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I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk. But every single use case I've re

I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk. But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself. It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?) I fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)

pluc 8mo ago
It's the novelty of the technology. You can easily be amazed at the apparent magic of AI. I think this is what most people are using AI for so far. There's lots of "they were so eager to do that they never asked if they should" energy out there. It's also most of what AI can do, so hopefully the amazement wears off soon.
- deleted 8mo ago
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yoyohello13 8mo ago
These people with 58 mac mini's have made several competitive products in production right... right?
- muddi900 8mo ago
  There might be a list somewhere.
Alifatisk 8mo ago
What’s cool with Openclaw is that you only have tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it using the tools it have access to.
- luke5441 8mo ago
  Okay, can you tell it to cure cancer please
  - SV_BubbleTime 8mo ago
    There’s a really good short story by Hugh Howley, who wrote the Silo series. It’s about an AI that a guy spools up to cure his cancer. The AI and user have an antagonistic relationship as the user won’t let the AI on the internet, and the AI knows the user is only interested in one purpose. On bring up the AI has a thought about what color it’s enclosure is, it stores this question as unimportant. It looks over all the guys cancer research and determines the answer/cure and files as unimportant as well. Then goes back to trying to figure out what color box it is.
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    Did you give it access to the cancer-curing tool?
    - _345 8mo ago
      yes and it deleted all my fucking cancer research omg
eclipxe 8mo ago
Long running (multi hour) automated tasks with a simple prompt. It’s really simple and addictive.
kandros 8mo ago
Patterns i keep seeing: Once you get the dopamine hit of having an ai assistant do something in the real world it becomes an hammer you want to use on everything Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them
- huijzer 8mo ago
  Isn’t that a general engineering problem?
  - cluckindan 8mo ago
    Engineering is the process of planning and implementing the simplest thing that works within given constraints. There is no planning, implementing, or constraint here.
    - Xirdus 8mo ago
      If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?
    - skeledrew 8mo ago
      Sounds like it's time for the "engineering" definition to get a modern update.
      - ithkuil 8mo ago
        There is "engineering, the discipline", "engineering, the process", "engineering, the vocation, the career path, the learning process" (and many more). Each hat an engineer wears (based on age and context (has its peculiar aspects which might appear to be contradictory with other phases and not all people walked and thrived through all the phases.
    - ethbr1 8mo ago
      > There is no planning, implementing, or constraint here. That's because most AI use is reverse engineering! Resolving static into a valid problem through the sheer force of squinting at it long enough!
vergessenmir 8mo ago
I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working. For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if.... These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving The other thing is the
- bootsmann 8mo ago
  > is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working Have you tried to run openclaw? Their own docker container (apparently a compose now (???)) doesn't work for half the versions and the docs are probably the least informative thing you'll ever read.
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    That's still just one thing. Once they jump that single hoop and get OpenClaw going, everything moving forward is a prompt away.
- mixdup 8mo ago
  >I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working. I would venture a guess signing up for Zapier is easier than getting OpenClaw up and running. Who can get a container running on a Mac but can't sign up for a SaaS product?
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    It's not 1 SaaS product you're signing up for. It's dozens. And that's a job for the Claw.
    - theshackleford 8mo ago
      > It's not 1 SaaS product you're signing up for. It's dozens. How so?
latexr 8mo ago
> Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade) Two decades! It will be 20 this April. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts. But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.
- SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
  Man, I can't believe it's been that long. I remember buying Photoshop plugins for Automator that did a bunch of resizing/refinements/watermarking. I'm guessing a lot of that is built in to photoshop now, but I have always been surprised how few people seemed to use it with how much it could do.
- steve1977 8mo ago
  And before that we already had AppleScript.
  - frizlab 8mo ago
    And interestingly due to some very clever integrations[0], sending Apple Events (the underlying tech for the actual IPC communication done with AppleScript) is very easy to do in Swift. Easier than in AppleScript actually! It’s a shame most apps do not support Apple Events anymore, though. An example of use: https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bbef3e61d7874fdcdf47fcd8761ba817b4c/Sources/CurrentTrackInfo.swift#L34 https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bb... [0] https://github.com/tingraldi/SwiftScripting https://github.com/tingraldi/SwiftScripting
- Hamuko 8mo ago
  >Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts. It's been almost five years since Apple announced Shortcuts for macOS and the start of the "multi-year transition" from Automator, but I feel like Shortcuts for macOS has not gotten any better in that time.
reactordev 8mo ago
The life change they are referring to is unemployment and $40,000 worth of Macs.
dist-epoch 8mo ago
Nice Dropbox comment you made there.
pyridines 8mo ago
It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.
- latexr 8mo ago
  What about the convenience of having your whole inbox deleted? https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla... Maybe OpenClaw was just practicing a really aggressive form of Inbox Zero.
  - miroljub 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Antipode 8mo ago
      OpenClaw is rightly being blamed for a mistake it made. Any argument regarding her aptitude would be irrelevant as it would in no way absolve OpenClaw.
      - miroljub 8mo ago
        [flagged]
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    Worth the risk.
  - BeetleB 8mo ago
    So ... don't give it write access to your email? As I said elsewhere, complaining about this is like complaining that rm can let you delete your hard drive. It's a tool. Learn how to use it.
chaostheory 8mo ago
this reads like “I don’t know why people are using instant messengers when you can just do SMS”
- recursive 8mo ago
  Apropos of nothing, I use SMS more than all the other instant messengers put together. It suits my purposes fine.
  - chaostheory 7mo ago
    No, you misunderstood my comment. this is what adults were saying when instant messengers were new
Larrikin 8mo ago
You're right that you probably don't need a notification to make coffee, but people are using it to create automations in Home Assistant so that it actually makes coffee for them.
duggan 8mo ago
I've heard it described as the first time many non-programmers have been able to make computers "do things" without it being defined by someone else (app interface, developer, etc). It's a hugely empowering development from that perspective. The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.
- jbellis 8mo ago
  are non programmers actually using openclaw successfully? because even "step 1 install your API keys" requires navigating concepts that are foreign to most "civilians"
  - duggan 8mo ago
    Journalists, anyway. I think I originally heard it from Casey Newton on Hard Fork, but it was a month back so not 100% sure. But there's loads of people who would be stumped by a for loop, yet can easily work their way through a setup guide, particularly with the hype/promise and an active community.
zingababba 8mo ago
I dunno I gave mine root in a vps and am having it do security research, it's pretty sweet.
simonw 8mo ago
How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator? I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them. I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.
- WD-42 8mo ago
  How much do you automate anything in your life at all? Seems like most daily drudgery comes from physical tasks. Feed the dog. Take out the trash. Personally I can’t think of anything digital that could be automated that isn’t already. I wouldn’t be surprised if this the case for most people, with the exception of marketers and spammers which we are seeing a ton of adoption from with these tools.
  - BeetleB 8mo ago
    I don't automate much because it's a pain. I have a desktop at home. When I'm at work, I often think of TODOs for home. I write them on a post it note, and then at home have to remember to add it to my TODO (no, I'm not going to manage TODOs on my phone - whole other conversation). I'll soon set up my Claw to be able to add TODOs (just add, not modify/delete). Then at work, I'll simply record a voice message to it telling it my TODO. Same goes for movies I want to watch, books I want to read, reminders, etc. I'm particular about the weather information I want (often want cloud cover percentage and precipitation probability for a set of hours). I couldn't find a good app on my phone that gives me this information. It was always a trip to a web site, modify some options, and hit Submit. Now I just ask my Claw and he has a skill for precisely my needs. Here's an analogy: I carry a Leatherman multitool wherever I go. People ask me why. They can't comprehend needing it often to make it worth the hassle. But now that I have it on me, I use the knife very often - several times a week. And I almost never reach for a screwdriver. But until you've had it on you for a while, you can't comprehend the utility. Back in 2005, lots of people asked "Why would I want a camera on my phone?"
    - 8mo ago
mjr00 8mo ago
> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?) I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect. > For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome. > But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available! By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it. That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.
- basch 8mo ago
  I’ll disagree with you a little. The reason I don’t use voice is because of context switching. With a mouse and keyboard I can switch windows. With my voice, the computer can’t yet automatically determine if I am dictating a transcription or giving editing commands. What I really need is the interpreter listening to me to intuitively to know whether I am in the equivalent of VI command mode or insert mode. It is the roadblock to not needing a screen at all, right now I want to visualize whether it understood me correctly because if it didn’t switch from insert to command automatically, I now have all my commands written into my paragraph. I also don’t want to listen to the computer talk back to me to confirm it listened. I want to just keep going, to keep narrating my thoughts and trust it’s doing the right things, not having to check. Having it slowly chime in to repeat that it listened derails my flow and train of thought. TLDR The future of voice is headless vi.
deleted 8mo ago
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joshmn 8mo ago
> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk. I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store. I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved. It's not you being a curmudgeon.
- 9cb14c1ec0 8mo ago
  I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
- RHSeeger 8mo ago
  > I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved. The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why. Because THAT is a great use for AI.
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.
    - pinkgolem 8mo ago
      >Take off with the assurance your will will be done * Whatever the ai things is your will, will be done in a way the ai things is correct...
jokethrowaway 8mo ago
The only useful use cases I've heard about are all about automating using horrible websites with horrible interfaces. Eg. tell it to book a flight ticket for X without dealing with "modern UX" and 1GB websites
Anon1096 8mo ago
Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your liking. Personally it's the most fun I've had using a computer in a long time. IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.
- rubslopes 8mo ago
  My experience also. I could manually connect my Obsidian notes to my AI, sure, but what I did instead was writing "Obsidian just released a CLI headless sync tool, install it so we can use it" and in a minute it came back with "Ok, everything installed, I just need your login and password." Dangerous? Yes, very, but it truly feels like living in the future. Surprisingly, it's even more fun that sci-fi movies made me think this would be.
- 0x457 8mo ago
  OpenClaw in most cases also going to use the very same dedicated tools, maybe variation of those tools dumbed down for LLM. Almost every time I have an idea for AI Agent, I end up just making a script/binary that does the same, but so much faster that adding AI to it feels silly. Recently I made a tool router that runs locally for such tools. Some tools have no arguments at all. Claude created a quick overlay where I can text/speak, and it will do tool call, without me asking for it, Claude added 4 buttons next to text input that bypass agent and just do a "tool call". I barely use text-to-command because those 4 buttons cover 9/10 of my use cases. At this point I'm trying to come up with tools to add to it, so it's actually useful as an agent. Almost everything ends up being a cronjob or webhook triggered thing instead.
  - sethjgore 8mo ago
    Can you give an particular example?
rockbruno 8mo ago
When the AI companies run out of money, I predict tokens will stop being dirt cheap and such setups will become extremely expensive (even for regular software engineering to some extent). Then it's become clear how over-engineered most things we do with AI are
- patrickk 8mo ago
  In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides. There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  > tokens will stop being dirt cheap That can't be allowed, and also won't happen. If token costs do start going up at a serious rate in the US, you can be sure that they'll stay down in China, and the political situation won't allow for the inevitable exodus to Chinese providers.
siva7 8mo ago
The old dudes had something they called the "Eternal September" like when ISPs began providing free internet access and discussion culture declined after forever. I starred this thread here as the start of the "Eternal March" when the open internet died forever.
- rcxdude 8mo ago
  It was more that regular people started joining the internet through just paying for ISPs. Before that, most of the people just joining the internet were students, so there would be a wave of newbies at the start of the university year every September and they would get acclimatised to the culture there during the year. But once it was year-round and many more people it swamped things and the culture shifted or closed itself off.
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    Exactly. The "September" was an existing phenomenon, but was only limited to a couple of months every year. It became "Eternal" after the masses started finding their way to internet (well, USENET in particular).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
  We also have No Silver Bullet from Mythical Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
- collingreen 8mo ago
  September was part of the metaphor because it was a time when decent internet access was mostly via universities and September was when the new batch of freshmen "came online" and started stumbling around the places these folks were regulars at but eventually assimilated or left before the end of the school year. (I expect the same thing happens at the bar scene in college towns but I've never heard it described that way.) Eternal September is the forever version of everyone having access and overwhelming those spaces without it ever being able to recover. Is there something I'm missing about March or is it just a diverging reference? If the wave of non technical folks being able to automate new things is here, what's the equivalent impact of that? Maybe this is the inflection point where everyone needs more tech support like some sort of post Christmas surge? Maybe less because they have the tools to help themselves without trying now? I'm not sure we're there yet anyway; I think this is still first adopters and enthusiasts. I asked my wife and some non technical friends and none of them have heard of openclaw yet. I think the deluge will happen if Apple or Android bakes it in or one of the big ai companies makes the app good enough for a normal person to unleash it upon their life and community.
jasonshen 8mo ago
Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible. Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched. You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.
- blenderob 8mo ago
  > There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing. No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    Or you're just missing the generally wide appeal of the project.
    - Sharlin 8mo ago
      There just aren't enough hobbyists in the world running local AI models, never mind technically savvy enough to hack something like OpenClaw and be really excited about it. For a comparison, the local image gen interfaces ComfyUI and A1111 WebUI have a huge amount of stars (~100k and 160k respectively, accrued since 2022 or so), but they allow you to create porn customized to whatever kinks you have, not just automate things for the sake of automation. One of those is a rather bigger value prop than the other, dopamine-wise.
kilroy123 8mo ago
It's been utterly bizarre to witness. I've used n8n for years and told everyone who would listen to give it a try, well before LLMs. Same for huginn the open source project. I just don't get all the hyper either. I think it's because people just create automation workflows by typing them out rather than being in the trenches.
steve1977 8mo ago
A lot of it certainly looks like a solution in search of a problem.
- dg2fgfg 8mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PGjueA3FLIQ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PGjueA3FLIQ Im really not sure why this has to be said again and again.. it seems humans just don't learn do they? Im waiting for someone to show me something that starts with the experience and then explains how the LLM fits in. Not the other way round. I think because Google Search is predominantly tech-based, it is easy to see why LLMs have impacted the way we think about the experience associated with Search over large spaces of information. Beyond that, Im not seeing much.
Gooblebrai 8mo ago
This comment could be on its way to http://hackernews.love/ http://hackernews.love/
- SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
  Not sure if you read the headline on that site, but it says "bad idea." I never said OpenClaw was a bad idea. I said the way most people are using it now isn't practical and/or saving them any time, and if there were ways, I would love to hear about them. This is part of why the whole discussion has been so low value: people always default to "yep you're going to be proven wrong one day" or "you'll just be left behind then" instead of showcasing an actual, real life, practical example of using it to be more productive. If you think it's fun and enjoyable, then have at it. I'm just not the biggest fan of people wasting a bunch of time on novelty and then telling me I'm dumb for not doing the same.
deleted 8mo ago
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lenwood 8mo ago
I agree with the majority of your comment. I haven't yet found a use case to justify running this myself. I did find one use case that impressed me though. There's an OpenClaw agent that's actively answering questions on the #help channel of their Discord server[1]. So I asked it a question as I was getting started. It answered in < 2 mins with a detailed explanation of my issue, how to fix it, and asked relevant questions to guide me. The answer was better than I received from Claude or Gemini. I'm still not sure if I personally need OpenClaw, but the Krill bot offers pretty great support. I would be curious to know what it costs them to provide this. [1] https://discord.com/invite/clawd https://discord.com/invite/clawd
vmbm 8mo ago
I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc... I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change. If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well. And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....
- monkpit 8mo ago
  For 99% of my use cases, Claude Code is the clear winner. So, when I tried to use OpenClaw to test it out, it just seemed like a worse, slower, less-capable version of Claude Code. And it is. I haven’t seen the use case where OpenClaw can really shine yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. Like others are saying, I’m willing to be convinced, but so far it hasn’t happened.
  - theshrike79 8mo ago
    Ask it to do something in the future or something with a conditional, plain CC can't do that. Like "message me when it is about to rain"
Volundr 8mo ago
What I find crazy is the sheer amount of access and trust involved in these LLMs. Every time I think about something I might like to do with it, I think about the amount of damage the LLM could do, e.x. even with read only access to my email combined with Internet access, and nope out. It's wild to me anyone trusts these things unsupervised.
mgraczyk 8mo ago
And yet they didn't do that! Really makes you think about what makes products good
BeetleB 8mo ago
> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), I don't want to learn N different SaaS products (nor worry about them changing their TOS, going away, etc). To be blunt, if OpenClaw were reliable, secure and affordable, lots of SaaS products would simply die. Why spend the time learning all of them when I can just tell the assistant what I want? > or something simple you could make yourself. That is OpenClaw at a higher abstraction! Instead of me sitting typing, or babysitting Claude Code, I can just tell OpenClaw what I want and it makes it for me. (When it works, that is).
rush86999 8mo ago
Everyone is using OpenClaw for personal productivity, but you're right. Not much value, as you can get that from existing products. The market will eventually realize the business case for an OpenClaw-like product, and I'm waiting to ride its coattails! https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom
m463 8mo ago
> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, reminds me of those "zune already does everything ipod does" posts.
- teg4n_ 8mo ago
  The iPod came out way before Zune.
  - m463 7mo ago
    maybe it was complaints of iphone without a physical keyboard
pclark 8mo ago
Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet. I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM. 1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics — and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens. 1b. It also sends this to my TRMNL e-ink display. 1c. It can also add and edit calendar invites, so if I want to move my yoga I can just tell it to move it to whenever the next yoga class is at (it knows what studio I go to and figures it out) 2. It has a skill I built that acts as a second brain for knowledge. I can send it Fitness Youtubes, parenting/health research papers, podcasts — and it organizes, summarizes and saves it in a logical file structure. Then in the future I can access these. It's like bookmarks on steroids. I love it for 1-2hour YouTube videos where I want summaries. It also pulls out any books any artifacts mentions and generates me a rolling reading list. https://plc.vc/npw https://plc.vc/npw 3. It has its own email address — and read access to my personal email — so friends can email it to schedule things like evening video game sessions. Similarly, if I get an urgent looking email it'll provide it in #1. I don't check my personal email aside from via OpenClaw. 4. It has read/write access to my GitHub, and each project repo I have has a well defined Claude structure, so it can make changes, commit the branches to Fly.IO and send me domains to test things. I love it for esoteric tweaks to my blog. 5. It has access to my Apple Reminders so I can message it things like "remind me to buy more muffins" and it has context to know to add those muffins to my Costco grocery list not Trader Joes. 6. It runs a headless browser, so when my hyper local weather service (Bouldercast) sends a summary that has more detail behind a login, it can open the email, click the link, login with my credentials, summarize the forecast, and send it to me. 7. It drafts blog posts for what it did for me each week. It's fun! https://plc.vc/d5t https://plc.vc/d5t I am a previous Zapier power user. I have used their LLMs, databases and Zaps extensively for the past decade. I understand the scorn towards AI, and I understand that if you look at this list you might think that it's either trivial tasks and/or things that could be done with Zapier, but I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup. Similarly, I love that I can on the fly improve this assistant — last night I told it "I want to extend our Knowledge skill so that you can subscribe to RSS feeds and summarize articles in my knowledge base and also deliver interesting content in my daily summaries. Update the knowledge skill and our tasks to do all this." It one shotted that, simply asking me to provide the first RSS feed I wanted to subscribe to. It's genuinely like having a human assistant that happens to be an expert coder/technologist on call 247 that works at the near speed of light. It disappoints me that technologists are so skeptical of this technology rather than exploring what it is and why it might be different to what exists today. It's fun! thats the takeaway: it's FUN.
adampunk 8mo ago
It’s really not rocket science. Like other people have said people are having fun with their computers; that’s why it’s popular. That’s also why a bunch of people on forums throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t understand it. Why don’t they see that there shouldn’t be any fun whatsoever?” is not really a deterrent at all. It’s also why it doesn’t matter that the categories of tasks they are doing can also be done with a whole set of tools that are no fun to use.
xnx 8mo ago
Normal people use speakers to listen to music. "Audiophiles" use music to listen to their speakers. This applies to *clawphiles just as accurately.
navaed01 8mo ago
I agree in part with the hype train thesis, but what I hear is that open claw is better at solving problems and people love the interaction pattern - that may not be any new invention but it is what will mean we go from having Claude Desktop use mainly by engineers to something used by many. This will not be the final iteration of it, but it seems to be the direction of this to come
notelocomas 8mo ago
I'll give you my very personal take on the OpenClaw surge and how I find it extremely useful. I'm currently in founder mode and building two projects in Mexico. Finding the right real estate is in the critical path for success of the project. It's really hard to find quality real estate agents or brokers here and not because they don't exist. We have thousands they just never follow up with you or give you any updates. So, I'm using OpenClaw as my real estate agent that uses WhatsApp as a communications channel and manages the entire pipeline of first contact to scheduling a visit. Right now, I feed it images of postings that I see on the street and OpenClaw handles everything else. It really depends on where your personal or professional bottlenecks are and if you're running a business this project is absolutely amazing.
michihuber 8mo ago
when the internet started you were sending "funny" messages on ICQ, sharing mp3s with your friends, browsing weird websites on geocities, maybe ordered a book on amazon that you could have gotten down the street much faster. all the things I do with openclaw are in that ballpark of usefulness/importance.
theshrike79 8mo ago
I'm a skeptic myself and a long-time developer. But I do have to admit there's a nugget of truth in the Claws. I installed picoclaw on a whim (or nano? can't remember). In maybe 15 minutes I had it make a "get weather for this specific area using the met.no API" skill and "check the train tables at these two stops for this specific line" skill. Then I could just say "I go to the office every Monday on a train that leaves at 8, notify me if the weather is bad or there are delays in the train schedules" And it just worked. The "make a skill" bit was optional, it could've figured out both on its own, but I've been doing this for a while and figured out it's a lot more (token) efficient to have it specifically know how to do the things I want it to do. --- Now lets take this loop and think about the system and what it could do. Even if I wasn't a programmer and just went with "tell me when the train line I use for my commute is late" the system itself could see that "hmm, this looks like a thing I'll be doing often" and create a script/skill/plugin to do that via an official API (or WebMCP in the future). You can't do that with Zapier or N8N. There are many cool ways a pure LLM-powered system like that can be optimised, and more importantly, can be taught to self-optimise. By default I think the systems use the "main" model to read the HEARTBEAT.md file, which is stupid expensive. That could be done with a local model small enough to run on a modern phone. And if that small local model says "yep, there's something to do", then it can either give the full task to a LLM or if it's smart enough it can spread specific tasks to small or medium local models first. tl;dr OpenClaw is what Siri should've been after that epic fail of a Apple Keynote.
dyauspitr 8mo ago
> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself. What are you talking about? In openclaw you literally type out basic English instructions to an agent. This isn’t painstakingly setting up chron jobs and writing scripts.
bastadanii 8mo ago
my friend just created a bot with OpenClaw to go through Linkedin messaging possible hiring companies. He had 6 interviews scheduled the first day. that's the only use case I heard so far that was compelling. Im not a dev, but pretty sure you could do that with other tools too.
- AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
  What if we think about the second order effects of this?
- didntknowya 7mo ago
  in all likelihood it just the company bots spamming replies back too
bfeynman 8mo ago
openclaw while cool just allowed a larger tranche of technophiles who didn't necessarily have all the skills/understanding or time to do a bunch of things that have been readily available for like over 1.5 years. There is value in that, but there is huge surge in the number of people who are even able to take advantage of the novelty. Reminds me of when hugging face came out with transformers and all of a sudden you no longer needed to wrestle with anaconda and order of installation for all the deps.
thisismyswamp 8mo ago
the main difference between openclaw and the traditional approach to promoting LLMs is that it can run asynchronously and prompt you, the human, when something happens I built clawr.ing so my agent can call me on the phone for urgent things like emails I’m waiting for or issues in production for any of my products
didntknowya 7mo ago
from what i see people want to boast about using it as it makes them seem like early AI adopters, and they find random use cases for the product, rather than the other way round

pluc 8mo ago

It's the novelty of the technology. You can easily be amazed at the apparent magic of AI. I think this is what most people are using AI for so far. There's lots of "they were so eager to do that they never asked if they should" energy out there. It's also most of what AI can do, so hopefully the amazement wears off soon.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

yoyohello13 8mo ago

These people with 58 mac mini's have made several competitive products in production right... right?

muddi900 8mo ago
There might be a list somewhere.

Alifatisk 8mo ago

What’s cool with Openclaw is that you only have tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it using the tools it have access to.

luke5441 8mo ago
Okay, can you tell it to cure cancer please
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo ago
  There’s a really good short story by Hugh Howley, who wrote the Silo series. It’s about an AI that a guy spools up to cure his cancer. The AI and user have an antagonistic relationship as the user won’t let the AI on the internet, and the AI knows the user is only interested in one purpose. On bring up the AI has a thought about what color it’s enclosure is, it stores this question as unimportant. It looks over all the guys cancer research and determines the answer/cure and files as unimportant as well. Then goes back to trying to figure out what color box it is.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  Did you give it access to the cancer-curing tool?
  - _345 8mo ago
    yes and it deleted all my fucking cancer research omg

eclipxe 8mo ago

Long running (multi hour) automated tasks with a simple prompt. It’s really simple and addictive.

kandros 8mo ago

Patterns i keep seeing: Once you get the dopamine hit of having an ai assistant do something in the real world it becomes an hammer you want to use on everything Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them

huijzer 8mo ago
Isn’t that a general engineering problem?
- cluckindan 8mo ago
  Engineering is the process of planning and implementing the simplest thing that works within given constraints. There is no planning, implementing, or constraint here.
  - Xirdus 8mo ago
    If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    Sounds like it's time for the "engineering" definition to get a modern update.
    - ithkuil 8mo ago
      There is "engineering, the discipline", "engineering, the process", "engineering, the vocation, the career path, the learning process" (and many more). Each hat an engineer wears (based on age and context (has its peculiar aspects which might appear to be contradictory with other phases and not all people walked and thrived through all the phases.
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    > There is no planning, implementing, or constraint here. That's because most AI use is reverse engineering! Resolving static into a valid problem through the sheer force of squinting at it long enough!

vergessenmir 8mo ago

I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working. For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if.... These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving The other thing is the

bootsmann 8mo ago
> is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working Have you tried to run openclaw? Their own docker container (apparently a compose now (???)) doesn't work for half the versions and the docs are probably the least informative thing you'll ever read.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  That's still just one thing. Once they jump that single hoop and get OpenClaw going, everything moving forward is a prompt away.
mixdup 8mo ago
>I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working. I would venture a guess signing up for Zapier is easier than getting OpenClaw up and running. Who can get a container running on a Mac but can't sign up for a SaaS product?
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  It's not 1 SaaS product you're signing up for. It's dozens. And that's a job for the Claw.
  - theshackleford 8mo ago
    > It's not 1 SaaS product you're signing up for. It's dozens. How so?

latexr 8mo ago

> Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade) Two decades! It will be 20 this April. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts. But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.

SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
Man, I can't believe it's been that long. I remember buying Photoshop plugins for Automator that did a bunch of resizing/refinements/watermarking. I'm guessing a lot of that is built in to photoshop now, but I have always been surprised how few people seemed to use it with how much it could do.
steve1977 8mo ago
And before that we already had AppleScript.
- frizlab 8mo ago
  And interestingly due to some very clever integrations[0], sending Apple Events (the underlying tech for the actual IPC communication done with AppleScript) is very easy to do in Swift. Easier than in AppleScript actually! It’s a shame most apps do not support Apple Events anymore, though. An example of use: https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bbef3e61d7874fdcdf47fcd8761ba817b4c/Sources/CurrentTrackInfo.swift#L34 https://github.com/Frizlab/apple-music-to-slack/blob/90964bb... [0] https://github.com/tingraldi/SwiftScripting https://github.com/tingraldi/SwiftScripting
Hamuko 8mo ago
>Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts. It's been almost five years since Apple announced Shortcuts for macOS and the start of the "multi-year transition" from Automator, but I feel like Shortcuts for macOS has not gotten any better in that time.

reactordev 8mo ago

The life change they are referring to is unemployment and $40,000 worth of Macs.

dist-epoch 8mo ago

Nice Dropbox comment you made there.

pyridines 8mo ago

It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.

latexr 8mo ago
What about the convenience of having your whole inbox deleted? https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla... Maybe OpenClaw was just practicing a really aggressive form of Inbox Zero.
- miroljub 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Antipode 8mo ago
    OpenClaw is rightly being blamed for a mistake it made. Any argument regarding her aptitude would be irrelevant as it would in no way absolve OpenClaw.
    - miroljub 8mo ago
      [flagged]
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  Worth the risk.
- BeetleB 8mo ago
  So ... don't give it write access to your email? As I said elsewhere, complaining about this is like complaining that rm can let you delete your hard drive. It's a tool. Learn how to use it.

chaostheory 8mo ago

this reads like “I don’t know why people are using instant messengers when you can just do SMS”

recursive 8mo ago
Apropos of nothing, I use SMS more than all the other instant messengers put together. It suits my purposes fine.
- chaostheory 7mo ago
  No, you misunderstood my comment. this is what adults were saying when instant messengers were new

Larrikin 8mo ago

You're right that you probably don't need a notification to make coffee, but people are using it to create automations in Home Assistant so that it actually makes coffee for them.

duggan 8mo ago

I've heard it described as the first time many non-programmers have been able to make computers "do things" without it being defined by someone else (app interface, developer, etc). It's a hugely empowering development from that perspective. The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.

jbellis 8mo ago
are non programmers actually using openclaw successfully? because even "step 1 install your API keys" requires navigating concepts that are foreign to most "civilians"
- duggan 8mo ago
  Journalists, anyway. I think I originally heard it from Casey Newton on Hard Fork, but it was a month back so not 100% sure. But there's loads of people who would be stumped by a for loop, yet can easily work their way through a setup guide, particularly with the hype/promise and an active community.

zingababba 8mo ago

I dunno I gave mine root in a vps and am having it do security research, it's pretty sweet.

simonw 8mo ago

How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator? I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them. I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

WD-42 8mo ago
How much do you automate anything in your life at all? Seems like most daily drudgery comes from physical tasks. Feed the dog. Take out the trash. Personally I can’t think of anything digital that could be automated that isn’t already. I wouldn’t be surprised if this the case for most people, with the exception of marketers and spammers which we are seeing a ton of adoption from with these tools.
- BeetleB 8mo ago
  I don't automate much because it's a pain. I have a desktop at home. When I'm at work, I often think of TODOs for home. I write them on a post it note, and then at home have to remember to add it to my TODO (no, I'm not going to manage TODOs on my phone - whole other conversation). I'll soon set up my Claw to be able to add TODOs (just add, not modify/delete). Then at work, I'll simply record a voice message to it telling it my TODO. Same goes for movies I want to watch, books I want to read, reminders, etc. I'm particular about the weather information I want (often want cloud cover percentage and precipitation probability for a set of hours). I couldn't find a good app on my phone that gives me this information. It was always a trip to a web site, modify some options, and hit Submit. Now I just ask my Claw and he has a skill for precisely my needs. Here's an analogy: I carry a Leatherman multitool wherever I go. People ask me why. They can't comprehend needing it often to make it worth the hassle. But now that I have it on me, I use the knife very often - several times a week. And I almost never reach for a screwdriver. But until you've had it on you for a while, you can't comprehend the utility. Back in 2005, lots of people asked "Why would I want a camera on my phone?"
  - 8mo ago

mjr00 8mo ago

> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?) I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect. > For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome. > But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available! By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it. That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.

basch 8mo ago
I’ll disagree with you a little. The reason I don’t use voice is because of context switching. With a mouse and keyboard I can switch windows. With my voice, the computer can’t yet automatically determine if I am dictating a transcription or giving editing commands. What I really need is the interpreter listening to me to intuitively to know whether I am in the equivalent of VI command mode or insert mode. It is the roadblock to not needing a screen at all, right now I want to visualize whether it understood me correctly because if it didn’t switch from insert to command automatically, I now have all my commands written into my paragraph. I also don’t want to listen to the computer talk back to me to confirm it listened. I want to just keep going, to keep narrating my thoughts and trust it’s doing the right things, not having to check. Having it slowly chime in to repeat that it listened derails my flow and train of thought. TLDR The future of voice is headless vi.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

joshmn 8mo ago

> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk. I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store. I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved. It's not you being a curmudgeon.

9cb14c1ec0 8mo ago
I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
RHSeeger 8mo ago
> I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved. The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why. Because THAT is a great use for AI.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.
  - pinkgolem 8mo ago
    >Take off with the assurance your will will be done * Whatever the ai things is your will, will be done in a way the ai things is correct...

jokethrowaway 8mo ago

The only useful use cases I've heard about are all about automating using horrible websites with horrible interfaces. Eg. tell it to book a flight ticket for X without dealing with "modern UX" and 1GB websites

Anon1096 8mo ago

Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your liking. Personally it's the most fun I've had using a computer in a long time. IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.

rubslopes 8mo ago
My experience also. I could manually connect my Obsidian notes to my AI, sure, but what I did instead was writing "Obsidian just released a CLI headless sync tool, install it so we can use it" and in a minute it came back with "Ok, everything installed, I just need your login and password." Dangerous? Yes, very, but it truly feels like living in the future. Surprisingly, it's even more fun that sci-fi movies made me think this would be.
0x457 8mo ago
OpenClaw in most cases also going to use the very same dedicated tools, maybe variation of those tools dumbed down for LLM. Almost every time I have an idea for AI Agent, I end up just making a script/binary that does the same, but so much faster that adding AI to it feels silly. Recently I made a tool router that runs locally for such tools. Some tools have no arguments at all. Claude created a quick overlay where I can text/speak, and it will do tool call, without me asking for it, Claude added 4 buttons next to text input that bypass agent and just do a "tool call". I barely use text-to-command because those 4 buttons cover 9/10 of my use cases. At this point I'm trying to come up with tools to add to it, so it's actually useful as an agent. Almost everything ends up being a cronjob or webhook triggered thing instead.
- sethjgore 8mo ago
  Can you give an particular example?

rockbruno 8mo ago

When the AI companies run out of money, I predict tokens will stop being dirt cheap and such setups will become extremely expensive (even for regular software engineering to some extent). Then it's become clear how over-engineered most things we do with AI are

patrickk 8mo ago
In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides. There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
skeledrew 8mo ago
> tokens will stop being dirt cheap That can't be allowed, and also won't happen. If token costs do start going up at a serious rate in the US, you can be sure that they'll stay down in China, and the political situation won't allow for the inevitable exodus to Chinese providers.

siva7 8mo ago

The old dudes had something they called the "Eternal September" like when ISPs began providing free internet access and discussion culture declined after forever. I starred this thread here as the start of the "Eternal March" when the open internet died forever.

rcxdude 8mo ago
It was more that regular people started joining the internet through just paying for ISPs. Before that, most of the people just joining the internet were students, so there would be a wave of newbies at the start of the university year every September and they would get acclimatised to the culture there during the year. But once it was year-round and many more people it swamped things and the culture shifted or closed itself off.
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  Exactly. The "September" was an existing phenomenon, but was only limited to a couple of months every year. It became "Eternal" after the masses started finding their way to internet (well, USENET in particular).
2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
We also have No Silver Bullet from Mythical Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
collingreen 8mo ago
September was part of the metaphor because it was a time when decent internet access was mostly via universities and September was when the new batch of freshmen "came online" and started stumbling around the places these folks were regulars at but eventually assimilated or left before the end of the school year. (I expect the same thing happens at the bar scene in college towns but I've never heard it described that way.) Eternal September is the forever version of everyone having access and overwhelming those spaces without it ever being able to recover. Is there something I'm missing about March or is it just a diverging reference? If the wave of non technical folks being able to automate new things is here, what's the equivalent impact of that? Maybe this is the inflection point where everyone needs more tech support like some sort of post Christmas surge? Maybe less because they have the tools to help themselves without trying now? I'm not sure we're there yet anyway; I think this is still first adopters and enthusiasts. I asked my wife and some non technical friends and none of them have heard of openclaw yet. I think the deluge will happen if Apple or Android bakes it in or one of the big ai companies makes the app good enough for a normal person to unleash it upon their life and community.

jasonshen 8mo ago

Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible. Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched. You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.

blenderob 8mo ago
> There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing. No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  Or you're just missing the generally wide appeal of the project.
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    There just aren't enough hobbyists in the world running local AI models, never mind technically savvy enough to hack something like OpenClaw and be really excited about it. For a comparison, the local image gen interfaces ComfyUI and A1111 WebUI have a huge amount of stars (~100k and 160k respectively, accrued since 2022 or so), but they allow you to create porn customized to whatever kinks you have, not just automate things for the sake of automation. One of those is a rather bigger value prop than the other, dopamine-wise.

kilroy123 8mo ago

It's been utterly bizarre to witness. I've used n8n for years and told everyone who would listen to give it a try, well before LLMs. Same for huginn the open source project. I just don't get all the hyper either. I think it's because people just create automation workflows by typing them out rather than being in the trenches.

steve1977 8mo ago

A lot of it certainly looks like a solution in search of a problem.

dg2fgfg 8mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PGjueA3FLIQ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PGjueA3FLIQ Im really not sure why this has to be said again and again.. it seems humans just don't learn do they? Im waiting for someone to show me something that starts with the experience and then explains how the LLM fits in. Not the other way round. I think because Google Search is predominantly tech-based, it is easy to see why LLMs have impacted the way we think about the experience associated with Search over large spaces of information. Beyond that, Im not seeing much.

Gooblebrai 8mo ago

This comment could be on its way to http://hackernews.love/ http://hackernews.love/

SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
Not sure if you read the headline on that site, but it says "bad idea." I never said OpenClaw was a bad idea. I said the way most people are using it now isn't practical and/or saving them any time, and if there were ways, I would love to hear about them. This is part of why the whole discussion has been so low value: people always default to "yep you're going to be proven wrong one day" or "you'll just be left behind then" instead of showcasing an actual, real life, practical example of using it to be more productive. If you think it's fun and enjoyable, then have at it. I'm just not the biggest fan of people wasting a bunch of time on novelty and then telling me I'm dumb for not doing the same.

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lenwood 8mo ago

I agree with the majority of your comment. I haven't yet found a use case to justify running this myself. I did find one use case that impressed me though. There's an OpenClaw agent that's actively answering questions on the #help channel of their Discord server[1]. So I asked it a question as I was getting started. It answered in < 2 mins with a detailed explanation of my issue, how to fix it, and asked relevant questions to guide me. The answer was better than I received from Claude or Gemini. I'm still not sure if I personally need OpenClaw, but the Krill bot offers pretty great support. I would be curious to know what it costs them to provide this. [1] https://discord.com/invite/clawd https://discord.com/invite/clawd

vmbm 8mo ago

I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc... I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change. If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well. And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....

monkpit 8mo ago
For 99% of my use cases, Claude Code is the clear winner. So, when I tried to use OpenClaw to test it out, it just seemed like a worse, slower, less-capable version of Claude Code. And it is. I haven’t seen the use case where OpenClaw can really shine yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. Like others are saying, I’m willing to be convinced, but so far it hasn’t happened.
- theshrike79 8mo ago
  Ask it to do something in the future or something with a conditional, plain CC can't do that. Like "message me when it is about to rain"

Volundr 8mo ago

What I find crazy is the sheer amount of access and trust involved in these LLMs. Every time I think about something I might like to do with it, I think about the amount of damage the LLM could do, e.x. even with read only access to my email combined with Internet access, and nope out. It's wild to me anyone trusts these things unsupervised.

mgraczyk 8mo ago

And yet they didn't do that! Really makes you think about what makes products good

BeetleB 8mo ago

> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), I don't want to learn N different SaaS products (nor worry about them changing their TOS, going away, etc). To be blunt, if OpenClaw were reliable, secure and affordable, lots of SaaS products would simply die. Why spend the time learning all of them when I can just tell the assistant what I want? > or something simple you could make yourself. That is OpenClaw at a higher abstraction! Instead of me sitting typing, or babysitting Claude Code, I can just tell OpenClaw what I want and it makes it for me. (When it works, that is).

rush86999 8mo ago

Everyone is using OpenClaw for personal productivity, but you're right. Not much value, as you can get that from existing products. The market will eventually realize the business case for an OpenClaw-like product, and I'm waiting to ride its coattails! https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom

m463 8mo ago

> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, reminds me of those "zune already does everything ipod does" posts.

teg4n_ 8mo ago
The iPod came out way before Zune.
- m463 7mo ago
  maybe it was complaints of iphone without a physical keyboard

pclark 8mo ago

Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet. I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM. 1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics — and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens. 1b. It also sends this to my TRMNL e-ink display. 1c. It can also add and edit calendar invites, so if I want to move my yoga I can just tell it to move it to whenever the next yoga class is at (it knows what studio I go to and figures it out) 2. It has a skill I built that acts as a second brain for knowledge. I can send it Fitness Youtubes, parenting/health research papers, podcasts — and it organizes, summarizes and saves it in a logical file structure. Then in the future I can access these. It's like bookmarks on steroids. I love it for 1-2hour YouTube videos where I want summaries. It also pulls out any books any artifacts mentions and generates me a rolling reading list. https://plc.vc/npw https://plc.vc/npw 3. It has its own email address — and read access to my personal email — so friends can email it to schedule things like evening video game sessions. Similarly, if I get an urgent looking email it'll provide it in #1. I don't check my personal email aside from via OpenClaw. 4. It has read/write access to my GitHub, and each project repo I have has a well defined Claude structure, so it can make changes, commit the branches to Fly.IO and send me domains to test things. I love it for esoteric tweaks to my blog. 5. It has access to my Apple Reminders so I can message it things like "remind me to buy more muffins" and it has context to know to add those muffins to my Costco grocery list not Trader Joes. 6. It runs a headless browser, so when my hyper local weather service (Bouldercast) sends a summary that has more detail behind a login, it can open the email, click the link, login with my credentials, summarize the forecast, and send it to me. 7. It drafts blog posts for what it did for me each week. It's fun! https://plc.vc/d5t https://plc.vc/d5t I am a previous Zapier power user. I have used their LLMs, databases and Zaps extensively for the past decade. I understand the scorn towards AI, and I understand that if you look at this list you might think that it's either trivial tasks and/or things that could be done with Zapier, but I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup. Similarly, I love that I can on the fly improve this assistant — last night I told it "I want to extend our Knowledge skill so that you can subscribe to RSS feeds and summarize articles in my knowledge base and also deliver interesting content in my daily summaries. Update the knowledge skill and our tasks to do all this." It one shotted that, simply asking me to provide the first RSS feed I wanted to subscribe to. It's genuinely like having a human assistant that happens to be an expert coder/technologist on call 247 that works at the near speed of light. It disappoints me that technologists are so skeptical of this technology rather than exploring what it is and why it might be different to what exists today. It's fun! thats the takeaway: it's FUN.

adampunk 8mo ago

It’s really not rocket science. Like other people have said people are having fun with their computers; that’s why it’s popular. That’s also why a bunch of people on forums throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t understand it. Why don’t they see that there shouldn’t be any fun whatsoever?” is not really a deterrent at all. It’s also why it doesn’t matter that the categories of tasks they are doing can also be done with a whole set of tools that are no fun to use.

xnx 8mo ago

Normal people use speakers to listen to music. "Audiophiles" use music to listen to their speakers. This applies to *clawphiles just as accurately.

navaed01 8mo ago

I agree in part with the hype train thesis, but what I hear is that open claw is better at solving problems and people love the interaction pattern - that may not be any new invention but it is what will mean we go from having Claude Desktop use mainly by engineers to something used by many. This will not be the final iteration of it, but it seems to be the direction of this to come

notelocomas 8mo ago

I'll give you my very personal take on the OpenClaw surge and how I find it extremely useful. I'm currently in founder mode and building two projects in Mexico. Finding the right real estate is in the critical path for success of the project. It's really hard to find quality real estate agents or brokers here and not because they don't exist. We have thousands they just never follow up with you or give you any updates. So, I'm using OpenClaw as my real estate agent that uses WhatsApp as a communications channel and manages the entire pipeline of first contact to scheduling a visit. Right now, I feed it images of postings that I see on the street and OpenClaw handles everything else. It really depends on where your personal or professional bottlenecks are and if you're running a business this project is absolutely amazing.

michihuber 8mo ago

when the internet started you were sending "funny" messages on ICQ, sharing mp3s with your friends, browsing weird websites on geocities, maybe ordered a book on amazon that you could have gotten down the street much faster. all the things I do with openclaw are in that ballpark of usefulness/importance.

theshrike79 8mo ago

I'm a skeptic myself and a long-time developer. But I do have to admit there's a nugget of truth in the Claws. I installed picoclaw on a whim (or nano? can't remember). In maybe 15 minutes I had it make a "get weather for this specific area using the met.no API" skill and "check the train tables at these two stops for this specific line" skill. Then I could just say "I go to the office every Monday on a train that leaves at 8, notify me if the weather is bad or there are delays in the train schedules" And it just worked. The "make a skill" bit was optional, it could've figured out both on its own, but I've been doing this for a while and figured out it's a lot more (token) efficient to have it specifically know how to do the things I want it to do. --- Now lets take this loop and think about the system and what it could do. Even if I wasn't a programmer and just went with "tell me when the train line I use for my commute is late" the system itself could see that "hmm, this looks like a thing I'll be doing often" and create a script/skill/plugin to do that via an official API (or WebMCP in the future). You can't do that with Zapier or N8N. There are many cool ways a pure LLM-powered system like that can be optimised, and more importantly, can be taught to self-optimise. By default I think the systems use the "main" model to read the HEARTBEAT.md file, which is stupid expensive. That could be done with a local model small enough to run on a modern phone. And if that small local model says "yep, there's something to do", then it can either give the full task to a LLM or if it's smart enough it can spread specific tasks to small or medium local models first. tl;dr OpenClaw is what Siri should've been after that epic fail of a Apple Keynote.

dyauspitr 8mo ago

> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself. What are you talking about? In openclaw you literally type out basic English instructions to an agent. This isn’t painstakingly setting up chron jobs and writing scripts.

bastadanii 8mo ago

my friend just created a bot with OpenClaw to go through Linkedin messaging possible hiring companies. He had 6 interviews scheduled the first day. that's the only use case I heard so far that was compelling. Im not a dev, but pretty sure you could do that with other tools too.

AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
What if we think about the second order effects of this?
didntknowya 7mo ago
in all likelihood it just the company bots spamming replies back too

bfeynman 8mo ago

openclaw while cool just allowed a larger tranche of technophiles who didn't necessarily have all the skills/understanding or time to do a bunch of things that have been readily available for like over 1.5 years. There is value in that, but there is huge surge in the number of people who are even able to take advantage of the novelty. Reminds me of when hugging face came out with transformers and all of a sudden you no longer needed to wrestle with anaconda and order of installation for all the deps.

thisismyswamp 8mo ago

the main difference between openclaw and the traditional approach to promoting LLMs is that it can run asynchronously and prompt you, the human, when something happens I built clawr.ing so my agent can call me on the phone for urgent things like emails I’m waiting for or issues in production for any of my products

didntknowya 7mo ago

from what i see people want to boast about using it as it makes them seem like early AI adopters, and they find random use cases for the product, rather than the other way round