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I've only been playing with it recently ... I have mine scraping for SF city meetings that I can attend and public comment to advocate for more housing etc (htt

by sgillen 6mo ago

I've only been playing with it recently ... I have mine scraping for SF city meetings that I can attend and public comment to advocate for more housing etc (https://github.com/sgillen/sf-civic-digest https://github.com/sgillen/sf-civic-digest). It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget. I'm just playing with it, it's been fun! It's all on a VM in the cloud and I assume it could get pwned at any time but the blast radius would be small.

mvdtnz 6mo ago
[flagged]
- gruez 6mo ago
  No? The comment was admittedly ambiguous but if you go to repo it's far clearer: >I use it to give me a weekly digest of what happened in my neighborhood and if there are any public hearings or trash pickups I might want to attend.
  - WhrRTheBaboons 6mo ago
    that does not seem like something you need an 'autonomous' agent for.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6mo ago
      What would you propose as an alternative? Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. That's not really worth the time, especially when you want summaries and not having to skim things yourself. Going from doing it manually on a regular basis to an autonomous agent turns a frequent 5-15 minute task into a 30 second one.
      - mvdtnz 6mo ago
        > Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. The very first line in your readme is "CivicClaw is a set of scripts and prompts" though? And almost the entire repo is a bunch of python scripts under a /scripts folder. I looked at one randomly chosen script (scripts/sf_rec_park.py) and it's 549 lines of Python to fetch and summarise data that is available on an RSS feed ( https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=91 https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=... )
        Gracana 6mo ago
        Parent isn't saying that bespoke scripts are bad, just that it's not worth their time to write them. The value of the bot is that it can do that for you.
    - butlike 6mo ago
      They've created a public bulletin board for themselves, like a café's blackboard, or a city telephone pole.
gruez 6mo ago
>It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget. seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this.
- Sargos 6mo ago
  >set up a bot that does this But he already did this. With a bonus of it will continue to work in the future if something breaks or changes. Human time is more precious than computing resources nowadays.
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  > seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this. I think Simon Willison said it best some weeks ago: He's capable of writing a bot like this - both before and after LLMs came on the scene. However, the reality is he never wrote one, despite wanting to many times. Yet in just 2-3 weeks of using OpenClaw[1], I did this a few times. Recall a year or so ago in the early days of vibe coding when people kept saying "I don't need AI to write code. It does a crap job and I can do it myself. Who needs LLMs to do it?" - You'd get lots of people countering with "Oh, in a few weeks I've written lots of automations that I'd been thinking about for months/years - that I likely would never have written without AI coding tools". The key is the lower barrier to producing something. OpenClaw is to using CC to write that bot as using CC was to writing code by hand. I can be doing work, shopping, etc and when an idea pops into my head, I casually send a note to my Claw instance (voice or text) asking it to look into it or try making it. It doesn't do a great job, but the expectations of success are similarly low. But when it does do precisely what you need it to: Oh boy, you're happy that it saved you time, etc. [1] I no longer run it, for very boring reasons.

by sgillen 6mo ago

mvdtnz 6mo ago

[flagged]

gruez 6mo ago
No? The comment was admittedly ambiguous but if you go to repo it's far clearer: >I use it to give me a weekly digest of what happened in my neighborhood and if there are any public hearings or trash pickups I might want to attend.
- WhrRTheBaboons 6mo ago
  that does not seem like something you need an 'autonomous' agent for.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6mo ago
    What would you propose as an alternative? Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. That's not really worth the time, especially when you want summaries and not having to skim things yourself. Going from doing it manually on a regular basis to an autonomous agent turns a frequent 5-15 minute task into a 30 second one.
    - mvdtnz 6mo ago
      > Anything not relying on an LLM likely means having to write bespoke scripts. The very first line in your readme is "CivicClaw is a set of scripts and prompts" though? And almost the entire repo is a bunch of python scripts under a /scripts folder. I looked at one randomly chosen script (scripts/sf_rec_park.py) and it's 549 lines of Python to fetch and summarise data that is available on an RSS feed ( https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=91 https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=... )
      - Gracana 6mo ago
        Parent isn't saying that bespoke scripts are bad, just that it's not worth their time to write them. The value of the bot is that it can do that for you.
  - butlike 6mo ago
    They've created a public bulletin board for themselves, like a café's blackboard, or a city telephone pole.

gruez 6mo ago

>It also have mine automatically grabs a spot at my gym when spots are released because I always forget. seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this.

Sargos 6mo ago
>set up a bot that does this But he already did this. With a bonus of it will continue to work in the future if something breaks or changes. Human time is more precious than computing resources nowadays.
BeetleB 6mo ago
> seems far more efficient/reliable to get codex/claude code to write and set up a bot that does this. I think Simon Willison said it best some weeks ago: He's capable of writing a bot like this - both before and after LLMs came on the scene. However, the reality is he never wrote one, despite wanting to many times. Yet in just 2-3 weeks of using OpenClaw[1], I did this a few times. Recall a year or so ago in the early days of vibe coding when people kept saying "I don't need AI to write code. It does a crap job and I can do it myself. Who needs LLMs to do it?" - You'd get lots of people countering with "Oh, in a few weeks I've written lots of automations that I'd been thinking about for months/years - that I likely would never have written without AI coding tools". The key is the lower barrier to producing something. OpenClaw is to using CC to write that bot as using CC was to writing code by hand. I can be doing work, shopping, etc and when an idea pops into my head, I casually send a note to my Claw instance (voice or text) asking it to look into it or try making it. It doesn't do a great job, but the expectations of success are similarly low. But when it does do precisely what you need it to: Oh boy, you're happy that it saved you time, etc. [1] I no longer run it, for very boring reasons.