12 ms·

OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

168 points by sonink 6mo ago

aleksiy123 6mo ago
I do feel like the memory the biggest hurdle I’ve been encountering and I’m curious what solutions people have been doing to make it work. What seems to be somewhat working for me 1. Karpathy wiki approach 2. some prompting around telling the llm what to store and not. But it still feels brittle. I don’t think it’s just a retrieval problem. In fact I feel like the retrieval is relatively easy. It’s the write part, getting the agent to know what it should be memorizing, and how to store it.
- aleksiy123 6mo ago
  As a side note, one thing that seemed to really help was having the agent recursively summarize all the files into a repo map with the same folder/file structure as the repo. And forcing to always orient itself with that repo map first seemed to really help it from tunnel visioning.
- syngrog66 6mo ago
  its almost as if its rules should be persisted, versioned and tested in a deterministic way. I also wonder if it might end up useful to try enforcing some kind of constraints to data (memory) itself. like if we could enforce atomicity, consistency, isolation AND durability. and transparency so no place for malware to hide. and deterministic execution, from fully reproducible builds... er, nevermind. prob just crazy castles in the sky wistful dreams :-)
Animats 6mo ago
"Who's in charge here?" "The Claw." Some of this stuff is starting to look like technologies that worked, looked promising, but were at best marginally useful, such as magnetohydrodynamic generators, tokamaks, E-beam lithography, and Ovonics.
choiway 6mo ago
Good to know that I'm not alone. I now use it for music recommendations (not so great) and keeping track of restaurants I want to try (really good at this but so are a lot of other apps).
jbverschoor 6mo ago
Sounds like an armchair expert
- threecheese 6mo ago
  Right back at ya ;) The author makes some good conclusions; I’m as AI-pilled as the next hopefully-not-soon-to-be-ex-software-engineer, and I struggled to find use cases for my Claw that couldn’t be served with a cronjob and $harness. If your findings contradict that, we are all ears - genuinely.
  - jbverschoor 6mo ago
    Oh not really, but the article just reads like it’s from an observing putting of view, without tangibles. The killer thing was remote control, but that’s here in Claude now. In my opinion claw has to reason to exist anymore. I tried it, didn’t like it. It gave me the ick with the communication channel.
broadsidepicnic 6mo ago
Could we stop with the clickbaiting headlines?
- Eufrat 6mo ago
  You forgot to add, “Here’s why.” /s I know that headlines are all about eyeballs, but this is seriously just exhausting. Headlines are advertisements and advertisements are about getting engagement. Surely having your audience just getting angry at them isn’t a good thing, right?
thepasch 6mo ago
It would’ve happened eventually anyway, but OpenClaw is basically what kickstarted the beginning of the end of token subsidies. It’s a almost begging to be used wastefully. And agents would miss and lose nothing without it. It’s devoid of a reason to exist.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  I don't follow the thinking here. If you are using it for coding maybe, but the main use case of openclaw is as a personal assistant. I'm using a $10 a month minimax subscription for it, and I've never used more than 10% usage of a 5 hour window.
  - mekael 6mo ago
    Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?
    - operatingthetan 6mo ago
      Mine is not connected to any of that. It is only connected to my Obsidian vault. Daily habits are reminded and checked off. It asks about calories etc. Think more of a manager or accountability partner than 'email on steroids.' I use it to track personal projects primarily. Lots of other tools could accomplish task tracking, but this one is more proactive than those. If you read my other comments today you will see I am not an openclaw-maxi.
    - fennecbutt 6mo ago
      Siri/Alexa/gemini are severely limited in what they can do/access because they wanna protect the brand.
- raincole 6mo ago
  I don't think this is fair (and I say this as someone who doesn't see much a point of OpenClaw). To me it's very obvious that Claude Code itself is the beginning of the end of token subsidies. When Claude Code was released, there was a community leaderboard where people competed who could waste the most tokens. Let that sinks. I know people, especially people who write code, like to blame "the other clueless people" for ruining their cheap token plan. But we're not stuck in the traffic. We're the traffic.
aunty_helen 6mo ago
> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)
- MadSudaca 6mo ago
  I don’t get people’s hate. Let others enjoy it.
  - Eufrat 6mo ago
    I think people are just tired of the fire hose of posts that have been showing up since it came out. It’s so annoying. Why does everyone need to pimp it so hard? It’s like your aunt trying to push Herbalife on you every time you see her.
    - zdragnar 6mo ago
      That, and some people hate being on the receiving end of the output. The old "if you didn't bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it".
- Eufrat 6mo ago
  What happens if it makes a mistake? How would you know?
  - aunty_helen 6mo ago
    10/80/10 10% done by an assistant that’s been trained on the task (or a dev or me) 80% heavy lifting done by claw 10% review and corrections
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.
MadSudaca 6mo ago
It can integrate apis for you on the fly. That’s one of the biggest usecases IMO. Combine that with skills, cron, and sub-agents, and you get a lot of power there.
hackermeows 6mo ago
there are zero legitmate use cases? sure bro. you can say that to my claw which is making me more money than my salary
- grebc 6mo ago
  Sure, bro.
- ofjcihen 6mo ago
  Bounties?
- tasuki 6mo ago
  Making Money, the ultimate "legitimate use case".
- the_pwner224 6mo ago
  Please elaborate
  - dimitri-vs 6mo ago
    Almost certainly some kind of scam
    - thenthenthen 6mo ago
      From what i have read openclaw seems to be the ideal scam/clickfarm bot or am I completely mistaken?
operatingthetan 6mo ago
I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.
- LaurensBER 6mo ago
  Amen. I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default. The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough. If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry. I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
  - wyre 6mo ago
    I know Twitter has been talking up Hermes Agent by Nous Research a lot or id recommend building your own agent off of Pi.
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      Thanks for this suggestion, I installed it yesterday after seeing this comment and this surely is a breath of fresh air! It appears that everything is designed reasonably well from the ground up. It’s more limited, but what’s there works well.
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    > easy to run on Kubernetes that sounds like an oxymoron.
jwpapi 6mo ago
From my perspective there are some people that have never built real processes in their life that enjoy having some processes now. But agent processes are less reliable slower and less maintenable then a process that is well-defined and architectured and uses llm’s only where no other solution is sufficient. Classification, drafting, summarizing. I’ve had a Whatsapp assistant since 2023, jailbraked as easy assistant. Only thing I kept using is transcription. https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt was released 3 years ago and many have extended it for more capabilities and arguably its more performant than Openclaw as it can run in all your chat windows. But there’s still no use case. It’s really classification and drafting.
- KhayaliY 6mo ago
  Fully agree with your comment regarding real processes. Being a Six Sigma Black Belt, studying processes and reducing the errors is critical. The Openclaw processes at the moment scare me.
  - whattheheckheck 6mo ago
    Make a skill.md called six sigma black belt audit refactor and publish it
    - KhayaliY 6mo ago
      That's actually a great idea!!
  - vasco 6mo ago
    I'm only at Four Alpha Brown Belt still but once I pass my test I think I'll also understand why this is critical. I can't wait to get scared.
- chris_money202 6mo ago
  This. So many junior engineers showing me AI flows that could just be a script with a few parameter inputs
estetlinus 6mo ago
Who is this guy and why is he casually admitting to reading all the user conversations???
- sonink 6mo ago
  To clarify - we don't read user conversations - what I'm referring to is deploy volume (how many times OpenClaw gets spun up on our infra) and direct conversations I've had with people in my network who deployed OpenClaw independently
axus 6mo ago
The twist? This article and marketing campaign for it are 100% by OpenClaw.
littlekey 6mo ago
I'm still trying to figure out what to use it for other than news aggregation...
- sassymuffinz 6mo ago
  I understand it's the quickest way to expose all your API keys.
deleted 6mo ago
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jmward01 6mo ago
It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we are likely to see real movement.
- bryanlarsen 6mo ago
  Conventional LLM's are moving fast too. The argument is that OpenClaw isn't any more useful than conventional LLM's, and I suspect it will always be true because the conventional LLM's will gain any useful capabilities.
  - jmward01 6mo ago
    I think openclaw provides a unique feature of a standardized host environment for a persistent assistant. This is different than the chat interfaces that are presented by anthropic/openai/others that give you a 'while you are here' assistant interface and is very different from the idea of trained llm weights and ways of serving them up like llama.cpp and others. There really is something unique here that will evolve over time I think.
    - osigurdson 6mo ago
      Agree. It is like just having one continuous chat session with ChapGPT forever. Of course they do have memory already (at least ChatGPT does). I ended up turning it off however, because it kept bringing irrelevant stuff into the current convo.
wg0 6mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 6mo ago
  Please don't do this here.
  - wg0 6mo ago
    I am sorry. I understand that many of us are heavily invested financially or emotionally into AI but the key insight about OpenClaw remains the same that it really isn't much useful beyond maybe a daily news summary. Nothing that cannot be done otherwise.
    - ejeje 6mo ago
      I think it broadly speaks to the issue of llm’s in general. People have to actively interact with these things to get outputs of them. Why can’t they do it passively? Because on the surface LLM’s seem intelligent. But they’re not. They need constant attention to ensure they are doing what one wants and not going off track. I experienced this myself many times - the variance in the output can be jarring at times. From surprisingly good to absolutely disappointing. Why hasn’t customer service over the web/telephone become completely autonomous or at least partially via llm’s? We have all this talk about agentic programming and yet much of the world carries on as it was. Interesting. I don’t think this variance problem is going away. It’s a different kind of variance than humans are used to when dealing with other humans.
      - wg0 6mo ago
        Then intellectual honesty demands that we present these limitations as such but capitalist grifters have their own principles it seems.
    - tomhow 6mo ago
      It’s a lame trope that people only comment favorably about things because they have a financial incentive or some other pathological reason to do so, and for that reason it’s against the guidelines.
theturtletalks 6mo ago
The hype around OpenClaw is a bit confusing but I think I figured it out. For most coders, Claude Code in the terminal was an important event. Letting it access code and change files directly. For normal users, they didn’t see the power is that. OpenClaw runs Pi in a terminal and exposes the chat thru Telegram or any chatting app. This gave the ah-ha moment to non-coders that coders had had for 6+ months prior.
- osigurdson 6mo ago
  I'm confused about it as well. I've installed OC locally and also on a VM. I don't get it so far. But then again, I'm not willing to give it all of my passwords which is probably why I'm not seeing much value. It isn't just non-coders that see OC as a game changer however.
the_real_cher 6mo ago
I was getting a lot of use case out of it mainly interacting with the file system. The problem is if not carefully designed it will burn through tokens like crazy.
deleted 6mo ago
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BeetleB 6mo ago
If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it). I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time. I will say, it's still amongst the best tools to do a variety of tasks. Yes, each one of those could be done with just a coding agent, but I found it's less effort to get OpenClaw to do it than you writing something for each use case. Very honest question: One of the use cases I had with OpenClaw that I'm missing now that I don't use it: I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw? How would you do it? (My TODO list is strictly on a home PC - no syncing with phone - by design). (BTW, the reason I stopped using OpenClaw is boring: My QEMU SW stopped working and I haven't had time to debug).
- tecoholic 6mo ago
  > It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)
  - BeetleB 6mo ago
    > You can use anything to call this API right? The API is on my home PC and not exposed to the outside world. Only OpenClaw via Telegram was. So my question is about the infrastructure: How do I communicate with something at home (it could be the API directly) using a messaging app like Telegram? I definitely want an LLM in the mix. I want to casually tell it what my TODO is, and have it: - Craft it into a concise TODO headline - Craft a detailed summary - Call the API with the above two. I'm not asking in the abstract. What specific tools/technologies should I use?
    - 6mo ago
_pdp_ 6mo ago
IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks. They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience. However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss. There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code. We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect. We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens. We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public. In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business. I hope this helps.
mmooss 6mo ago
Why aren't databases the solution to many memory problems? Maybe this is a naive question: For example, for the invitations in the OP: Have Openclaw write incoming rsvps to a database, probably a flat file here, and use the db as persistent memory: OpenClaw can compose outgoing update emails based on the database. Don't even suggest to OpenClaws that it try to remember the rsvps - its job is just writing to and reading from a database, and composing emails based on the latter. ? Does that violate the experiment, by using some tool in addition to OpenClaw?
- jmuguy 6mo ago
  Mostly because it can’t or shouldn’t remember everything - eventually the context window gets too big. But how does it know what to forget and what’s important and should be remembered?
tbrownaw 6mo ago
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. Sure, anything it does can be done better with specialized tooling. If you know that tooling. The memory thing sounds like an implementation limit rather than something fundamentally unsolvable. Just experiment with different ways of organizing state until something works?
SyneRyder 6mo ago
I partly identify with the article. While I don't use OpenClaw itself, I hacked together my own small Claude-in-a-loop/cronjob, and it seems we're all getting our morning briefings and personalized morning podcasts now. The other common use case seems to be kicking off an automated Claude session from an email / voicetext / text / Telegram, and getting replies back. I'm emailing Claude throughout the day now, and sometimes it's useful to just forward an email to Claude and ask it to handle the task within it for me. But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted. Give it enough context, long term memory, and ability to explore all of that, and useful stuff emerges.
- andai 6mo ago
  Just a heads up if you're using claude -p with the sub your account might be in trouble, they're cracking down on this kind of stuff lately. Enforcement seems to be a combination of string matching for 3rd party sysprompts, heavy usage, and some random factor. Not clear if there are any hard rules you can stay on the good side of, the only way to be safe seems to be to pay per token. (There goes the ~90% discount!) -- Also yeah you get ~80% of Claw by shoving Claude Code in a Telegram Bot ;) It's already a general purpose computer use thing, people forget! (And it's a lot better at extending itself than the actual claws, lol) I think the least illegal and also least bad option is to just use ngrok and tmux tho
drowntoge 6mo ago
I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool. It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified. But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere. I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.
Rekindle8090 6mo ago
My biggest issue with OpenClaw is everyone talks about doing things with it but doesn't explain what it actually is doing. First of all is not an LLM, you're beholden to an api or local llm limitations. Second of all it's always calendars, email replies, summarizing. You do not need an LLM for that, and an LLM doesn't make it easier either. It sounds like executive cosplay, not productivity. Everything I see people talking about that's actually productive, it's doing probabilistically when deterministic tools already exist and have for in some cases over 20 years. You don't need an LLM to put a meeting on a calendar, that's literally two taps with your phone or a single click in gmail. Most email services already have suggestions already built in. Emails have been summarized for 10 years at this point. If you're so busy you need this stuff automated, you probably have an assistant, or you're important enough that actually using general intelligence is critical to being successful at all. The idea of getting an LLM email response sounds great for someone who has never worked a job in their life. This comment section is full of llm writen responses too, to the point where its absurd. Noticing how most of them just talk in circles like "But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted." This literally isn't even saying anything. This paragraph does not mean anything. It's not saying what its doing, whats happening or what the result is, just "something is happening". No, you didn't save time using openclaw, you just changed to managing openclaw instead of doing your actual job. You don't need custom scripts for most things if its actually something that matters, most tools already exist, and if you do openclaw isn't going to help you do it.
- nonameiguess 6mo ago
  I'm gonna die shaking my fists at clouds pretty soon, but amen. I had a guy in work Slack evangelizing about this in January when it first came out and he's talking about automatically ordering groceries and getting reminders to do laundry and shit and I just don't get it. Sure, that's a use case, but I figured out how to feed, clothe, and house myself without digital assistance 25 years ago. How'd you live this long if you can't eat without a machine telling you what to buy and how to cook? I can't even tell if these replies are in fact just astroturfed bot armies flooding us with marketing or there really is an entire generation of people out there right now who can't do anything unless their phone is telling them what to do. And where are the outcomes? Okay, you've got OpenClaw telling you every few hours how many calories you've had so far today. Have you gotten leaner? Faster? Stronger? Healthier or fitter by any quantifiable objective metric at all? Or are you just doing exactly what you did before but now your phone is scripting it for you?
andai 6mo ago
>This isn’t a bug that gets fixed in the next release. It’s a fundamental constraint of how OpenClaw manages context. Last I checked, it doesn't!
sailfast 6mo ago
I dunno - my boss has deployed a couple of claw agents that are pretty good at doing SWE and SRE work. They’re available for the whole company to use, and they save us a ton of time. Pretty decent use case! Personally I haven’t found claw agents replace anything really for personal use outside of commercial tools I’d pay for to handle scheduling and stuff, but I also haven’t tried / trusted too many new use cases outside of that cron / daily briefing or some family schedules.
- osigurdson 6mo ago
  Just curious, what is the delta with this and Claude Code / Codex CLI for the SWE work?
deleted 6mo ago
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bibstha 6mo ago
I actually quite enjoy the OpenClaw. Although the recent CC crackdown has caused me to try different LLM providers which aren't that reliable but anyways, here are few things I do with it, in all separate groups. * Telegram Health Group, created an agent to help me track sleep, recommend my supplements based on my location, remind me in the morning and evening to monitor my food. I send it images of what I eat and it keeps track of it. * Telegram Career Group, I randomly ask it to find certain kind of job posts based on my criteria. Not scheduled, only when I like to. * Telegram Coder Group, gave it access to my github account. It pulls, runs tests and merges dependabot PRs in the mornings. Tells me if there are any issues. I also ask it to look into certain bugs and open PRs while I'm on the road. * Telegran News Group, I gave it a list of youtube videos and asked it to send me news every day at 10am similar to the videos. So far, it's a super easy assistant taking multiple personas. But it's getting a bit painful without CC subscription
- pigeons 6mo ago
  Are you concerned about telegram admins having access to that information?
  - fennecbutt 6mo ago
    Yeah! And what if Samsung put a bug in the silicon that gives them access to all your stuff without you ever knowing! Or the CIA has set up inside your closet with a listening device!
    - pigeons 6mo ago
      But those are much more hypothetical. Telegram admins and anyone who bribes or hacks them do have access to your messages.
- emptysongglass 6mo ago
  You can just have your bot use Telegram topics for this.
- VitalStack 6mo ago
bobjordan 6mo ago
I primarily "only" use it as a run-manager that can spin up another agent in a tmux which I can then join by ssh on my cell phone. Then, I can monitor the work from my cell phone and choose to either directly interact with the tmux pane or else just message my openclaw agent to do it for me. That right there is the only "killer" app I've found for it. I do also use it to post to my x.com account and that's also pretty useful. Neither of these uses assume any super long context over time will be retained. But, to me, the run-manager use case is pretty great.
villgax 6mo ago
You probably don't know how to setup memory. The killer usecase is letting you make whatever you want, instead of being at the mercy of what your OS/platform dictates. Your idea of a killer idea is a whatsapp summarizer lol.
- lokar 6mo ago
  I can already make whatever I want
  - villgax 6mo ago
    It's for people who can't, did drop some neurons on this thread?
    - lokar 6mo ago
      I can’t parse that
san_tekart 6mo ago
[flagged]
villgax 6mo ago
Author basically admitting to having a boring outlook on life IMO. Sure maybe not for work but there's tons of things that suck the life out of your limited time, having a tool not just OpenClaw is one way to not bend to the will of BigCo for whatever thing you want to do, need a 3D model? Need something summarized or need control of something which the manufacturer forbids? All can be done without spending entire weekends for.
UltraSane 6mo ago
That is very similar to human memory.
pmdr 6mo ago
How much money are people here spending on tokens for this thing?
loehnsberg 6mo ago
As long as there's no solution to the long-term memory problem, we will have a "country of geniuses in a data center" that are all suffering from anterograde amnesia (movie: Memento), which requires human hand-holding. I have experimented with a lot of hacks, like hierarchies of indexed md files, semantic DBs, embeddings, dynamic context retrieval, but none of this is really a comprehensive solution to get something that feels as intelligent as what these systems are able to do within their context windows. I am als a touch skeptical that adjusting weights to learn context will do the trick without a transformer-like innovation in reinforcement learning. Anyway, I‘ll keep tinkering…
- ambewas 6mo ago
  You're right to be skeptical. Without a way to actually implement how the human brain processes experiences into a consolidated memory, we won't be able to solve the long term memory problem at all. Not with the current technology. An LLM context is a pretty well extended short term memory, and the trained network is a very nice comprehensive long term memory, but due to the way we currently train these networks, an LLM is just fundamentally not able to "move" these experiences to long term, like a human brain does (through sleep, among others). Once we can teach a machine to experience something once, and remember it (preferably on a local model, because you wouldn't want a global memory to remember your information), we just cannot solve this problem. I think this is probably the most interesting field of research right now. Actually understanding in depth how the brain learns, and figuring out a way to build a model that implements this. Because right now, with backtracking and weight adjustments, I just can't see us getting there.
  - loehnsberg 6mo ago
    I think if we want to build on what we have, instead of compaction at the end of the context window, the LLM would have to 'sleep', i.e. adjust its weights, then wake up with the last bits of the old context window in the new one, and have a 'feel' for what it did before through the change in weights. I just sense it's not that simple to get there, because simply updating the weights based on a single context sample risks degrading the weights of the whole network. I like the idea of using small local model (or several) for tackling this problem, like low rank adaptation, but with current tech, I still have to piece this together or the small local models will forget old memories.
gbro3n 6mo ago
I've had a crack at this problem in Agent Kanban for VS Code (https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban). The core idea is that you converse with the agent in a markdown task file in a plan, todo, implement flow, and that I have found works really well for long running complex tasks, and I use this tool every day. But after a while, the agent just forgets to converse in the task file. The only way to get it to (mostly) reliably converse in the task file is to reference the task file and instructions in AGENTS.md. There is support for git work trees and skipping commits of the agents file so as not to pollute the file with the specific task info. There is also an option for working without work trees, but in this flow I had to add chat participant "refresh" commands to help the agent keep it's instructions fresh in context. It's a problem that I believe will slowly get better as better agents appear, and get cheaper to use, because general LLM capability is the key differentiator at the moment.
anonyfox 6mo ago
I built a special belief-based system recently for my own agent harnesses instead of some similarity based fact storage stuff... which falls flat once conflicting data points enter the system and just increase LLM confusion and make it do weird things. this means learning over time works a bit more like humans do - superseding old beliefs and reconciliating stuff cleanly over time. Also including the building blocks to have a subagent managing it autonomously (with tools/skills/soul). works quite well and very fast given its pure nodejs+sqlite and doesn't eat tokens like crazy or needs any thirdparty embeddings solution. maybe have a look. https://github.com/GhostPawJS/codex https://github.com/GhostPawJS/codex
shawnta 6mo ago
[flagged]
jFriedensreich 6mo ago
Memory systems as most people understand and build them are a clear dead end. We just need skills, tools and better context management.
darqis 6mo ago
Openclaw is unreliable. I had it running for a few months. It uses up a lot of resources and doesn't provide any benefit other than being able to chat with it via other methods than tui. I've removed it.
- azmz 6mo ago
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azmz 6mo ago
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JohnMakin 6mo ago
I’ve had some success with claude cli agents at some scale with a memory architecture - but it roughly reads like a massive index, where it crawls through a trail of breadcrumbs to piece together all the info it needs to do a task. It’s fairly tedious to maintain, and it’s always a battle maintaining reasonable context size and token spend. I’d say it’s like 85% reliable on any given task, and since I supervise it, this is good enough for me. But for something to be useful autonomously, that number needs to be several 9’s to be useful at all, and we’re no world near that yet. I’m currently watching someone trying and failing to roll openclaw out at scale in an org and they believe in it so much it’s very difficult to convince them even with glaring evidence staring them in the face that it will not work
jditu 6mo ago
[dead]
maxbeech 6mo ago
[dead]
linzhangrun 6mo ago
[flagged]
matthewduff 6mo ago
This is essentially a 140-IQ analyst you can text "please fix" at 3:00 AM without the shit you have to deal with when hosting your stuff locally. The context awareness across your text messages, emails, and between chats is not half bad; just wish that the "computer use" feature set was fully locked in so I can automate half the apps on my phone.

168 points by sonink 6mo ago

I do feel like the memory the biggest hurdle I’ve been encountering and I’m curious what solutions people have been doing to make it work. What seems to be somewhat working for me 1. Karpathy wiki approach 2. some prompting around telling the llm what to store and not. But it still feels brittle. I don’t think it’s just a retrieval problem. In fact I feel like the retrieval is relatively easy. It’s the write part, getting the agent to know what it should be memorizing, and how to store it.

aleksiy123 6mo ago
As a side note, one thing that seemed to really help was having the agent recursively summarize all the files into a repo map with the same folder/file structure as the repo. And forcing to always orient itself with that repo map first seemed to really help it from tunnel visioning.
syngrog66 6mo ago
its almost as if its rules should be persisted, versioned and tested in a deterministic way. I also wonder if it might end up useful to try enforcing some kind of constraints to data (memory) itself. like if we could enforce atomicity, consistency, isolation AND durability. and transparency so no place for malware to hide. and deterministic execution, from fully reproducible builds... er, nevermind. prob just crazy castles in the sky wistful dreams :-)

Animats 6mo ago

"Who's in charge here?" "The Claw." Some of this stuff is starting to look like technologies that worked, looked promising, but were at best marginally useful, such as magnetohydrodynamic generators, tokamaks, E-beam lithography, and Ovonics.

choiway 6mo ago

Good to know that I'm not alone. I now use it for music recommendations (not so great) and keeping track of restaurants I want to try (really good at this but so are a lot of other apps).

jbverschoor 6mo ago

Sounds like an armchair expert

threecheese 6mo ago
Right back at ya ;) The author makes some good conclusions; I’m as AI-pilled as the next hopefully-not-soon-to-be-ex-software-engineer, and I struggled to find use cases for my Claw that couldn’t be served with a cronjob and $harness. If your findings contradict that, we are all ears - genuinely.
- jbverschoor 6mo ago
  Oh not really, but the article just reads like it’s from an observing putting of view, without tangibles. The killer thing was remote control, but that’s here in Claude now. In my opinion claw has to reason to exist anymore. I tried it, didn’t like it. It gave me the ick with the communication channel.

broadsidepicnic 6mo ago

Could we stop with the clickbaiting headlines?

Eufrat 6mo ago
You forgot to add, “Here’s why.” /s I know that headlines are all about eyeballs, but this is seriously just exhausting. Headlines are advertisements and advertisements are about getting engagement. Surely having your audience just getting angry at them isn’t a good thing, right?

thepasch 6mo ago

It would’ve happened eventually anyway, but OpenClaw is basically what kickstarted the beginning of the end of token subsidies. It’s a almost begging to be used wastefully. And agents would miss and lose nothing without it. It’s devoid of a reason to exist.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
I don't follow the thinking here. If you are using it for coding maybe, but the main use case of openclaw is as a personal assistant. I'm using a $10 a month minimax subscription for it, and I've never used more than 10% usage of a 5 hour window.
- mekael 6mo ago
  Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    Mine is not connected to any of that. It is only connected to my Obsidian vault. Daily habits are reminded and checked off. It asks about calories etc. Think more of a manager or accountability partner than 'email on steroids.' I use it to track personal projects primarily. Lots of other tools could accomplish task tracking, but this one is more proactive than those. If you read my other comments today you will see I am not an openclaw-maxi.
  - fennecbutt 6mo ago
    Siri/Alexa/gemini are severely limited in what they can do/access because they wanna protect the brand.
raincole 6mo ago
I don't think this is fair (and I say this as someone who doesn't see much a point of OpenClaw). To me it's very obvious that Claude Code itself is the beginning of the end of token subsidies. When Claude Code was released, there was a community leaderboard where people competed who could waste the most tokens. Let that sinks. I know people, especially people who write code, like to blame "the other clueless people" for ruining their cheap token plan. But we're not stuck in the traffic. We're the traffic.

aunty_helen 6mo ago

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

MadSudaca 6mo ago
I don’t get people’s hate. Let others enjoy it.
- Eufrat 6mo ago
  I think people are just tired of the fire hose of posts that have been showing up since it came out. It’s so annoying. Why does everyone need to pimp it so hard? It’s like your aunt trying to push Herbalife on you every time you see her.
  - zdragnar 6mo ago
    That, and some people hate being on the receiving end of the output. The old "if you didn't bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it".
Eufrat 6mo ago
What happens if it makes a mistake? How would you know?
- aunty_helen 6mo ago
  10/80/10 10% done by an assistant that’s been trained on the task (or a dev or me) 80% heavy lifting done by claw 10% review and corrections
operatingthetan 6mo ago
None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

MadSudaca 6mo ago

It can integrate apis for you on the fly. That’s one of the biggest usecases IMO. Combine that with skills, cron, and sub-agents, and you get a lot of power there.

hackermeows 6mo ago

there are zero legitmate use cases? sure bro. you can say that to my claw which is making me more money than my salary

grebc 6mo ago
Sure, bro.
ofjcihen 6mo ago
Bounties?
tasuki 6mo ago
Making Money, the ultimate "legitimate use case".
the_pwner224 6mo ago
Please elaborate
- dimitri-vs 6mo ago
  Almost certainly some kind of scam
  - thenthenthen 6mo ago
    From what i have read openclaw seems to be the ideal scam/clickfarm bot or am I completely mistaken?

operatingthetan 6mo ago

I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.

LaurensBER 6mo ago
Amen. I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default. The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough. If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry. I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
- wyre 6mo ago
  I know Twitter has been talking up Hermes Agent by Nous Research a lot or id recommend building your own agent off of Pi.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    Thanks for this suggestion, I installed it yesterday after seeing this comment and this surely is a breath of fresh air! It appears that everything is designed reasonably well from the ground up. It’s more limited, but what’s there works well.
- fragmede 6mo ago
  > easy to run on Kubernetes that sounds like an oxymoron.

jwpapi 6mo ago

From my perspective there are some people that have never built real processes in their life that enjoy having some processes now. But agent processes are less reliable slower and less maintenable then a process that is well-defined and architectured and uses llm’s only where no other solution is sufficient. Classification, drafting, summarizing. I’ve had a Whatsapp assistant since 2023, jailbraked as easy assistant. Only thing I kept using is transcription. https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt was released 3 years ago and many have extended it for more capabilities and arguably its more performant than Openclaw as it can run in all your chat windows. But there’s still no use case. It’s really classification and drafting.

KhayaliY 6mo ago
Fully agree with your comment regarding real processes. Being a Six Sigma Black Belt, studying processes and reducing the errors is critical. The Openclaw processes at the moment scare me.
- whattheheckheck 6mo ago
  Make a skill.md called six sigma black belt audit refactor and publish it
  - KhayaliY 6mo ago
    That's actually a great idea!!
- vasco 6mo ago
  I'm only at Four Alpha Brown Belt still but once I pass my test I think I'll also understand why this is critical. I can't wait to get scared.
chris_money202 6mo ago
This. So many junior engineers showing me AI flows that could just be a script with a few parameter inputs

estetlinus 6mo ago

Who is this guy and why is he casually admitting to reading all the user conversations???

sonink 6mo ago
To clarify - we don't read user conversations - what I'm referring to is deploy volume (how many times OpenClaw gets spun up on our infra) and direct conversations I've had with people in my network who deployed OpenClaw independently

axus 6mo ago

The twist? This article and marketing campaign for it are 100% by OpenClaw.

littlekey 6mo ago

I'm still trying to figure out what to use it for other than news aggregation...

sassymuffinz 6mo ago
I understand it's the quickest way to expose all your API keys.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jmward01 6mo ago

It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we are likely to see real movement.

bryanlarsen 6mo ago
Conventional LLM's are moving fast too. The argument is that OpenClaw isn't any more useful than conventional LLM's, and I suspect it will always be true because the conventional LLM's will gain any useful capabilities.
- jmward01 6mo ago
  I think openclaw provides a unique feature of a standardized host environment for a persistent assistant. This is different than the chat interfaces that are presented by anthropic/openai/others that give you a 'while you are here' assistant interface and is very different from the idea of trained llm weights and ways of serving them up like llama.cpp and others. There really is something unique here that will evolve over time I think.
  - osigurdson 6mo ago
    Agree. It is like just having one continuous chat session with ChapGPT forever. Of course they do have memory already (at least ChatGPT does). I ended up turning it off however, because it kept bringing irrelevant stuff into the current convo.

wg0 6mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 6mo ago
Please don't do this here.
- wg0 6mo ago
  I am sorry. I understand that many of us are heavily invested financially or emotionally into AI but the key insight about OpenClaw remains the same that it really isn't much useful beyond maybe a daily news summary. Nothing that cannot be done otherwise.
  - ejeje 6mo ago
    I think it broadly speaks to the issue of llm’s in general. People have to actively interact with these things to get outputs of them. Why can’t they do it passively? Because on the surface LLM’s seem intelligent. But they’re not. They need constant attention to ensure they are doing what one wants and not going off track. I experienced this myself many times - the variance in the output can be jarring at times. From surprisingly good to absolutely disappointing. Why hasn’t customer service over the web/telephone become completely autonomous or at least partially via llm’s? We have all this talk about agentic programming and yet much of the world carries on as it was. Interesting. I don’t think this variance problem is going away. It’s a different kind of variance than humans are used to when dealing with other humans.
    - wg0 6mo ago
      Then intellectual honesty demands that we present these limitations as such but capitalist grifters have their own principles it seems.
  - tomhow 6mo ago
    It’s a lame trope that people only comment favorably about things because they have a financial incentive or some other pathological reason to do so, and for that reason it’s against the guidelines.

theturtletalks 6mo ago

The hype around OpenClaw is a bit confusing but I think I figured it out. For most coders, Claude Code in the terminal was an important event. Letting it access code and change files directly. For normal users, they didn’t see the power is that. OpenClaw runs Pi in a terminal and exposes the chat thru Telegram or any chatting app. This gave the ah-ha moment to non-coders that coders had had for 6+ months prior.

osigurdson 6mo ago
I'm confused about it as well. I've installed OC locally and also on a VM. I don't get it so far. But then again, I'm not willing to give it all of my passwords which is probably why I'm not seeing much value. It isn't just non-coders that see OC as a game changer however.

the_real_cher 6mo ago

I was getting a lot of use case out of it mainly interacting with the file system. The problem is if not carefully designed it will burn through tokens like crazy.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

BeetleB 6mo ago

If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it). I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time. I will say, it's still amongst the best tools to do a variety of tasks. Yes, each one of those could be done with just a coding agent, but I found it's less effort to get OpenClaw to do it than you writing something for each use case. Very honest question: One of the use cases I had with OpenClaw that I'm missing now that I don't use it: I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw? How would you do it? (My TODO list is strictly on a home PC - no syncing with phone - by design). (BTW, the reason I stopped using OpenClaw is boring: My QEMU SW stopped working and I haven't had time to debug).

tecoholic 6mo ago
> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  > You can use anything to call this API right? The API is on my home PC and not exposed to the outside world. Only OpenClaw via Telegram was. So my question is about the infrastructure: How do I communicate with something at home (it could be the API directly) using a messaging app like Telegram? I definitely want an LLM in the mix. I want to casually tell it what my TODO is, and have it: - Craft it into a concise TODO headline - Craft a detailed summary - Call the API with the above two. I'm not asking in the abstract. What specific tools/technologies should I use?
  - 6mo ago

_pdp_ 6mo ago

IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks. They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience. However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss. There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code. We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect. We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens. We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public. In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business. I hope this helps.

mmooss 6mo ago

Why aren't databases the solution to many memory problems? Maybe this is a naive question: For example, for the invitations in the OP: Have Openclaw write incoming rsvps to a database, probably a flat file here, and use the db as persistent memory: OpenClaw can compose outgoing update emails based on the database. Don't even suggest to OpenClaws that it try to remember the rsvps - its job is just writing to and reading from a database, and composing emails based on the latter. ? Does that violate the experiment, by using some tool in addition to OpenClaw?

jmuguy 6mo ago
Mostly because it can’t or shouldn’t remember everything - eventually the context window gets too big. But how does it know what to forget and what’s important and should be remembered?

tbrownaw 6mo ago

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. Sure, anything it does can be done better with specialized tooling. If you know that tooling. The memory thing sounds like an implementation limit rather than something fundamentally unsolvable. Just experiment with different ways of organizing state until something works?

SyneRyder 6mo ago

I partly identify with the article. While I don't use OpenClaw itself, I hacked together my own small Claude-in-a-loop/cronjob, and it seems we're all getting our morning briefings and personalized morning podcasts now. The other common use case seems to be kicking off an automated Claude session from an email / voicetext / text / Telegram, and getting replies back. I'm emailing Claude throughout the day now, and sometimes it's useful to just forward an email to Claude and ask it to handle the task within it for me. But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted. Give it enough context, long term memory, and ability to explore all of that, and useful stuff emerges.

andai 6mo ago
Just a heads up if you're using claude -p with the sub your account might be in trouble, they're cracking down on this kind of stuff lately. Enforcement seems to be a combination of string matching for 3rd party sysprompts, heavy usage, and some random factor. Not clear if there are any hard rules you can stay on the good side of, the only way to be safe seems to be to pay per token. (There goes the ~90% discount!) -- Also yeah you get ~80% of Claw by shoving Claude Code in a Telegram Bot ;) It's already a general purpose computer use thing, people forget! (And it's a lot better at extending itself than the actual claws, lol) I think the least illegal and also least bad option is to just use ngrok and tmux tho

drowntoge 6mo ago

I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool. It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified. But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere. I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.

Rekindle8090 6mo ago

My biggest issue with OpenClaw is everyone talks about doing things with it but doesn't explain what it actually is doing. First of all is not an LLM, you're beholden to an api or local llm limitations. Second of all it's always calendars, email replies, summarizing. You do not need an LLM for that, and an LLM doesn't make it easier either. It sounds like executive cosplay, not productivity. Everything I see people talking about that's actually productive, it's doing probabilistically when deterministic tools already exist and have for in some cases over 20 years. You don't need an LLM to put a meeting on a calendar, that's literally two taps with your phone or a single click in gmail. Most email services already have suggestions already built in. Emails have been summarized for 10 years at this point. If you're so busy you need this stuff automated, you probably have an assistant, or you're important enough that actually using general intelligence is critical to being successful at all. The idea of getting an LLM email response sounds great for someone who has never worked a job in their life. This comment section is full of llm writen responses too, to the point where its absurd. Noticing how most of them just talk in circles like "But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted." This literally isn't even saying anything. This paragraph does not mean anything. It's not saying what its doing, whats happening or what the result is, just "something is happening". No, you didn't save time using openclaw, you just changed to managing openclaw instead of doing your actual job. You don't need custom scripts for most things if its actually something that matters, most tools already exist, and if you do openclaw isn't going to help you do it.

nonameiguess 6mo ago
I'm gonna die shaking my fists at clouds pretty soon, but amen. I had a guy in work Slack evangelizing about this in January when it first came out and he's talking about automatically ordering groceries and getting reminders to do laundry and shit and I just don't get it. Sure, that's a use case, but I figured out how to feed, clothe, and house myself without digital assistance 25 years ago. How'd you live this long if you can't eat without a machine telling you what to buy and how to cook? I can't even tell if these replies are in fact just astroturfed bot armies flooding us with marketing or there really is an entire generation of people out there right now who can't do anything unless their phone is telling them what to do. And where are the outcomes? Okay, you've got OpenClaw telling you every few hours how many calories you've had so far today. Have you gotten leaner? Faster? Stronger? Healthier or fitter by any quantifiable objective metric at all? Or are you just doing exactly what you did before but now your phone is scripting it for you?

andai 6mo ago

>This isn’t a bug that gets fixed in the next release. It’s a fundamental constraint of how OpenClaw manages context. Last I checked, it doesn't!

sailfast 6mo ago

I dunno - my boss has deployed a couple of claw agents that are pretty good at doing SWE and SRE work. They’re available for the whole company to use, and they save us a ton of time. Pretty decent use case! Personally I haven’t found claw agents replace anything really for personal use outside of commercial tools I’d pay for to handle scheduling and stuff, but I also haven’t tried / trusted too many new use cases outside of that cron / daily briefing or some family schedules.

osigurdson 6mo ago
Just curious, what is the delta with this and Claude Code / Codex CLI for the SWE work?

deleted 6mo ago

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bibstha 6mo ago

I actually quite enjoy the OpenClaw. Although the recent CC crackdown has caused me to try different LLM providers which aren't that reliable but anyways, here are few things I do with it, in all separate groups. * Telegram Health Group, created an agent to help me track sleep, recommend my supplements based on my location, remind me in the morning and evening to monitor my food. I send it images of what I eat and it keeps track of it. * Telegram Career Group, I randomly ask it to find certain kind of job posts based on my criteria. Not scheduled, only when I like to. * Telegram Coder Group, gave it access to my github account. It pulls, runs tests and merges dependabot PRs in the mornings. Tells me if there are any issues. I also ask it to look into certain bugs and open PRs while I'm on the road. * Telegran News Group, I gave it a list of youtube videos and asked it to send me news every day at 10am similar to the videos. So far, it's a super easy assistant taking multiple personas. But it's getting a bit painful without CC subscription

pigeons 6mo ago
Are you concerned about telegram admins having access to that information?
- fennecbutt 6mo ago
  Yeah! And what if Samsung put a bug in the silicon that gives them access to all your stuff without you ever knowing! Or the CIA has set up inside your closet with a listening device!
  - pigeons 6mo ago
    But those are much more hypothetical. Telegram admins and anyone who bribes or hacks them do have access to your messages.
emptysongglass 6mo ago
You can just have your bot use Telegram topics for this.
VitalStack 6mo ago

bobjordan 6mo ago

I primarily "only" use it as a run-manager that can spin up another agent in a tmux which I can then join by ssh on my cell phone. Then, I can monitor the work from my cell phone and choose to either directly interact with the tmux pane or else just message my openclaw agent to do it for me. That right there is the only "killer" app I've found for it. I do also use it to post to my x.com account and that's also pretty useful. Neither of these uses assume any super long context over time will be retained. But, to me, the run-manager use case is pretty great.

villgax 6mo ago

You probably don't know how to setup memory. The killer usecase is letting you make whatever you want, instead of being at the mercy of what your OS/platform dictates. Your idea of a killer idea is a whatsapp summarizer lol.

lokar 6mo ago
I can already make whatever I want
- villgax 6mo ago
  It's for people who can't, did drop some neurons on this thread?
  - lokar 6mo ago
    I can’t parse that

san_tekart 6mo ago

[flagged]

villgax 6mo ago

Author basically admitting to having a boring outlook on life IMO. Sure maybe not for work but there's tons of things that suck the life out of your limited time, having a tool not just OpenClaw is one way to not bend to the will of BigCo for whatever thing you want to do, need a 3D model? Need something summarized or need control of something which the manufacturer forbids? All can be done without spending entire weekends for.

UltraSane 6mo ago

That is very similar to human memory.

pmdr 6mo ago

How much money are people here spending on tokens for this thing?

loehnsberg 6mo ago

As long as there's no solution to the long-term memory problem, we will have a "country of geniuses in a data center" that are all suffering from anterograde amnesia (movie: Memento), which requires human hand-holding. I have experimented with a lot of hacks, like hierarchies of indexed md files, semantic DBs, embeddings, dynamic context retrieval, but none of this is really a comprehensive solution to get something that feels as intelligent as what these systems are able to do within their context windows. I am als a touch skeptical that adjusting weights to learn context will do the trick without a transformer-like innovation in reinforcement learning. Anyway, I‘ll keep tinkering…

ambewas 6mo ago
You're right to be skeptical. Without a way to actually implement how the human brain processes experiences into a consolidated memory, we won't be able to solve the long term memory problem at all. Not with the current technology. An LLM context is a pretty well extended short term memory, and the trained network is a very nice comprehensive long term memory, but due to the way we currently train these networks, an LLM is just fundamentally not able to "move" these experiences to long term, like a human brain does (through sleep, among others). Once we can teach a machine to experience something once, and remember it (preferably on a local model, because you wouldn't want a global memory to remember your information), we just cannot solve this problem. I think this is probably the most interesting field of research right now. Actually understanding in depth how the brain learns, and figuring out a way to build a model that implements this. Because right now, with backtracking and weight adjustments, I just can't see us getting there.
- loehnsberg 6mo ago
  I think if we want to build on what we have, instead of compaction at the end of the context window, the LLM would have to 'sleep', i.e. adjust its weights, then wake up with the last bits of the old context window in the new one, and have a 'feel' for what it did before through the change in weights. I just sense it's not that simple to get there, because simply updating the weights based on a single context sample risks degrading the weights of the whole network. I like the idea of using small local model (or several) for tackling this problem, like low rank adaptation, but with current tech, I still have to piece this together or the small local models will forget old memories.

gbro3n 6mo ago

I've had a crack at this problem in Agent Kanban for VS Code (https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban https://github.com/appsoftwareltd/vscode-agent-kanban). The core idea is that you converse with the agent in a markdown task file in a plan, todo, implement flow, and that I have found works really well for long running complex tasks, and I use this tool every day. But after a while, the agent just forgets to converse in the task file. The only way to get it to (mostly) reliably converse in the task file is to reference the task file and instructions in AGENTS.md. There is support for git work trees and skipping commits of the agents file so as not to pollute the file with the specific task info. There is also an option for working without work trees, but in this flow I had to add chat participant "refresh" commands to help the agent keep it's instructions fresh in context. It's a problem that I believe will slowly get better as better agents appear, and get cheaper to use, because general LLM capability is the key differentiator at the moment.

anonyfox 6mo ago

I built a special belief-based system recently for my own agent harnesses instead of some similarity based fact storage stuff... which falls flat once conflicting data points enter the system and just increase LLM confusion and make it do weird things. this means learning over time works a bit more like humans do - superseding old beliefs and reconciliating stuff cleanly over time. Also including the building blocks to have a subagent managing it autonomously (with tools/skills/soul). works quite well and very fast given its pure nodejs+sqlite and doesn't eat tokens like crazy or needs any thirdparty embeddings solution. maybe have a look. https://github.com/GhostPawJS/codex https://github.com/GhostPawJS/codex

shawnta 6mo ago

[flagged]

jFriedensreich 6mo ago

Memory systems as most people understand and build them are a clear dead end. We just need skills, tools and better context management.

darqis 6mo ago

Openclaw is unreliable. I had it running for a few months. It uses up a lot of resources and doesn't provide any benefit other than being able to chat with it via other methods than tui. I've removed it.

azmz 6mo ago
[flagged]

azmz 6mo ago

[flagged]

JohnMakin 6mo ago

I’ve had some success with claude cli agents at some scale with a memory architecture - but it roughly reads like a massive index, where it crawls through a trail of breadcrumbs to piece together all the info it needs to do a task. It’s fairly tedious to maintain, and it’s always a battle maintaining reasonable context size and token spend. I’d say it’s like 85% reliable on any given task, and since I supervise it, this is good enough for me. But for something to be useful autonomously, that number needs to be several 9’s to be useful at all, and we’re no world near that yet. I’m currently watching someone trying and failing to roll openclaw out at scale in an org and they believe in it so much it’s very difficult to convince them even with glaring evidence staring them in the face that it will not work

jditu 6mo ago

[dead]

maxbeech 6mo ago

[dead]

linzhangrun 6mo ago

[flagged]

matthewduff 6mo ago

This is essentially a 140-IQ analyst you can text "please fix" at 3:00 AM without the shit you have to deal with when hosting your stuff locally. The context awareness across your text messages, emails, and between chats is not half bad; just wish that the "computer use" feature set was fully locked in so I can automate half the apps on my phone.