5 ms·

I still use it and find it helpful. My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via Wha

I still use it and find it helpful. My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via WhatsApp, but instead of the memory being locked away with a specific vendor, it's stored in version control that I can read and edit. That reason alone makes it compelling to me. When a better LLM comes along, I can just switch, and my memory and system prompts come with it. However, I also use it for calorie/weight/workout tracking, to-do lists (bill, birthday, event reminders), and to support my various life admin tasks. I don't give it access to much at all, except a few skills that give it read-only access to some data. Hasn't given me a 10x productivity boost or anything. It's just handy. I wrote an article on it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidians-second-brain https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...

jaybuff 6mo ago
I used it very similarly to you, but found it to be about $3.50 per day, or $100 a month. It wasn't worth that.
- koinedad 6mo ago
  My minimax has liberal usage at $10 per month, if you’re not looking for some amazing model.
  - nickthegreek 6mo ago
    minimax 2.7 is great at smaller tasks. I use it for simple subagents and it is capable and I don’t come close to using the quota.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    Minimax 2.7 gets confused too often and misses a lot of things. GLM 5.1 is better, closer to a Sonnet style model, but also significantly more pricey.
- osculum 6mo ago
  Couldn't you use it with a Codex subscription? Plus is $20 per month
  - johnzim 6mo ago
    I think the claude EULA has now explicitly banned this use https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907074/anthropic-openclaw-claude-subscription-ban https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907074/a...
    - tcoff91 6mo ago
      That's Anthropic. Codex is OpenAI.
      - baby_souffle 6mo ago
        For what it's worth, codex doesn't yet seem to be aggressively terminating accounts or invalidating auth tokens if they detect usage in a non-first party tool. Whether that will continue to be the case or not a gamble though.
        FergusArgyll 6mo ago
        https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/8338 https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/8338
    - BeetleB 6mo ago
      Claude is not Codex.
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  Z.ai explicitly allows you to use it with OpenClaw on their plans.
- esskay 6mo ago
  Try opencode go using kimi - its more than enough for most usecases unless you try something really stupid that you shouldn't be getting openclaw to do directly, like coding.
LelouBil 6mo ago
That's exactly what I want to use it for, thanks for writing an article about it !
towledev 6mo ago
Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?
- lexandstuff 6mo ago
  I already had the hierarchy from years of maintaining the notes, but for new things I do collaborate with the model on how best to structure stuff and get it to refactor when needed.
frankdenbow 6mo ago
Interested in the calorie tracking (have done amateur bodybuilding). Are you mostly cooking your own meals? Wonder if scanning items and tracking more loosely (a more forgiving myfitnesspal) would be helpful for you? Its on the roadmap of things I'm looking to build for myself (just made this last weekend for buying tovala meals: http://brovala.site http://brovala.site)
- cogogo 6mo ago
  Why oh why is openclaw an improvement for workouts and calorie tracking?
  - aianus 6mo ago
    MyFitnessPal takes a lot of clicks to log one meal, I can just use natural language with openclaw.
    - nicksrose7224 6mo ago
      What is the accuracy of this method vs manual entry?
      - TheDong 6mo ago
        When I message my claw "Mark that I had 825 calories for lunch today", it has marked down 825 correctly 100% of the time so far. It shows me way fewer ads than all the popular fitness apps and loads way quicker since it doesn't have to load like 10MB of ads for me to enter one number, so it seems like a good improvement. I do not think it's an improvement over an excel sheet, but as the average openclaw user, I would rather pay anthropic $10/day in API credits than create a google sheets document.
        charlieflowers 6mo ago
        I do something similar with Claude Code. I say, "I ate a single serving of that Toasted Beef Ravioli that Aldi sells." Claude web searches, finds it, gets its nutrition info, then uses gspread to add it to the daily food log tab of my spreadsheet. So much less hassle, lower activation energy needed than with MyFitnessPal.
brtkwr 6mo ago
I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).
- eterm 6mo ago
  I am weirded out but this, I find it horrific, like some kind of mind zombie, leeching humanity from your family members. Someone somewhere is thinking they're connecting with you and sharing their humanity but they're just shoveling their soul into a machine that is "meticulously documenting" them. Sorry, but ick.
  - nickthegreek 6mo ago
    You are making a lot of assumptions.
    - navigate8310 6mo ago
      I hope OP is using some self-hosted local model to document their family archives
      - ryang2718 6mo ago
        This is actually a really interesting use case for a local model. The writing might be a bit mediocre but it would capture all the information. Parent post really stumbled on a great idea here.
  - kaoD 6mo ago
    To give a different perspective: archival is important. If nobody does this job, generational knowledge is lost at some point. I talked plenty with my grandpa, but I'm sure he didn't even tell me 20% of his life. And my other grandpa died when I was still a kid, so I didn't even get to have adult conversations with him. Imagine making this available to your grandgrandgrandson.
mx_03 6mo ago
I find it funny you call it an Obsidian project. It is just folders and MD files. You are not even locked-in with Obsidian. Or maybe OpenClaw is reading the graph view?
- lexandstuff 6mo ago
  Yeah, not locked in with Obsidian. I just use it as a Markdown viewer/editor, and it handles updating links across notes when a file is renamed. There are some handy conventions that Obsidian encourages, like Daily Notes, templates and linking across notes, enough to call it an Obsidian project, but yeah - it's just markdown. I don't even use the [[Wiki-links]] style that it uses by default.
alexchantavy 6mo ago
Great article, thanks for sharing. How much does it run you a month roughly?
- lexandstuff 6mo ago
  I recently switched to Codex using my ChatGPT Plus subscription, so only $20 a month or so. Before that, using Opus 4.5/6 it was like $100-150. Opus was by far the best at the job, but Codex with GPT 5.4 is decent.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
This is roughly how I use it as well, except I made it a little bit more proactive and actively chases me whether it should track certain things in OmniFocus and chases me about completing overdue tasks or other things I would otherwise forget. I keep data collection out of the LLMs. I have separate scripts that push and pull data from external sources. So I don’t need to provide the LLM with auth keys, and the things it can do is very limited.
wuschel 6mo ago
Hi, You mentioned switching out LLM backends. Would you think that lesser models e.g. one of the recent Qwen variants would work for your use case?
tiel88 6mo ago
This is basically the same setup as mine, except I built a grocery price crawler, that spits out a weekly menu along with a check-box shopping list straight into my google drive. Wife loves being able to just type "we need toothpaste" or whatever into Telegram and whenever we go to do our weekly shop we get an up to date shopping list optimised for prices and our dietary preferences. Before getting side-tracked by other projects I was also going to build a kind of family archiving function like someone in the comments also mentioned. Just to quickly be able to record small/funny family moments.
seebeen 6mo ago
Thank you for this detailed writeup. If it's not a secret - what is your monthly ballpark figure. I'm planning to deploy an instance during the weekend, for light - medium usage. Can't gauge costs.

jaybuff 6mo ago

I used it very similarly to you, but found it to be about $3.50 per day, or $100 a month. It wasn't worth that.

koinedad 6mo ago
My minimax has liberal usage at $10 per month, if you’re not looking for some amazing model.
- nickthegreek 6mo ago
  minimax 2.7 is great at smaller tasks. I use it for simple subagents and it is capable and I don’t come close to using the quota.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  Minimax 2.7 gets confused too often and misses a lot of things. GLM 5.1 is better, closer to a Sonnet style model, but also significantly more pricey.
osculum 6mo ago
Couldn't you use it with a Codex subscription? Plus is $20 per month
- johnzim 6mo ago
  I think the claude EULA has now explicitly banned this use https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907074/anthropic-openclaw-claude-subscription-ban https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907074/a...
  - tcoff91 6mo ago
    That's Anthropic. Codex is OpenAI.
    - baby_souffle 6mo ago
      For what it's worth, codex doesn't yet seem to be aggressively terminating accounts or invalidating auth tokens if they detect usage in a non-first party tool. Whether that will continue to be the case or not a gamble though.
      - FergusArgyll 6mo ago
        https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/8338 https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/8338
  - BeetleB 6mo ago
    Claude is not Codex.
BeetleB 6mo ago
Z.ai explicitly allows you to use it with OpenClaw on their plans.
esskay 6mo ago
Try opencode go using kimi - its more than enough for most usecases unless you try something really stupid that you shouldn't be getting openclaw to do directly, like coding.

LelouBil 6mo ago

That's exactly what I want to use it for, thanks for writing an article about it !

towledev 6mo ago

Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?

lexandstuff 6mo ago
I already had the hierarchy from years of maintaining the notes, but for new things I do collaborate with the model on how best to structure stuff and get it to refactor when needed.

frankdenbow 6mo ago

Interested in the calorie tracking (have done amateur bodybuilding). Are you mostly cooking your own meals? Wonder if scanning items and tracking more loosely (a more forgiving myfitnesspal) would be helpful for you? Its on the roadmap of things I'm looking to build for myself (just made this last weekend for buying tovala meals: http://brovala.site http://brovala.site)

cogogo 6mo ago
Why oh why is openclaw an improvement for workouts and calorie tracking?
- aianus 6mo ago
  MyFitnessPal takes a lot of clicks to log one meal, I can just use natural language with openclaw.
  - nicksrose7224 6mo ago
    What is the accuracy of this method vs manual entry?
    - TheDong 6mo ago
      When I message my claw "Mark that I had 825 calories for lunch today", it has marked down 825 correctly 100% of the time so far. It shows me way fewer ads than all the popular fitness apps and loads way quicker since it doesn't have to load like 10MB of ads for me to enter one number, so it seems like a good improvement. I do not think it's an improvement over an excel sheet, but as the average openclaw user, I would rather pay anthropic $10/day in API credits than create a google sheets document.
      - charlieflowers 6mo ago
        I do something similar with Claude Code. I say, "I ate a single serving of that Toasted Beef Ravioli that Aldi sells." Claude web searches, finds it, gets its nutrition info, then uses gspread to add it to the daily food log tab of my spreadsheet. So much less hassle, lower activation energy needed than with MyFitnessPal.

brtkwr 6mo ago

I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).

eterm 6mo ago
I am weirded out but this, I find it horrific, like some kind of mind zombie, leeching humanity from your family members. Someone somewhere is thinking they're connecting with you and sharing their humanity but they're just shoveling their soul into a machine that is "meticulously documenting" them. Sorry, but ick.
- nickthegreek 6mo ago
  You are making a lot of assumptions.
  - navigate8310 6mo ago
    I hope OP is using some self-hosted local model to document their family archives
    - ryang2718 6mo ago
      This is actually a really interesting use case for a local model. The writing might be a bit mediocre but it would capture all the information. Parent post really stumbled on a great idea here.
- kaoD 6mo ago
  To give a different perspective: archival is important. If nobody does this job, generational knowledge is lost at some point. I talked plenty with my grandpa, but I'm sure he didn't even tell me 20% of his life. And my other grandpa died when I was still a kid, so I didn't even get to have adult conversations with him. Imagine making this available to your grandgrandgrandson.

mx_03 6mo ago

I find it funny you call it an Obsidian project. It is just folders and MD files. You are not even locked-in with Obsidian. Or maybe OpenClaw is reading the graph view?

lexandstuff 6mo ago
Yeah, not locked in with Obsidian. I just use it as a Markdown viewer/editor, and it handles updating links across notes when a file is renamed. There are some handy conventions that Obsidian encourages, like Daily Notes, templates and linking across notes, enough to call it an Obsidian project, but yeah - it's just markdown. I don't even use the [[Wiki-links]] style that it uses by default.

alexchantavy 6mo ago

Great article, thanks for sharing. How much does it run you a month roughly?

lexandstuff 6mo ago
I recently switched to Codex using my ChatGPT Plus subscription, so only $20 a month or so. Before that, using Opus 4.5/6 it was like $100-150. Opus was by far the best at the job, but Codex with GPT 5.4 is decent.

stingraycharles 6mo ago

This is roughly how I use it as well, except I made it a little bit more proactive and actively chases me whether it should track certain things in OmniFocus and chases me about completing overdue tasks or other things I would otherwise forget. I keep data collection out of the LLMs. I have separate scripts that push and pull data from external sources. So I don’t need to provide the LLM with auth keys, and the things it can do is very limited.

wuschel 6mo ago

Hi, You mentioned switching out LLM backends. Would you think that lesser models e.g. one of the recent Qwen variants would work for your use case?

tiel88 6mo ago

This is basically the same setup as mine, except I built a grocery price crawler, that spits out a weekly menu along with a check-box shopping list straight into my google drive. Wife loves being able to just type "we need toothpaste" or whatever into Telegram and whenever we go to do our weekly shop we get an up to date shopping list optimised for prices and our dietary preferences. Before getting side-tracked by other projects I was also going to build a kind of family archiving function like someone in the comments also mentioned. Just to quickly be able to record small/funny family moments.

seebeen 6mo ago

Thank you for this detailed writeup. If it's not a secret - what is your monthly ballpark figure. I'm planning to deploy an instance during the weekend, for light - medium usage. Can't gauge costs.