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Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interes
by piker 6mo ago
Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interest in letting an AI into my comms and see no value there whatsoever. Probably negative.
- _pdp_ 6mo agoThere is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.
- piker 6mo agoYes, I can see the (potential) value in working with agents in software development. The “claw” movement I understood to suggest value in less constrained access to my inbox, personal messages, calendar etc like some sort of PA. It’s hard to quantify how much damage a bad PA can do to someone’s personal and professional life, so if my understand is correct, this seems like a dead end.
- _pdp_ 6mo agoI posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here because it seems to be on topic. --- 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.
- bsenftner 6mo agoGreat information post. don't let the AI fad boi's down votes lead you to think this is not a very worthwhile contribution.
- esseph 6mo ago> They can automate but they are not reliable. This is why I won't use them for anything externally facing or with high or even moderate damage potential. Which basically means they don't get used at all.
- _pdp_ 6mo agoThis is my point ... it is a change of perspective. They are best suited for cooperation for now.
- eucyclos 6mo agoWeird that you're being downvoted for sharing anecdata on actual use cases. It's as if there's a desire to downplay the positive aspects of this technology in the HN community.
- TheDong 6mo agoI find some value as kinda a better alexa. I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things. I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday" I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay. It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
- coldtea 6mo agoRegarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
- puelocesar 6mo ago180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
- quietbritishjim 6mo ago"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
- puelocesar 6mo agook, now I wish there was an edit button. Thanks for noticing the mistake though
- tikotus 6mo agoI don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
- onchainintel 6mo agoIt all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo agoEh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.
- mathgladiator 6mo agoAgent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.
- bayindirh 6mo agoWe had better agent infrastructures (namely JADE) back in the day. I worked with them, and now these things look like flimsy 50¢ plastic toys to me, too.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoI see the appeal, but I also see the risks. If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value. The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes. That's all great, until it isn't. Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.
- theshrike79 6mo agoJust limit the tooling. There's no reason for the AI to be able to delete emails for example. I built a fastmail CLI tool for my *claw and it can only read mails, that's it. I might give it the ability to archive and label later on, with a separate log of actions so I can undo any operation it did easily. It's pretty decent at going "hey, there's a sale on $thing at $store", for mails, but that's about it.
- greedo 6mo agoDeleting email to free up space has to be the most ridiculous justification for burning up the environment.
- vbezhenar 6mo agoMany wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work. This is cheap replacement for ordinary people. It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.
- lionkor 6mo agoThose human assistants can be held accountable.
- piker 6mo agoYes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages. OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason. Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.
- 6mo ago
- dankobgd 6mo agono, it's only for scammers
- pjmlp 6mo agoSame here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.
- rimliu 6mo agoI am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.
- eucyclos 6mo agoJust the boring bits. I don't need openclaw to lounge by a pool thinking about macro trends for me.
- andai 6mo agoIt's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage. I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol
- edschofield 6mo agoClaude Code does now have integration with Telegram, Discord, and iMessage as of a few weeks ago: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels I haven't used OpenClaw since then ...
- jstummbillig 6mo ago> letting an AI into my comms Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool. Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails. Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.
- rowanG077 6mo agoThe problem for me is not the LLM reading it. The problem is the company behind it can most likely recover the sessions. That is a problem since they could share it with whomever they want. Even if they are fully incorruptable it's also not uncommon that they simply get hacked and all this data ends up on the open market.
- piker 6mo agoMy issues aren’t really with privacy so much as what the failure modes look like, and, more fundamentally, with becoming a passenger to my own life.
- littlecranky67 6mo agoI can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.
- Terr_ 6mo agoI can't recall the name, but I vaguely remember a Bayesian spam filter for arbitrary POP3 accounts in the 2000s that had a local web frontend, and how excited I was at its effectiveness. I believe that the shift from "my one computer" to multiple clients (computer + phone + webmail) probably has something to do with it. Even with IMAP sharing state, you still don't have a great way to see and control the filtering, except by moving things in/out of spam folders.
- easygenes 6mo agoI was an original Thunderbird pre-1.0 (from 2003) user and prior to that, Netscape Mail, and am quite certain it has had bayesian spam filtering all this time, at least since the late ‘90s. That was a headline feature in the early days. My first email account used POP3 through a shared web host for my own domain in that era. Edit: Yes it’s still there https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-sp...
- pizza234 6mo ago> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.
- moffkalast 6mo agoI thought emails from github already did that?
- mgkimsal 6mo agoI think the more useful part is the parts that checks a ticket, fixes a bug, then opens the PR automatically. Whether you get an email or a phone text or call from a voice agent is ... somewhat secondary, im.
- moffkalast 6mo agoFixes a bug, yeah that's some wishful thinking right there. I don't think it counts if it adds three new ones in the process.
- eucyclos 6mo agoIf it added four last month I'd say it absolutely counts. Trends often matter more than position.
- surgical_fire 6mo agoNo. But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af. Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.
- stingraycharles 6mo agoThis is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant. It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything. I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.
- cl0ckt0wer 6mo agoMostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.
- coldtea 6mo agoNewb technies love it.
- mark_l_watson 6mo agoI ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value. Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and on a VPS with only access to a local directory in the VPS with a dozen active projects on GitHub. I don't give it access to my GitHub credentials, but allow it to work in whatever branch is checked out. This setup is fabulously productive. I use it about every other day to perform some meaningful task for me. It is inexpensive also. A task might take 20 minutes and cost $0.25 in GLP-5.1 API costs. So TLDR: out of the box, I use Hermes at least one hour a week and find it to be a wonderful tool.
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- bitmasher9 6mo agoYep, I’m seeing real value. I use them for tasks that an assistant might have done in the past. It’s much cheaper than hiring a human, and setup is much faster than finding a good assistant. I’m honestly considering giving it access to accounts with payment information so it can book flights and hotels for me. You can ask it questions like “what classes does my gym offer between 6-8pm today” and just get a good answer instead of wasting time finding their schedule. You can tell it to check your favorite band’s website everyday to see if they announce any shows in your city. You can tell it to read your emails and automatically add important information to your calendar. This isn’t the space where I get the most value from AI, but it’s nice to have a hyper connected agent that can quickly take care of more smaller and more personal tasks.
- piker 6mo agoNo offense but all of those are near zero value except entertainment to the orchestrator. That’s without understanding the failure rate and modes. It’s telling that you haven’t yet given it your credit card.
- bitmasher9 6mo agoI would agree that the value is low. It’s the type of thing I wouldn’t pay $20/hr to have a human do, if you want to put a value cap on this type of activity.
- jillesvangurp 6mo agoI talk to a lot of business people that are interested in automating very basic things in their inbox, on their Google drive, in CRMs, etc. The reason is not that they want to be cool and hip but because they are forced to spend lots of their precious time doing very dull and repetitive things. Promising to take some of that pain away is a really easy sell. Hence all the hype around OpenClaw. If you look around in the business world, there is an absurdly large number of people still doing all sorts of things manually that they probably shouldn't. And its costing them money. Even before AI that was true. But now it's increasingly becoming obvious to these people that there are solutions out there that might work. There's a fair amount of FOMO on that front with more clued in people that have heard of other people allegedly being a bit smarter than them. From a practical experience point of view, most people probably don't have the hands-on experience to make a good judgment just yet. "I tried Chat GPT once and it hallucinated" doesn't really count as valid experience at this point and many non-technical people are still at that level. There generally are a lot of headless chickens making absurd claims (either way) about what these systems can and cannot do making sweeping statements about how possible or impossible things are. If you take the time and sit down to automate a few things you'll find that: 1) the tools aren't great right now 2) there are lots of basic plumbing issues that get in the way 3) fixing those plumbing issues is not rocket science and something anyone with basic CLI or scripting skills can solve easily 4) you can actually outsource most of that stuff to coding agents. 5) if you figure some of the basics out, you can actually make OpenClaw or similar systems do things that are valuable. 6) Most people that aren't programmers won't get very far given the current state of tools. 7) this might change rapidly as better tools become available. 8) people generally lack the imagination to see how even basic solutions could work for them with these systems. I have an OpenClaw up and running for our company. It is doing some basic things that are useful for us. After solving some basic plumbing issues, it's now a lot easier to make it do new things. It's not quite doing everything just yet (lots more plumbing issues to solve) and we have our healthy hesitations about letting it loose on our inboxes. But it's not useless or without value. Every plumbing issue we solve unlocks a few more use cases. There's a bit of a gold rush right now of course. And "picks and shovels" people like myself are probably going to do a brisk business. You can wait it out or tap into the action now. That's your choice. But try making it an informed choice. And no better experience than the first-hand type.
- seniorThrowaway 6mo agoYes, they are good at being coding "interns". They work together in slack which allows management visibility and tasking directly to them. i.e. people who aren't going to be managing a bunch of claude code's all day. I say interns because they are incredibly smart at some things like implementing well defined coding plans and incredibly dumb in other ways, like shipping non-compiling code and asking a human to troubleshoot. To do this requires thoughtful setup, you have to onboard them more like you would a human than a piece of software. Give them their own "workstation", accounts etc. Limit what they can do in those accounts, not in their .md files or skills or anything, they will never follow those 100%, just like a person won't follow directions 100% of the time.