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With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer. You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, l
by EastSmith 8mo ago
With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
- baxtr 8mo agoSeems like models become commoditized?
- verdverm 8mo agoSame for OpenClaw, it will be commodity soon if you don't think it is already
- baxtr 8mo agoNot sure. I mean the tech yes definitely. But the community not.
- verdverm 8mo agoThe community is tiny by any measure (beyond the niche), market penetration is still very very early Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
- filoleg 7mo ago> Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users? Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
- verdverm 7mo agoMy main gripe is that it feels more like land grabbing than discovery Stories like this reinforce my bias
- elxr 7mo agoIt's definitely not right now. What else has the feature list and docs even resembling it?
- verdverm 7mo agoOpenClaw has mediocre docs, from my perspective on some average over many years using 100s of open source projects. I think Anthropic's docs are better. Best to keep sampling from the buffet than to pick a main course yet, imo. There's also a ton of real experiences being conveyed on social that never make it to docs. I've gotten as much value and insights from those as any documentation site.
- Aurornis 7mo agoOpenClaw has only been in the news for a few weeks. Why would you assume it’s going to be the only game in town? Early adopters are some of the least sticky users. As soon as something new arrives with claims of better features, better security, or better architecture then the next new thing will become the popular topic.
- beaker52 7mo agoIt appears to me that the same people who think “vibe coding” is a great idea, are the same people who think “Gas Town” is the future, and “OpenClaw” detractors are just falling behind. For your sake, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed.
- verdverm 7mo agoI'm not generally opposed to the idea, I'm just looking at the output and seeing tokens burnt to produce slop projects. I'd imagine a bunch of basic, non-coding tasks may be more tractable, but a quick look at /shownew ought to reduce anxiety My personal approach is to start from minimal, push that as far as I can, keep the human in the loop so I know how good it actually is, then find ways that have a better overall ROI. I'm performing similar loops to clawd/ralph manually, with my attention paid.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoThings that arn't happening any time soon but need to for actual product success built on top: 1. Stable models 2. Stable pre- and post- context management. As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow. This is all before even enshittification can happen.
- altcunn 7mo agoThis is the underrated risk that nobody talks about enough. We've already seen it play out with the Codex deprecation, the GPT-4 behavior drift saga, and every time Anthropic bumps a model version. The practical workaround most teams land on is treating the model as a swappable component behind a thick abstraction layer. Pin to a specific model version, run evals on every new release, and only upgrade when your test suite passes. But that's expensive engineering overhead that shouldn't be necessary. What's missing is something like semantic versioning for model behavior. If a provider could guarantee "this model will produce outputs within X similarity threshold of the previous version for your use case," you could actually build with confidence. Instead we get "we improved the model" and your carefully tuned prompts break in ways you discover from user complaints three days later.
- lez 8mo agoIt has already been so with ppq.ai (pay per query dot AI)
- beaker52 7mo agoI mean, ppq.ai (which I’ve never heard of) had zero to do with the commoditisation of LLMs. The industry did that. And services like OpenRouter are far more serious and responsible in this area than this ppq.ai is.
- softwaredoug 8mo agoIndeed, coding agents took off because of a lot of ongoing trial and error on how to build the harness as much as model quality.
- canadiantim 7mo agoThere’s actually many UI’s now? See moltis, rowboat, and various others that are popping up daily
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoAre there any with a credible approach to security, privacy and prompt injections?
- rlt 7mo agoDoes any credible approach to prompt injection even exist?
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoNot that I'm aware of, but I probably won't be interested in these kinds of assistants until there are.
- joquarky 7mo agoAnyone who figures out a reliable solution would probably never have to work again.
- PurpleRamen 7mo agoI think the point was about the frequency of switching your frontend. With a proper frontend you can switch the backend on each request if you want, but usually people will stay with one main-interface of their choice. For AI, OpenClaw, Moltic, Rowboat are now such a frontend, but not many will use them all at once. It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
- bhadass 7mo agoopenclaw is just one of many now, there are new ones weekly.
- mcapodici 7mo agoPlus you can get the model to write you a bespoke one that suits your needs.
- theturtletalks 7mo agoI've been digging into how Heartbeat works in Openclaw to bring directly into Vibetunnel, another of Peter's projects
- beaker52 7mo agoAnd OpenClaw is nothing revolutionary. It’s all shit we could do before OpenClaw. It’s just that no one was stupid enough to do it. Now everyone has gone crazy.
- palata 7mo agoAI is the new Javascript?
- madeofpalk 7mo ago? We saw this years/months ago with Claude Code and Cursor.
- miki_oomiri 7mo agoBut it just codes. And are console / ide tools. Openclaw is so so so much more.
- Aurornis 7mo agoThat’s missing the point. OpenClaw is just one of many apps in its class. It, too, will fall out of favor as the next big thing arrives.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 7mo agoThis is the sort of thing employers are failing on. They sign contracts that assume employees are going to be logging in and asking questions directly. But if I don’t have a url for my IDE (or whatever) to call, it isn’t useful. So I use Ollama. It’s less helpful, but ensure confidentiality and compliance.
- Aurornis 7mo ago> You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw. It’s only been a couple months. I guarantee people will be switching apps as others become the new hot thing. We saw the same claims when Cursor was popular. Same claims when Claude Code was the current topic. Users are changing their app layer all the time and trying new things.
- ryanmcgarvey 7mo agoMemory. I have built up so many scripts and crons and integrated little programs and memories with open claw it would be difficult to migrate to some other system. System of record and all.
- blackoil 7mo agoConsidering you have built them all in last few weeks, it should not be that difficult and no reason other systems won't reuse same.
- outofpaper 7mo agoExactly! The whole point of personal agents is that the data is yours and it's where you want it not in someone's cloud. What harness you use to work with this should be a matter of preference and not one of lock in.
- Gareth321 7mo agoThe future will be ownership of our memories and data. AI companies will fight tooth and nail to keep that data walled in and impossible to export.
- k4rli 7mo agoSince it's already not walled-in in most cases I don't see this happening very effectively. Using openrouter+kilocode I can simply switch between different providers' models and not miss out on anything.
- czhu12 7mo agoIt’s only 2 months and there are already a rush of viable alternatives, from smaller, lightweight versions, to hosted, managed SaaS alternatives. I’d suspect the moat here will be just as fragile as every other layer
- karmasimida 7mo agoWhy? You can literally ask codex to build a slim version for you overnight. I love OpenClaw, but I really don't think there is anything that can't be cloned.
- coffeebeqn 7mo agoWhat’s the moat exactly?
- hirako2000 7mo agoNone. That's why joining openai is the perfect fit.
- zombot 7mo agoWell, duh. You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.
- alansaber 7mo agoThis has been the case since the beginning of last year imo