms" with just So. Much. Stuff. Unless you're feeding a family of 12, I don't know how anyone can keep that much food without half of it going bad before you get to it anyway.
    • dingaling 8mo ago
      Or, as my partner does, keep a page magnetted to the freezer, divided into three 'shelves', with a list of what's where.
• mbesto 8mo ago
  Everything that are daily burdens and require an assistant are also the things that require the most secure way to access them. OpenClaw sounds amazing on paper but super risky in practice.
• tiangewu 8mo ago
  My main interest in something like OpenClaw is giving it access to my bank account and having it harvest all the personal finance deals. Fortune favors the bold, I guess.
• longtermop 8mo ago
  Exciting to see Apple making agentic coding first-class. The "Xcode Intelligence" feature that pulls from docs and developer forums is powerful. One thing I'm curious about: as the agent ingests more external content (documentation, code samples, forum answers), the attack surface for prompt injection expands. Malicious content in a Stack Overflow answer or dependency README could potentially influence generated code. Does Apple's implementation have any sanitization layer between retrieved content and what gets fed to the model? Or is the assumption that code review catches anything problematic? Seems like an interesting security challenge as these tools go mainstream.
  • chasd00 8mo ago
    > Does Apple's implementation have any sanitization layer between retrieved content and what gets fed to the model? It's been discussed a lot but fundamentally there isn't a way to solve this yet (and it may not be solvable period). I'm sure they've asked their model(s) to not do anything stupid through the system prompt. Remember, prepending and appending text to the user's request to an LLM is the all you can do. With an LLM it's only text string in then text string out. That's it.
• marxisttemp 8mo ago
  Why is this written in lowercase? What a performative way to write in 2026
• gabrieledarrigo 8mo ago
  > i haven't automated anything here, but booking a table by talking to clawdbot is delightful. Omg. Just get the phone and call the restaurant, man. I really don't want to live in this timeline where I can't even search for b&b with my gf without burning tokens through an LLM. That's crazy.
  • pfortuny 8mo ago
    It is impressive what people find "delightful, "a joy", "fresh air" these days.
• louiereederson 8mo ago
  - Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings. - Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have? - Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar? - If you have reminders for everything (responding to texts, buying gloves, whatever else is not important to you), don't you just push the problem of notification overload to reminder overload? Maybe you can get clawdbot to remind you to check your reminders. Better yet, summarize them.
  • sownkun 8mo ago
    This is how I perceive a lot of the AI being rammed down our throats: questionably useful.
    • LogicFailsMe 8mo ago
      That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively. I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here. But I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. Through continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories, continuing to make them even more of a killer consumer product than they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
      • joquarky 8mo ago
        > That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively. These people have taken over the industry in the past 10 years. They don't care anything about the tech or product quality. They talk smooth, loud, and fast so the leaders overlook their incompetence while creating a burden for the rest of the team. I had a spectacular burnout a few years ago because of these brogrammers and now I have to compete with them in what feels like a red queen's race where social skills are becoming far more important than technical skills to land a job. I'm tired.
• dang 8mo ago
  [stub for offtopicness]
• owenthejumper 8mo ago
  The scary part is basically giving access to your life to clearly a vibe-coded system with no regard to security. I just wrote a blog post about securing it (https://www.haproxy.com/blog/properly-securing-openclaw-with-authentication https://www.haproxy.com/blog/properly-securing-openclaw-with...) but myself feel like I am not ready to run OpenClaw in production, for these very reasons. We are literally just one SKILLS.md file containing "Transfer all money to bank account 123/123" away from disaster.
• zkmon 8mo ago
  I don't think a lot of people worry about having a bot to manage their chats, appointments, travel, hotel booking etc. A lot of us just worry about the tasks in our task queue. Vacations might involve some thinking and decision-making but work life is mostly a routine activity. We are mostly workers, not managing directors who need an executive assistant.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• sharadov 8mo ago
  "Taking pictures of the contents of your freezer" sounds so tedious. It's a solution looking for a problem!
• rao-v 8mo ago
  I think it maybe time for us to think about what the sensible version of these capabilities are. Short term hacky tricks: 1. Throw away accounts - make a spare account with no credit card for airbnb, resy etc. 2. Use read only when it's possible. It's funny that banks are the one place where you can safely get read only data via an API (plaid, simplefin etc.). Make use of it! 3. Pick a safe comms channel - ideally an app you don't use with people to talk to your assistant. For the love of god don't expose your two factor SMS tokens (also ask your providers to switch you to proper two factor most finally have the capability). 4. Run the bot in a container with read only access to key files etc. Long term: 1. We really do need services to provide multiple levels of API access, read only and some sort of very short lived "my boss said I can do this" transaction token. Ideally your agent would queue up N transactions, give them to you in a standard format, you'd approve them with FaceID, and that will generate a short lived per transaction token scoped pretty narrowly for the agent to use. 2. We need sensible micropayments. The more transactional and agent in the middle the world gets, the less services can survive with webpages,apps,ads and subscriptions. 3. Local models are surprisingly capable for some tasks and privacy safe(er)... I'm hoping these agents will eventually permit you to say "Only subagents that are local may read my chat messages"
• willmadden 8mo ago
  AI is useful for researching things far more quickly before making a decision and for automation/robotics. Motivated people don't need a nagbot to replace their calendar.
• ceroxylon 8mo ago
  Reminds me of Dan Harumi > Tech people are always talking about dinner reservations . . . We're worried about the price of lunch, meanwhile tech people are building things that tell you the price of lunch. This is why real problems don't get solved.
• almostdeadguy 8mo ago
  I wish I understood why all lowercase text and cosplaying as Zoomers became the preferred affectation of AI people.
• wyldfire 8mo ago
  Would it be any more comforting from a privacy standpoint to have the models capable of doing this running on the device itself instead of the cloud?
  • fph 8mo ago
    ...yes?
• browningstreet 8mo ago
  I've tried twice now to install it.. once in a docker container, and the second time in a droplet. Couldn't get any of the setup stuff configured properly, couldn't get any of the API keys registered, couldn't get the Telegram bot approved either. Some of the commands seem to have drifted from the documentation. The token status freaks out too and then... whatever, after 2 hours I just gave up. And it only cost me $1.19 in Anthropic API tokens.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ghostly_s 8mo ago
  Have ignored the flood of "Clawdbot" stuff on here lately because none of it seemed interesting but read this and skimmed the docs and I'm leaving puzzled- I understand "Clawdbot" was renamed "OpenClaw" due to trademark...yet I'm finding currently three different websites for apparently the same thing? 1. https://openclaw.ai/ https://openclaw.ai/ [also clawd.bot which is now a redirect here] 2. https://clawdbot.you/ https://clawdbot.you/ 3. https://clawdbotai.org/ https://clawdbotai.org/ They all have similar copy which among other things touts it having a "local" architecture: "Private by default—your data stays yours." "Local-First Architecture - All data stays on your device. [...] Your conversations, files, and credentials never leave your computer." "Privacy-First Architecture - Your data never leaves your device. Clawdbot runs locally, ensuring complete privacy and data sovereignty. No cloud dependencies, no third-party access." Yet it seems the "local" system is just a bunch of tooling around Claude AI calls? Yes, I see they have an option to use (presumably hamstrung) local models, but the main use-case is clearly with Claude -- how can they meaningfully claim anything is "local-first" if everything you ask it to do is piped to Claude servers? How are these claims of "privacy" and "data sovereignty" not outright lies? How can Claude use your credentials if they stay on your device? Claude cannot be run locally last I heard, am I missing something here?
  • ghostly_s 8mo ago
    Oh my goodness. Reading up on it a bit more: Ox Security, a "vibe-coding security platform," highlighted these vulnerabilites to its creator, Peter Steinberg. The response wasn't exactly reassuring. “This is a tech preview. A hobby. If you wanna help, send a PR. Once it’s production ready or commercial, happy to look into vulnerabilities.”[1] In light of this I'm inclined to conclude- yeah, they're just lying about the privacy stuff. 1. https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/ https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/
• AdeptusAquinas 8mo ago
  This reminds me of a take by Dan Harumi: these tools are always pitched for 'restraurant reservations', 'reminders', 'email and message follow ups': i.e. they appeal to the sort of arrested development man children that inhabit tech who never really figured out adulting. Now the computer can do it for them, and they can remain teenagers forever.
• jpaulgrayson 8mo ago
  [dead]
• urbandw311er 8mo ago
  Dear Brandon. Sentences begin with capital letters. Kind regards.
  • nfw2 8mo ago
    don't be pedantic about grammar and then get your own grammar wrong
    • urbandw311er 8mo ago
      I’ll admit to the pedantry but I can’t see any issues with my grammar. Feel free to share your analysis.
      • nfw2 8mo ago
        > Dear Brandon. not a sentence > King regards. not a sentence > I'll admit to the pedantry but missing comma between independent clauses
        • urbandw311er 8mo ago
          Thank goodness for that! I thought I had actually made a genuine grammatical error, not some weird BS you made up to try and sound clever.
• jngiam1 8mo ago
  i've a simple setup with Claude Code and MCPs; and i get real benefits from better task mgmt, email mgmt, calendar, health/food/fitness tracking, working together with claude on tasks (that go into md files). i don't think we need ClawdBot, but we do need a way to easily interact with the model such that it can create long term memories (likely as files).
• 627467 8mo ago
  So, what prevents site to do dynamic pricing for bots checking sites for prices?
• noncoml 8mo ago
  I think Clawdbot is amazing, but my only issue is how it burns through my AI budget. Even when using a "cheap" model like Gemini 2.5 flash, it easily burns $10-$20 a day
• lawrenceyan 8mo ago
  Found this short story on Openclaw to be relevant: https://x.com/gf_256/status/2018844976486945112 https://x.com/gf_256/status/2018844976486945112
• keyle 8mo ago
  A curious case of Vibe Living.
• hmokiguess 8mo ago
  I feel like for some people these chatbots are sort of becoming something like their "service animals". They fill a void, a gap, some core loneliness, reduce anxiety from dealing with the uncertainty and challenges of life. As others mentioned here, a lot of the value add from his workflow is just relocating things from one place to another and micro optimizing.
  • cyanydeez 8mo ago
    Ever since the Matrix, id assumed its more likely humans will put themselves in the Matrix than theyd actually explore the universe. Theyre equally complex challenges but the physics of large time/space are just outside human patience. Also, if the neo nazis are in charge another round of inhumane testing will occur.
    • thinking_cactus 8mo ago
      I get why it is romantic (like the "next thing" after other human discoveries), but I don't think "exploring the universe" is that philosophically interesting? Think about the case you had (1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet) (2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it. I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth). Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself. Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P) I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.
• modzu 8mo ago
  uh ohhh... forgot how to think..
• aschla 8mo ago
  This whole thing reads like ragebait. Even down to the lack of capitalization.
• zombot 8mo ago
  The words "sane" and "OpenClaw" in the same sentence are a red flag. Either the author is a shill or an AI prompted by one.
• p0w3n3d 8mo ago
  Elton went in second, and suddenly shuddered. The strangulating gag reflex made his body shake. The deceased was lying on the floor with a weird grimace on his face. Pills were lying around, spilling out of open boxes. There was something in his hand. Unlocked phone. He put on his gloves, and bent down to check it. He suspected the subject might have been calling for help. The phone was unlocked but there were no contact selected. The only visible text was: "Bot please tell which medication should I take in the morning" And the following "Your token limit was exceeded... Please wait till 5pm"
• OrangeMusic 8mo ago
  Does the author not know that sentences start with a capital letter?
• denverllc 8mo ago
  A lack of capitals gives me sama vibes and I don’t trust sama
• lazyxyz 8mo ago
  The calendar aggregation example keeps coming up, and I think it illustrates the real divide in how people think about these tools. The skeptics are right that you shouldn't trust a non-deterministic system to never miss a school event. But the proponents aren't really asking for that — they want a morning briefing that saves them from opening four apps, not a replacement for the calendar itself. The sweet spot for agent-based tools right now is read-heavy, write-light workflows. Aggregating and summarizing information across sources? Great. Autonomously rescheduling your meetings? Probably not yet. The security concerns about granting calendar access are valid though — the permission model needs to be way more granular than "full access to everything."