Discussion

Nishant Soni

jbverschoor: Sounds like an armchair expert

choiway: [delayed]

Animats: "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.

broadsidepicnic: Could we stop with the clickbaiting headlines?

threecheese: 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.

operatingthetan: 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.

aunty_helen: > 0 legitimate use casesMy 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)

Eufrat: What happens if it makes a mistake? How would you know?

aunty_helen: 10/80/1010% done by an assistant that’s been trained on the task (or a dev or me)80% heavy lifting done by claw10% review and corrections

thepasch: 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: 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.

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

ofjcihen: Bounties?

MadSudaca: I don’t get people’s hate. Let others enjoy it.

Eufrat: 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.

operatingthetan: None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

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

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

LaurensBER: 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.

tasuki: Making Money, the ultimate "legitimate use case".

BeetleB: 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).

the_real_cher: 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.

aunty_helen: The difference is I would have to do that myself. It has access to gdrive and cc and does it for me when I send it a message in chat. Sometimes when I’m out I even just send it voicys.

operatingthetan: You're contradicting yourself here. Are you controlling it yourself or not? lol

the_pwner224: Please elaborate

aleksiy123: 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 me1. Karpathy wiki approach2. 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.

syngrog66: 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 :-)

wyre: I know Twitter has been talking up Hermes Agent by Nous Research a lot or id recommend building your own agent off of Pi.

theturtletalks: 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.

aunty_helen: It’s task dependent.

syngrog66: somehow I've been able to do that for 40+ years using my brain, eyes, fingers, vi , CLIs and shell scripts. no unsolved problems there.

aunty_helen: I did too :DNothing of what my agents do, we didn’t previously do. But now I can get moderate to good results with a lot less effort. Allowing the business to expand whilst keeping costs controlled.

jmward01: 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: 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.

BeetleB: I was able to buy stuff from home without the Internet as well.

jmward01: 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.

BeetleB: > None of those things require openclaw.OpenClaw was never meant to be a tool that could do things you couldn't do without it.Also, whenever someone points out you could accomplish something without it, he underestimates the effort needed. In the examples I'm thinking of, someone simply asked OpenClaw to do something, had a few back and forths with it, and it was done. I have yet to see someone say "Oh, I can do that without OpenClaw" and go ahead and do it within 10 minutes.Not once.OpenClaw is flawed, but the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.

tecoholic: > It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO listYou 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)

wormpilled: None of those require Claude Code CLI either, you could develop their workflows with a script (bash, python) and any quality LLM.

operatingthetan: Just an example of how I would accomplish them. The obsession with openclaw is generally misguided. The 'magic' is the LLM. I'm running an OC instance on a server in my home, I have experience here.

operatingthetan: > the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.You offered nothing to support this. My openclaw is realistically just an agent in discord versus the CLI. That's not an "order of magnitude" more convenient. Anthropic already has a tool for it https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control

BeetleB: > 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?

bryanlarsen: > In every case, when you dig deeper, the story is one of two things: either what they built could already be done with standard AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, any decent LLM with a simple integration), or it’s aspirationalAll your use cases are fairly well handled by conventional LLM's. OpenClaw is a security nightmare, so it's probably worth switching away.

aunty_helen: Most of these things I could’ve handled with pen and paper, but that’s missing the point.

dimitri-vs: Almost certainly some kind of scam