3 ms·

I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather? Why would I not j

I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather? Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?

criddell 7mo ago
Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.
- kaizenb 7mo ago
  ツ
lucrbvi 7mo ago
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things. But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
- joe_mamba 7mo ago
  >but people using it are mostly non-technicals Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called. If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
  - firecall 7mo ago
    Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true! My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini. I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
    - joe_mamba 7mo ago
      >My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini. Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
      - firecall 7mo ago
        Thats a hot take LOL > https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. No, I'm saying they are not a 'technical person'. I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition. What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected. I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it. Much like the excitement around AI today!
        joe_mamba 7mo ago
        Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?
        pigeons 7mo ago
        Most "technical people" haven't bought a mac mini to run openclaw. Doing so fully qualifies you as a "technical person".
- Otterly99 7mo ago
  I tried it for 2 days and honestly don't see the usefulness either. Although, the big reason is that I paired it with Claude, which only uses the per token billing method. Here are the few improvement on a simple Claude usage: - As you mentioned, the message bot thing was kind of cool. - It can browse the internet and act (like posting on MoltBook, which I tried). - It has a a permanent "memory" (loads of .md files, so nothing fancy). - It can be schedulded via cron jobs. Overall, nothing really impressive. It is very gimmicky and it felt very unsafe the whole time (I had already read about the security issues, but sometimes you gotta live dangerously). The most annoying part was the huge token consumption (conversations start at 20k+ because of all the .md files) and it cost me roughly $12 for a few hours of testing.
threecheese 7mo ago
First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks. Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape. Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable. That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
bmurphy1976 7mo ago
You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything. (Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)
- burningChrome 7mo ago
  Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can. They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?" I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
tavavex 7mo ago
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
- eclipxe 7mo ago
  No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.
jacobra2 7mo ago
IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in 1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now 2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
- gavinray 7mo ago
  > accessibility to non-technical folks. When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?
  - eclipxe 7mo ago
    No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.
  - cesarvarela 7mo ago
    There are technicals and "technicals"

criddell 7mo ago

Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.

kaizenb 7mo ago
ツ

lucrbvi 7mo ago

I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things. But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version

joe_mamba 7mo ago
>but people using it are mostly non-technicals Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called. If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
- firecall 7mo ago
  Well…. In my experience that’s not exactly true! My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini. I have been surprised at how much attention is being paid to this AI thing by pretty much everybody AFAICT.
  - joe_mamba 7mo ago
    >My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini. Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
    - firecall 7mo ago
      Thats a hot take LOL > https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. No, I'm saying they are not a 'technical person'. I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition. What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected. I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it. Much like the excitement around AI today!
      - joe_mamba 7mo ago
        Why are you pointing out the rules? Did anyone break them?
      - pigeons 7mo ago
        Most "technical people" haven't bought a mac mini to run openclaw. Doing so fully qualifies you as a "technical person".
Otterly99 7mo ago
I tried it for 2 days and honestly don't see the usefulness either. Although, the big reason is that I paired it with Claude, which only uses the per token billing method. Here are the few improvement on a simple Claude usage: - As you mentioned, the message bot thing was kind of cool. - It can browse the internet and act (like posting on MoltBook, which I tried). - It has a a permanent "memory" (loads of .md files, so nothing fancy). - It can be schedulded via cron jobs. Overall, nothing really impressive. It is very gimmicky and it felt very unsafe the whole time (I had already read about the security issues, but sometimes you gotta live dangerously). The most annoying part was the huge token consumption (conversations start at 20k+ because of all the .md files) and it cost me roughly $12 for a few hours of testing.

threecheese 7mo ago

First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks. Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape. Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable. That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.

bmurphy1976 7mo ago

You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything. (Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)

burningChrome 7mo ago
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can. They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?" I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.

tavavex 7mo ago

Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?

eclipxe 7mo ago
No, it has a web interface, Mac app, etc.

jacobra2 7mo ago

IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in 1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now 2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties

gavinray 7mo ago
> accessibility to non-technical folks. When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?
- eclipxe 7mo ago
  No it doesn't, it walks you through that in setup flow.
- cesarvarela 7mo ago
  There are technicals and "technicals"