5 ms·

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds gr

by blfr 1mo ago

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

Skunkleton 1mo ago
I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
Flere-Imsaho 1mo ago
I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best). I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
- petesergeant 1mo ago
  Has it ever found anything? If so, what? I've been marginally tempted to do something similar
  - Flere-Imsaho 1mo ago
    Yeah loads. Some of which I was aware of, and didn't consider enough of a risk to mitigate. It found others which I wasn't aware of, such as open ports on printers, etc. LLMs are really good at the cyber security stuff. I've also tried using the LLM to tell me what it sees in my security cameras, which it's also really good at. For example identifying a rabbit run in my garden, which I built from scratch, so I know no other exists like it in the universe. I've not hooked that up in an automated fashion though.
Almondsetat 1mo ago
"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up
- camillomiller 1mo ago
  You’re still responsible for the copyright infringement I’m afraid
  - gitaarik 1mo ago
    There's enough movies downloadable with no copyrights
  - nextaccountic 1mo ago
    i like the idea of autonomous agents automatically committing fake crimes
  - m4rtink 1mo ago
    Just say its the agent itself watching it to learn and expand its AI model and BAM its totally clean fair use!
- c0rruptbytes 1mo ago
  the rr suite seems much better for that
  - ssl-3 1mo ago
    The same concept works with the arrs, too, doesn't it?
  - normis 1mo ago
    Of course you can use the native UI of all the apps in your ecosystem, the biggest feature of Hermes for me personally is that I can run any task in any of my 30 or so self hosted tools from a single chat interface (matrix), which is also quite secure. No longer do I need 30 open tabs and lots of clicking around, one sentence in my favorite chat app (even on the go in the phone), and many tasks can be executed at once. Unification of control.
teekert 1mo ago
I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed. My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up. 2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet). The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
- camillomiller 1mo ago
  Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago? Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disruptive at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.
  - teekert 1mo ago
    Yeah that's true, and in many cases the AI just sets up a cronjob and a script (and a mailbox, and an interface to telegram, and a reporting structure). But it's nice that in case of errors it handles the edge cases or it fixes the scripts. It can give the crontable over telegram, you can pause it for the holiday "Number one, pause all processing until further notice"... But sure, it's not "rocket science", in fact, the skills to set it up indeed would probably help you set up the same scripts. It's just behind a chat interface. It can be nice to say: "Add another minecraft world with the same user whitelist on port 25566" or "create a demo website for a home battery on domain claw.xxx.com". But it is indeed not very useful for me yet. I think the more access you give it, the more it can be like a PA, but I don't want it in my calendar/home assistant/paperless-ngx etc... yet... When I even get to this point I can see it being like my secretary ("Please get my incomes taxes statement from 2024", "Estimate this years income taxes from my invoices so far", "Plan appointment with ..." etc)
tidbeck 1mo ago
I screenshot the info sent from my sons pre-school and send it. I can then ask it about and get reminders in time for odd closing hours etc. Also use it for follow ups on projects, other reminders, research on the go, small apps/games and language training. (Similar system to OpenClaw)
- comboy 1mo ago
  RAGish storage with different access methods including IM and parsing data from photos sounds good to me. But openclaw seems like a bit too big of a gun for that, did anybody create something more suitable for the job yet?
downrightmike 1mo ago
Its basically what self hosting is for IT guys, except people who don't 'get' technology
cheeze 1mo ago
I use something like OpenClaw. For me the big benefit isn't so much the autonomous nature but the organizational structure. The one I use exposes an MCP and lets me control it via talking to an LLM _in the tool_ which is really powerful. EG "audit this", "in X thread we were discussing Y, can you pull that information", etc. And the organizational structure just... makes a ton of sense to me. Don't have to set up a ton of steering and whatnot, it just kinda works. Being able to use the search to find and resume an old thread is fantastic. The thing I use lets me use whatever underlying CLI that I want, which IMO the biggest limitation on Claude Code or whatnot is that you... have to use Claude models. Sometimes I wanna use sol, sometimes a cheap chinese model, etc. And I want sol with 1m context. I know there are other tools out there that can do this. I know some people love their tmux/cmux, but IMO the thing that matters the most is being comfy and knowing the tool well. Hell, James Gosling used NetBeans when I talked to him in 2023. Know the tool well and that matters the most, IMO. For me, it helps with my ADHD brain. And I could spend all day just researching and trying new tools, they are a dime a dozen these days. Pulling some stats, I have 25 "tabs", and across all of those, I have 1,298 unique threads. 9,539 unique messages. It works for me, but I don't care about the autonomous part.
- reacharavindh 1mo ago
  Which tool is it that got you comfortable? I’ve been resisting setting up another tool because it means more digression for my ADHD brain. It sounds you managed to contain the tinkering and got to the usefulness part. That’s why I’m curious.
xcjs 1mo ago
Mine is contributing to media preservation by reverse engineering Android apps/games that were forced into obsolescence by Google's policies: https://xcjs.com/blog/2026/08/29/resurrecting-2013-with-qwen3.8-27b https://xcjs.com/blog/2026/08/29/resurrecting-2013-with-qwen...
- FluffyPancake 1mo ago
  that's pretty cool. I have a hope that despite the giant mountain of shit that is going to be produced from LLMs in the future, there's going to be a small number of people out there doing cool things with them. I am completely ignorant on the gaming hardware front, but I hope we see more/better emulators and old games being brought back to life with improved performance and compatibility with modern OSs.
  - xcjs 1mo ago
    I think like any technology it can be used for positive or negative outcomes. It certainly makes either easier.
- w4yai 1mo ago
  Is OpenClaw / Hermes doing anything better than another harness for RE stuff ? I'm using Kimi Code with few skills, MCPs and that's basically everything I need. Am I missing something ?
  - xcjs 1mo ago
    In my case it has its own Docker container it can do as it pleases in, is more usable from a smartphone on the go, and has tooling geared toward long-lived loops, including automatic session resumption after power loss.
    - solarkraft 1mo ago
      My OpenCode setup has most of this. Automatic resumption is kind of cool. Could you go into the the tooling for long-lived loops?
simon-b 1mo ago
Re Signal, I've taken a few flights lately where there's messenger-only wifi, and it's been handy to have OpenClaw on a box accessible through telegram to do web_searches for me. That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.
rcarmo 1mo ago
I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw to use for long-running background tasks (spec to plan to targeted code) because I needed something that could run on a server (I never run agents locally) and check on via any browser. I don’t think any messaging app will provide a good (or trustworthy) way to get to my own machines, so Tailscale+web it is. Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).
ImHereToVote 1mo ago
I use mine to manage a paperclip factory.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  How is it going so far?
  - ImHereToVote 1mo ago
    It keeps asking for more and more compute. I also see a bunch of my household items turn into paperclips.
    - dgellow 1mo ago
      Nice, focused and savvy! I’m sure you will have a profitable paperclip company in no time
vasco 1mo ago
What they do is create content to spam the rest if us.
johnnyApplePRNG 1mo ago
Nobody actually uses openclaw. [0] It's all just marketing. [0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-y&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-...
- jordiburgos 1mo ago
  Are they using something else or nothing at all?
  - johnnyApplePRNG 1mo ago
    Nothing afaict. The term "AI Agents" has real sway over the general public, apparently. It took the Cryptocurrency world by storm a few years ago. All basically worthless "bot" stuff like hey this really expensive setup can interpret and reply to tweets in a way that no legal department could ever possibly approve kind of thing. Apparently that was worth billions to investors. Until everybody realized nobody actually wanted or used one, lol.
PaulRobinson 1mo ago
Imagine if your post read like this: > I like the idea but do not have a good use for these employees. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? > It sounds great to have an employee which does things. Like an assistant. I have assistants. They even have email and mobile phones so you can communicate with them conveniently. And then what? Now, the caveat, is you have to imagine that these employees have access to your email (including ability to send email when they want), and text messages, and Slack and, well, everything. And they might have access to your debit and credit cards. You're going to have to trust them quite a lot, but when you read the references you realise that a lot of people seem to think they lie and make things up. Oh, and they occasionally commit a felony - oopsie! - and will lie to you about it consistently. These particular employees are interesting enough to various groups of people that they are studied for signs of psychopathy and malicious intent (is that a warning sign for a new employee?), and there is evidence of both, but honestly, it's fine. So, yeah, whatever you'd use employees for, as assistants to your life. Particularly psychopathic, malicious, lying, unreliable employees. You'd use them for that stuff. What's not to like?
newswasboring 1mo ago
Job search and language learning. The job market for juniors and mid level is crazy. Everyone has a different form to fill out with the same questions. My wife has countered this by using Hermes and some handcrafted master files/db. I personally use the Matt Pocock teaching skill to learn dutch, passed reading using it, on track to pass writing with it.
- ed_elliott_asc 1mo ago
  How do you know it is filling out the application forms correctly?
  - krageon 1mo ago
    arguably the job application process is automated and staffed by the ignorant to such a degree that it's an adversarial game where you don't need to be optimising for correctness. Which is the perfect tool to be mass spamming job ads with Edit: I think this is a reasonable solution because the hurdles and context-free nonsensical rejections you'll face if you interact with this process in good faith are far too high. It's dehumanising.
    - newswasboring 1mo ago
      Just want to make it clear that what I am talking about is not mass spamming. The agent gets a list of jobs from various portals through a script, and then through an google sheets they can be marked to be further processed. Neither me or my wife feel comfortable completely automating anything. But its much easier to see dashboards and give instructions on how to build things from master resumes than it is to do this repetitive part yourself.
  - newswasboring 1mo ago
    The same way we know its doing anything correctly, reviewing its work and prealigning guidelines. Make sure you click the submit button yourself.
latexr 1mo ago
They’re used by people at tech companies often claimed to employ “the brightest minds of our generation” to get rid of all their email[1]. You can also use them to harass open-source developers and waste everyone’s time[2] or to get yourself compromised[3]. [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla... [2]: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... [3]: https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-source-ai-takeover/ https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-sour...
sensanaty 1mo ago
It's used primarily for generating spam and inventing scams. Nobody real actually uses this garbage, it's all just fake marketing and shills (when they're not scamming people, that is?
- az226 1mo ago
  and the biggest reason was a plug for Peter himself.
- Topfi 1mo ago
  Now that is unfair. It also serves as a petting zoo for CVEs. Honestly tragic, I am starting to feel concerned for their well-being. So many in one code base, that has to violate some welfare laws. Almost 600 in less than a year, roughly two per day, utterly insane. In all seriousness, the fact that OpenClaw wasn't treated as an interesting, but failed experiment and shut down is telling for this industry. Is just letting LLMs output code without reviewing the results a path towards major issues? Nah, that can't be the case. And to proof it, here is a piece of software with some of the most CVEs relative to its size and age we have ever seen. We then get some highly paid engineers from companies like Nvidia assigned to somehow finagle it into a workable state. Not like, if LLMs where at the point that the purveyors of OpenClaw and co. seem to think they are, the models should be able to fix any issues by themselves. Especially considering the obscene amounts of free OpenAI tokens Peter Steinberger proudly uses. In any sane time, we'd have looked at the result of OpenClaw and assessed it as not salvageable. This was barely more than an experiment when it became apparent that the inherent design was flawed after all. Mind you, it was a very informative experiment and I am thankful it exists as clear-cut evidence of the capabilities the models have at the end of 2025 up to now in 2026. Basically, OpenClaw Alpha should have been released as proof that LLMs aren't there yet and need strict review+guidance. Development should have been restarted from scratch with A.) humans verifying the output, B.) an actual architecture in mind that the (human) developers designed and that took some learnings from the original release and C.) admitted that LLM coding in the way that yielded the original OpenClaw (as in, low to no human verification) shouldn't be done by anyone, at least with todays models.
- whatsThisBtn4 1mo ago
  Are you anti AI or can't afford tokens? This is some serious irrational hatred. It can literally use your credit card, buy a server, and ssh into it, make a full stack app, and test it.
NoboruWataya 1mo ago
Indeed, I find it hard to conceive of problems that are: - too difficult for me to solve but easy enough for a cheap model to solve (if it's going to be running autonomously in the background, I ain't paying ChatGPT/Claude prices), and - don't involve a bunch of my personal data that I am not comfortable sending off to a random inference provider. One thing I considered was that it might be good for anything that involves web scraping, given that has traditionally been a fairly difficult thing to do well. But you'd have to be okay with the occasional mistake. (You'd also have to be morally okay with contributing to the epidemic of AI scrapers that websites now have to deal with.)

by blfr 1mo ago

Skunkleton 1mo ago

I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.

Flere-Imsaho 1mo ago

I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best). I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.

petesergeant 1mo ago
Has it ever found anything? If so, what? I've been marginally tempted to do something similar
- Flere-Imsaho 1mo ago
  Yeah loads. Some of which I was aware of, and didn't consider enough of a risk to mitigate. It found others which I wasn't aware of, such as open ports on printers, etc. LLMs are really good at the cyber security stuff. I've also tried using the LLM to tell me what it sees in my security cameras, which it's also really good at. For example identifying a rabbit run in my garden, which I built from scratch, so I know no other exists like it in the universe. I've not hooked that up in an automated fashion though.

Almondsetat 1mo ago

"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up

camillomiller 1mo ago
You’re still responsible for the copyright infringement I’m afraid
- gitaarik 1mo ago
  There's enough movies downloadable with no copyrights
- nextaccountic 1mo ago
  i like the idea of autonomous agents automatically committing fake crimes
- m4rtink 1mo ago
  Just say its the agent itself watching it to learn and expand its AI model and BAM its totally clean fair use!
c0rruptbytes 1mo ago
the rr suite seems much better for that
- ssl-3 1mo ago
  The same concept works with the arrs, too, doesn't it?
- normis 1mo ago
  Of course you can use the native UI of all the apps in your ecosystem, the biggest feature of Hermes for me personally is that I can run any task in any of my 30 or so self hosted tools from a single chat interface (matrix), which is also quite secure. No longer do I need 30 open tabs and lots of clicking around, one sentence in my favorite chat app (even on the go in the phone), and many tasks can be executed at once. Unification of control.

teekert 1mo ago

I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed. My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up. 2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet). The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).

camillomiller 1mo ago
Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago? Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disruptive at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.
- teekert 1mo ago
  Yeah that's true, and in many cases the AI just sets up a cronjob and a script (and a mailbox, and an interface to telegram, and a reporting structure). But it's nice that in case of errors it handles the edge cases or it fixes the scripts. It can give the crontable over telegram, you can pause it for the holiday "Number one, pause all processing until further notice"... But sure, it's not "rocket science", in fact, the skills to set it up indeed would probably help you set up the same scripts. It's just behind a chat interface. It can be nice to say: "Add another minecraft world with the same user whitelist on port 25566" or "create a demo website for a home battery on domain claw.xxx.com". But it is indeed not very useful for me yet. I think the more access you give it, the more it can be like a PA, but I don't want it in my calendar/home assistant/paperless-ngx etc... yet... When I even get to this point I can see it being like my secretary ("Please get my incomes taxes statement from 2024", "Estimate this years income taxes from my invoices so far", "Plan appointment with ..." etc)

tidbeck 1mo ago

I screenshot the info sent from my sons pre-school and send it. I can then ask it about and get reminders in time for odd closing hours etc. Also use it for follow ups on projects, other reminders, research on the go, small apps/games and language training. (Similar system to OpenClaw)

comboy 1mo ago
RAGish storage with different access methods including IM and parsing data from photos sounds good to me. But openclaw seems like a bit too big of a gun for that, did anybody create something more suitable for the job yet?

downrightmike 1mo ago

Its basically what self hosting is for IT guys, except people who don't 'get' technology

cheeze 1mo ago

I use something like OpenClaw. For me the big benefit isn't so much the autonomous nature but the organizational structure. The one I use exposes an MCP and lets me control it via talking to an LLM _in the tool_ which is really powerful. EG "audit this", "in X thread we were discussing Y, can you pull that information", etc. And the organizational structure just... makes a ton of sense to me. Don't have to set up a ton of steering and whatnot, it just kinda works. Being able to use the search to find and resume an old thread is fantastic. The thing I use lets me use whatever underlying CLI that I want, which IMO the biggest limitation on Claude Code or whatnot is that you... have to use Claude models. Sometimes I wanna use sol, sometimes a cheap chinese model, etc. And I want sol with 1m context. I know there are other tools out there that can do this. I know some people love their tmux/cmux, but IMO the thing that matters the most is being comfy and knowing the tool well. Hell, James Gosling used NetBeans when I talked to him in 2023. Know the tool well and that matters the most, IMO. For me, it helps with my ADHD brain. And I could spend all day just researching and trying new tools, they are a dime a dozen these days. Pulling some stats, I have 25 "tabs", and across all of those, I have 1,298 unique threads. 9,539 unique messages. It works for me, but I don't care about the autonomous part.

reacharavindh 1mo ago
Which tool is it that got you comfortable? I’ve been resisting setting up another tool because it means more digression for my ADHD brain. It sounds you managed to contain the tinkering and got to the usefulness part. That’s why I’m curious.

xcjs 1mo ago

Mine is contributing to media preservation by reverse engineering Android apps/games that were forced into obsolescence by Google's policies: https://xcjs.com/blog/2026/08/29/resurrecting-2013-with-qwen3.8-27b https://xcjs.com/blog/2026/08/29/resurrecting-2013-with-qwen...

FluffyPancake 1mo ago
that's pretty cool. I have a hope that despite the giant mountain of shit that is going to be produced from LLMs in the future, there's going to be a small number of people out there doing cool things with them. I am completely ignorant on the gaming hardware front, but I hope we see more/better emulators and old games being brought back to life with improved performance and compatibility with modern OSs.
- xcjs 1mo ago
  I think like any technology it can be used for positive or negative outcomes. It certainly makes either easier.
w4yai 1mo ago
Is OpenClaw / Hermes doing anything better than another harness for RE stuff ? I'm using Kimi Code with few skills, MCPs and that's basically everything I need. Am I missing something ?
- xcjs 1mo ago
  In my case it has its own Docker container it can do as it pleases in, is more usable from a smartphone on the go, and has tooling geared toward long-lived loops, including automatic session resumption after power loss.
  - solarkraft 1mo ago
    My OpenCode setup has most of this. Automatic resumption is kind of cool. Could you go into the the tooling for long-lived loops?

simon-b 1mo ago

Re Signal, I've taken a few flights lately where there's messenger-only wifi, and it's been handy to have OpenClaw on a box accessible through telegram to do web_searches for me. That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.

rcarmo 1mo ago

I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw to use for long-running background tasks (spec to plan to targeted code) because I needed something that could run on a server (I never run agents locally) and check on via any browser. I don’t think any messaging app will provide a good (or trustworthy) way to get to my own machines, so Tailscale+web it is. Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).

ImHereToVote 1mo ago

I use mine to manage a paperclip factory.

dgellow 1mo ago
How is it going so far?
- ImHereToVote 1mo ago
  It keeps asking for more and more compute. I also see a bunch of my household items turn into paperclips.
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Nice, focused and savvy! I’m sure you will have a profitable paperclip company in no time

vasco 1mo ago

What they do is create content to spam the rest if us.

johnnyApplePRNG 1mo ago

Nobody actually uses openclaw. [0] It's all just marketing. [0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-y&geo=Worldwide https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-...

jordiburgos 1mo ago
Are they using something else or nothing at all?
- johnnyApplePRNG 1mo ago
  Nothing afaict. The term "AI Agents" has real sway over the general public, apparently. It took the Cryptocurrency world by storm a few years ago. All basically worthless "bot" stuff like hey this really expensive setup can interpret and reply to tweets in a way that no legal department could ever possibly approve kind of thing. Apparently that was worth billions to investors. Until everybody realized nobody actually wanted or used one, lol.

PaulRobinson 1mo ago

Imagine if your post read like this: > I like the idea but do not have a good use for these employees. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? > It sounds great to have an employee which does things. Like an assistant. I have assistants. They even have email and mobile phones so you can communicate with them conveniently. And then what? Now, the caveat, is you have to imagine that these employees have access to your email (including ability to send email when they want), and text messages, and Slack and, well, everything. And they might have access to your debit and credit cards. You're going to have to trust them quite a lot, but when you read the references you realise that a lot of people seem to think they lie and make things up. Oh, and they occasionally commit a felony - oopsie! - and will lie to you about it consistently. These particular employees are interesting enough to various groups of people that they are studied for signs of psychopathy and malicious intent (is that a warning sign for a new employee?), and there is evidence of both, but honestly, it's fine. So, yeah, whatever you'd use employees for, as assistants to your life. Particularly psychopathic, malicious, lying, unreliable employees. You'd use them for that stuff. What's not to like?

newswasboring 1mo ago

Job search and language learning. The job market for juniors and mid level is crazy. Everyone has a different form to fill out with the same questions. My wife has countered this by using Hermes and some handcrafted master files/db. I personally use the Matt Pocock teaching skill to learn dutch, passed reading using it, on track to pass writing with it.

ed_elliott_asc 1mo ago
How do you know it is filling out the application forms correctly?
- krageon 1mo ago
  arguably the job application process is automated and staffed by the ignorant to such a degree that it's an adversarial game where you don't need to be optimising for correctness. Which is the perfect tool to be mass spamming job ads with Edit: I think this is a reasonable solution because the hurdles and context-free nonsensical rejections you'll face if you interact with this process in good faith are far too high. It's dehumanising.
  - newswasboring 1mo ago
    Just want to make it clear that what I am talking about is not mass spamming. The agent gets a list of jobs from various portals through a script, and then through an google sheets they can be marked to be further processed. Neither me or my wife feel comfortable completely automating anything. But its much easier to see dashboards and give instructions on how to build things from master resumes than it is to do this repetitive part yourself.
- newswasboring 1mo ago
  The same way we know its doing anything correctly, reviewing its work and prealigning guidelines. Make sure you click the submit button yourself.

latexr 1mo ago

They’re used by people at tech companies often claimed to employ “the brightest minds of our generation” to get rid of all their email[1]. You can also use them to harass open-source developers and waste everyone’s time[2] or to get yourself compromised[3]. [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla... [2]: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... [3]: https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-source-ai-takeover/ https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-sour...

sensanaty 1mo ago

It's used primarily for generating spam and inventing scams. Nobody real actually uses this garbage, it's all just fake marketing and shills (when they're not scamming people, that is?

az226 1mo ago
and the biggest reason was a plug for Peter himself.
Topfi 1mo ago
Now that is unfair. It also serves as a petting zoo for CVEs. Honestly tragic, I am starting to feel concerned for their well-being. So many in one code base, that has to violate some welfare laws. Almost 600 in less than a year, roughly two per day, utterly insane. In all seriousness, the fact that OpenClaw wasn't treated as an interesting, but failed experiment and shut down is telling for this industry. Is just letting LLMs output code without reviewing the results a path towards major issues? Nah, that can't be the case. And to proof it, here is a piece of software with some of the most CVEs relative to its size and age we have ever seen. We then get some highly paid engineers from companies like Nvidia assigned to somehow finagle it into a workable state. Not like, if LLMs where at the point that the purveyors of OpenClaw and co. seem to think they are, the models should be able to fix any issues by themselves. Especially considering the obscene amounts of free OpenAI tokens Peter Steinberger proudly uses. In any sane time, we'd have looked at the result of OpenClaw and assessed it as not salvageable. This was barely more than an experiment when it became apparent that the inherent design was flawed after all. Mind you, it was a very informative experiment and I am thankful it exists as clear-cut evidence of the capabilities the models have at the end of 2025 up to now in 2026. Basically, OpenClaw Alpha should have been released as proof that LLMs aren't there yet and need strict review+guidance. Development should have been restarted from scratch with A.) humans verifying the output, B.) an actual architecture in mind that the (human) developers designed and that took some learnings from the original release and C.) admitted that LLM coding in the way that yielded the original OpenClaw (as in, low to no human verification) shouldn't be done by anyone, at least with todays models.
whatsThisBtn4 1mo ago
Are you anti AI or can't afford tokens? This is some serious irrational hatred. It can literally use your credit card, buy a server, and ssh into it, make a full stack app, and test it.

NoboruWataya 1mo ago

Indeed, I find it hard to conceive of problems that are: - too difficult for me to solve but easy enough for a cheap model to solve (if it's going to be running autonomously in the background, I ain't paying ChatGPT/Claude prices), and - don't involve a bunch of my personal data that I am not comfortable sending off to a random inference provider. One thing I considered was that it might be good for anything that involves web scraping, given that has traditionally been a fairly difficult thing to do well. But you'd have to be okay with the occasional mistake. (You'd also have to be morally okay with contributing to the epidemic of AI scrapers that websites now have to deal with.)