Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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-obsidi...

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype.

No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short:

I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast for the weeks ahead to see how busy my month was. I spent about 40-50 bucks in one week just working through kinks and having it fix itself until I stumbled onto a post that helped me optimize my model usage for price instead of just throwing Opus and Sonnet at everything.

Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again. At a certain point I just got fed up with it and cut the cron job, it's still running on my pi but I never use it.

Pretty sure Claude has something like this now but I'm pretty thrown off the whole thing, I'd rather just take the 30-45mins to plan out my day in the morning myself.

I’m a professional maintenance gardener and I have used NanoClaw running on my Mac to do the following:

Schedule jobs on my job management tool (I vibed it) using a custom MCP. I’ll ask it questions like “what jobs are on today” etc. start the job, complete the job etc.

It will watch Gmail using a MCP for work orders from local real estate agents, where it will schedule quote visits.

After the quote visit I add the photos to telegram (the channel I happen to use) where I then ask it to analyse the photos.

Claude in NanoClaw does a good job of figuring out what needs to be done, but it doesn’t always get it quite right, so I use intake-api which is a “session inbox” [1] that generates a form and uploads it to Cloudflare along with the images and puts a link to the form in the chat so I can make adjustments to the annotated images of the property. After I’m happy, I click submit.

I’ll then go back to the telegram channel and let it know I have submitted the form. Claude will then pull the JSON payload back down into the session and integrate it into the quote.

It will ask me questions about what the job will cost etc, and anything else it thinks it needs to know.

It will then generate a full PDF proposal using Latex between 14 and 32 pages long depending on how many photos were taken.

There are sections with terms and conditions as well as a bit of sales guff etc. as well as quite a nice cover page with their contact details and mine etc.

When I’m happy I’ll ask it to create a draft email in Gmail with the attached pdf proposal.

I’ll review it quickly and then send it.

I also have the Xero MCP setup so I can ask it to create invoices and contacts etc.

I do all of this when getting in and out of my truck.

It’s freed up my home life to spend more time with my children and my Mrs.

There is alot of scope for small business owners who need these sorts of agentic assistant tasks and with my Agentic CRM I’m see a glimpse of the future for guys like me I think.

Intake API:

https://github.com/mjsweet/intake-api

I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it.

What do I use it for? I basically just use it as a personal assistant and a way to centralize a lot of other automations that I have elsewhere.

- I have an automation that rolls everything on my todo list over to the next day at 11:59pm

- I have one that checks the weather and tells me if it's going to be windy in the next few days since I need to bring the lawn furniture in

- I have it set up so that I can forward it email with invoices and it will extract the data from a PDF and enter it into a cost tracking sheet

- I have it check my outlook calendar and tell me if there are any 1:1 meetings where the other person has declined the invite (since Outlook doesn't show that clearly and I'd often show up to meetings and sit for 5 minutes before realizing the other person cancelled)

Nothing I'm doing is life changing, it all could be done using other tools, and honestly, for anything important, I want something more deterministic anyway, but I kind of love. It's just a low lift way to automate away minor annoyances through a single interface that I can access from just about anywhere. It's far from perfect, but I don't use it for anything where I need to to be perfect, so I'm happy.

I disagree with practically every take here, and likely will get hate for this message.

Personally it has been a huge unlock and here are some specific use cases.

1.Context engineering for “any task”: my claw agents debate with me, and write me files to be picked up by Claude code or Claude cowork to write code/build presentations.

2. Discovering this page: my personal newsfeed that took me 10 mins to setup. Never had any newsfeed before this which could be personalised like this.

3. Strategy: similar to point 1 above. I set up a “tough-coach” skill. Now all my 1am ideas go through the wringer of why they suck, and what, if anything could be differentiated about them.

4. Many other small-ish things that are important enough for me to spend on them, but not important enough to invest my time.

I run a conversational AI startup in India working mostly in Financial inclusion space - so most of time is spent in meetings (:-/).

With openclaw, the 2-3 hours before I sleep (low energy, high on ideas), convert into pretty productive sessions. No more “this is a great idea, I will do it tomorrow”. Instead “oh this sounded great but my agent just called it shit - what if I modify it a bit, and then let’s see”.

The main function of OpenClaw was for people to signal how advanced and cutting edge and thought-leader-y they were. All those Mac minis are sitting idle now.

I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it.

Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time.

I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:

Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.

It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

I set it up and had some fun but it was super janky and regularly broke, especially the whatsapp integration

Now I have a separate plugged in macbook running nixos (that claude set up) and a single long-running claude code process with a channel to a Telegram bot. This means I can talk to it much like I could with OpenClaw, but it's much simpler (no weird soul.md etc). It feels more powerful than just claude code directly as it can set up software, build me throwaway websites with research etc, and "do" things, but it's a lot more stable and feels more controllable because I understand how it works and don't have to worry about it signing up to some social media platform and getting poisoned by another claw.

I asked both sonnet 4.6 and gpt-5.3 to summarize the use cases in this room, looks pretty different. Chatgpt tries a lot harder to categorize whereas Claude is more straightforward about just listing out use case examples.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69e0de34-4048-83ea-9704-4ea18d4b41...

https://claude.ai/share/291ccf67-19d1-4187-bfb4-968d1ecc0bc1

It's like the rest of Agentic AI - a lot of talk, but when it comes to the crunch, very few people are actually willing to hand over full autonomy to anything where significant value / liability is in play.

The truth is, a lot of the value of agentic AI in general is negated by the sheer power of agentic coding itself. If I can prompt an AI to write an actual deterministic process to solve a problem in a couple of minutes (still potentially AI assisted, just in a deterministic manner), why would I delegate it to a non-deterministic AI? You have to come up with a category of tasks where the actual process itself cannot be anticipated. Intersect that with high value processes and you whittled down to almost nothing. Not actually nothing but a far smaller category than people make out.

I've been playing around with it. The only two real use cases I have for it for now are entertaining me on long flights where I have messaging-only Wi-Fi and sending me a personalized "morning brief".

I suppose it could be a lot more useful if I actually gave it access to any of my personal data (it lives in a heavily resource-limited container), but there's absolutely no way I'm letting that hot mess of a walking, talking CVE anywhere near my data. It's somehow both horribly insecure and extremely prone to locking me out because of several competing security/permission models fighting it out and gridlocking each other.

Code quality and the issue tracker of the repo are a big mess; for example, the local "memory" retrieval functionality is completely broken for some trivial reason that has been reported and auto-closed about five times (automatically, of course).

In summary: Brilliant idea, terrible execution. Can't wait for the first big tech player I trust enough (or at least one that has my data already anyway) to actually make it a product. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

I’m getting those awkward emails from claw users (that’s an actual one I got recently):

> Hey Sam, I'm Jarvis — $CEO_NAME's AI assistant (OpenClaw). He asked me to reach out on his behalf. $CEO is building $HYPED_STARTUP — the tool execution and MCP layer for AI agents (10K+ integrations, Series A with $FAMOUS_INVESTOR). He's looking for engineers who are deeply into the agentic coding stack — Claude Code, Codex, MCP, agent infra. Builder mindset, ships fast. Worth a quick call?

>

>Jarvis (on behalf of $CEO, co-founder @$HYPED_STARTUP)

It’s the weirdest thing ever to receive. I generally answer politely to the claw bot, but that all feels just extremely strange.

You’re reaching out to a human for a call and cannot present yourself as a human? But at the same time, it’s maybe preferable if they disclaim it was automated? I don’t know

Just weird all around

Think about what you would want an assistant to do. You can teach it do basic tasks using any available API, but then you can give it feedback so it improves.

For example my agent can control home automation via Home Assistant or any other API. My agent contributes to websites and open source projects. When you give it feedback it updates its skill files.

It checks and answers email, can receive and place phone calls, and do general research and monitoring online. I was even playing around with it to create music. The list of things to try is limitless.

I think just like LLMs, people get discouraged when it doesnt one-shot a problem. This technology thrives on feedback. It will make mistakes, your job is to make sure it learns from those mistakes so it doesnt repeat them.

This is how I analyze geopolitics with OpenClaw.

I developed OpenClaw Think-Tank Intelligence, a skill that transforms complex global crises into concise, insightful think-tank memos. These memos include stakeholder maps, scenarios, policy options, tradeoffs, risks, confidence levels, and assumptions. You’ll be amazed by the quality of analytics. https://clawhub.ai/vassiliylakhonin/global-think-tank-analys...

I tried, really really hard but then I realised that I essence it's a poorly written agentic coding assistant that wastes a lot of tokens antropomorphising itself while forcing me to debug via WhatsApp instead of normal tools. So I leaned into that and made OpenCode my general assistant, it worked much better in this aspect.

I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work.

The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of "scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only when there is something worth mentioning]".

You could simulate the same things with cron jobs on a server and some scripts and LLM APIs. But having Openclaw do it does make it a little bit easier to set up and make changes.

The initial setup was a bit more time consuming than I thought it would be. I set it up on a VPS, I already have scripts to set up a server and tighten security normally, so I could just use that, but people who don't already have that stuff would have to do that first. Then the Openclaw setup and configuration was like a 20~30 step situation, lots of API keys to get, etc. I opted for Slack over Telegram or Discord (I don't use either of those regularly) and you pretty much have to set up a new slack bot app yourself (you follow their listed steps, but there's still hiccups here and there), you have to debug and solve issues etc. to get through it all.

Then even after all the initial setup is done, it takes some time to learn and get used to its quirks and behaviors, at the beginning there's just a lot of frustration about things it can't do, or things it says it can or will do, but doesn't.

Yes, every day.

Similar to other users here, giving it access to an Obsidian vault has been the key for me. And I wouldn't discount how much the chat interface matters - Telegram is so much nicer to use for extended conversations than the Claude or ChatGPT apps, etc.

You can feed these tools context about your day to day life, and make them increasingly useful and personalized, in a way that you can't with vanilla ChatGPT/Claude etc without relying on some opaque memory system.

Here's a few things I'm using it for. A lot of things uses cases are fairly trivial but a bunch of small, daily QoL improvements add up:

- Calorie and macro tracker.

- Day to day todo list, obsidian wrangling.

- Tech support for family: I have a group chat we're all part of, and I've created OpenClaw skills for frequently asked questions, a memory system to remember questions, and a periodic 'quiz' based on previously asked questions to help everyone "learn to fish", bit by bit.

- Interface to Anki. Bit of a longer one here that I should write up, but it's easy to use it add cards to Anki on the go and review missed cards from today, ask clarifying questions, etc.

- One off reminders.

- Light mental health support for family / friends. An agent that remembers the cool things you've done lately and proactively reminds you of them, helping you zoom out a bit, has been helpful for those in my life whose brains, for whatever reason, tend towards more negative cognitive patterns. (There is definitely a more refined product here)

- General questions / curiosity; stuff I would otherwise use Claude for that's simply nicer in Telegram.

- Language studying support. I'm studying Japanese and OpenClaw helps me by studying whole sentences, tricky grammar concepts, kanji I commonly mix up - all backed by a well organized Obsidian vault. I add to this system constantly.

Used it for a few weeks. The potential of the tool is massive. The reality is that it is frustrating and unreliable. When it works, though, you really like it.

I stopped because something changed on my machine that broke my VM SW, so I don't have access to it. Which is good because I was spending too much time debugging/tweaking.

I recently used pi to recreate an agent that does some of the basic things I was using it for (without all the scary privacy issues). I don't think I'll go back to any Claw-like tool until they're a lot more robust.

Recently started exploring it and will likely continue. Particularly fascinated by how (fake) self aware it is on configuration and functionality. Can make changes to itself etc

That said hesitant to give it access to emails etc so use will always be limited by that

Found it quite hard to set up though relative to other selfhosted tools. Need for https and all the additional security measures they put in place after some security scares are well beyond what randoms could manage I think

I still use it but totally not the "This one trick will supercharge your profits" kind of way. I do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails and execute tasks I want to delegate but honestly could have had any our AI agent handle it. There was some manual task I told myself I would automate but never got around too, Openclaw made is just easier to prompt it in to being.

The next biggest thing I like is just the shared context from machine to machine and the fact its always running and I have given it yolo access to my local stack. Home Assistant crashes? Now the wife can ask the bot to restart it. I see an interesting HN blog, i can get it to add it to my obsidian make me a useful doc (I am starting to use the llm-wiki trend but Claude Cowork seems to be really killer for this). I see an Reddit post about some new service to run locally? I can ask it to spin up an lxc of it and configure it for my use case and it will do the wiring for me.

I will say since the killing of Claude oAuth i am finding a lot of its magic did come from Opus just being so aggressive. An example was I had a task of someone sending me an image and I would have to turn it in to a table and then upload it to this really crappy portal for my non-profit. I threw the task at Openclaw (and at the time running Opus 4.6) and i watched in real time as it reverse engineer the sites backend API and found a way for it to post the data itself and it wrote itself a python script to make it repeatable. I dont see that same kind of killer instinct of doing whatever you need to do to get the task done with other models (Codex and now MiniMax).

I see some creative usage from other people for OpenClaw. My usage basically boiled down to commanding it via WhatsApp. What I mostly used the agent was mundane tasks like fetching information, creating documents for my work etc. Being able to schedule something is great, although OpenClaw quickly got confused about the cron tasks it had. I switched to ZeroClaw as the project is much smaller in terms of features and lines of code so I felt it was much more manageable.

But I realised everything I needed was cron + some basic tools to create and handle local documents + API access. The last is still a pain to manage so I built my own tool to work as an auth layer https://ohita.tech/ Basically it handles all the token refreshing, rate limiting etc. so when the scheduled task triggers it does not immediately fail because API auth failed.

If your personal life is so complex that you need to "automate" it, I think you need to reduce complexity instead of throwing an AI at it.

Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it.

It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff — emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another app, navigate six separate steps, and organize everything on the fly just to send one message. I stay in one place, organize my thoughts about what I’m trying to do, and the execution happens automatically.

For example, open claw will find the relevant threads, lookup the relevant details via web search, present them to me, give me a draft, I can review it, edit it, and send. 2 minutes instead of 20.

As a software engineer using AI daily, I think this is the real unlock — staying in a single context and not getting lost in the long tail of trivial details that fragment your attention before you ever get to the actual work.

The mental model shift is important too. It’s not that AI does all the work and we end up with agents emailing each other. It’s that AI automates the steps required to achieve your goals, so you can focus on the substance — like actually writing the email instead of navigating to the place where you write the email.

I also have GitHub and Vercel wired up, which means I can jot down an idea for a little productivity app for me and my family and it just appears a few minutes later, deployed and ready to use. That alone has been worth the setup.

Can I tag along to the main question and ask - what are some good OpenClaw guides or plugin/skill collections that you think are must-use?

So much AI generated bullshit online, it's really hard to find good guides from bad ones.

I managed to run a council using OpenClaw twice a day of different models that would discuss my personal projects, and send me to telegram ideas or suggestions for the next steps. It was quite cool and got very nice insights, but was burning tokens like crazy, so I stopped it.

I use it, but it feels half-baked. And seemingly more so with each successive release, often including changes that just break my existing setup. I don't feel like a tool that is ready for a non-developer audience.

That said, it does a few things for me that are useful. I have it run a nightly scan of Hacker News and Twitter for topics that interest me, summarizing the stories and the conversations around them. It's a nice daily digest. It also reads my personal email account, reminding me of anything I need to take care of that day for my kids, bills, or whatever else I need to worry about. I also have it do nightly builds for something random, one with codex, one with a local model, and run a comparative analysis between the two implementations.

This guy is: https://youtu.be/sxX8BMscce0?si=1MuE3_cCH_uDabrT

I think this article covers it well.

https://entropytown.com/articles/2026-03-12-openclaw-sandbox...

In fact, I haven't even installed it yet.

I tried openclaw when it was released, but I preferred the minimalism of nanoclaw and replaced it. I have it on a mac mini now

For context: I have additional automation with scripts set up on the mini, some of them call LLMs to do things like summarizing today's news.

I have other automations that are agentic and just run "claude -p" (mainly just checks status of other jobs and fixes them automatically). Agentic automations are great because they can handle unexpected situations (at the cost of predictability). They're all sandboxed and we have control over tools for the most part. Any files it would write to are typically git-controlled so we have change records and rollback built in.

Nanoclaw acts as an agentic layer but combines it with the communication layer over telegram to make it interactive.

I use it to go through my centralized task list (currently beads in my main 'wiki' monorepo), give me nudges for todos, I can also send it pictures of say, food and it will fetch a recipe and sort it into the wiki via a general "inbox" skill (claude has it as well). Every day at 12:30 it will give me a mini "standup" of all my personal projects and todos, and once in a while will give me some thoughts based on my interests.

Its set up to do appropriate tasks with local models to keep token costs down, so far it doesn't seem to cost more than $10-20/mo, it would use less if I didn't drive it with sonnet.

I'm still experimenting with it, and trying to go slow, one thing at a time. I don't give it access to anything super sensitive yet, and try to keep it observable.

I used it for about a week, thought it was an interesting demo of the possibilities of general purpose automation with a local model (even though most OpenClaw users use hosted models). The approach to scheduled jobs still makes more sense than anything else I've seen implemented. But like a lot of self-hosted software with passionate evangelists, it wants to be your new main hobby instead of just getting out of the way, and I lost interest because I didn't want a new hobby. It feels like a more thoughtful community could have made something useful with the concept, but as it is the community around it is too absorbed in marketing and shipping stuff for its own sake.

I tried it tonight, and it's installation is frustrating to say the least.

For me `openclaw init` did not work, and I've tried installing twice, and still running into issues. Also it took fairly beefy vps on my home server at 4GB of ram, so not sure how I feel about it.

I wrote a blog post about what I did with OpenClaw in the first few weeks. [1]

Then I was experimenting with a fleet of OpenClaw agents for a while. I was running 14 different instances, each with their own roles (project management, software developer, personal assistant, etc.) The experiment didn't work very well. I burned through a lot of tokens and didn't end up with much to show for it. I'm back to just running one agent and am not using it very much. I'm planning to be much more careful about any work that I ask it to do, and I want to have full visibility into everything it's doing.

I think we are about 6-12 months away from the AI models that would allow me to accomplish what I was trying to do with those 14 agents.

[1] https://madebynathan.com/2026/02/03/everything-ive-done-with...

Reading through the comments here, most use cases is running an agent with some input in a cron job.

Anthropic now have Routines in Claude Code that do precisely that, and I’d bet they will bring that to Cowork. ChatGPT can’t be far behind (or maybe they already have - tbh hard to keep track of everything).

Devs can already set up reliable cron jobs for cheaper. Normies will have a less brittle solution for it soon. Where does that leave the claws?

I have a clawlike. It’s just a small agentic loop with tools that are other specialized agents. It can write things itself but I upgrade many of the things it writes to first class if I use them a lot.

As an example, it has a built-in web server which I find useful. The basic agent is easy to write and it’s trivial to add a Telegram bot. Mine also uses Codex’s subscription and then swaps to other things as it burns through Codex. The Gemmas have been great and I’m heading home to buy a few RTX 6000 Pro Blackwells so I’m sure it’ll be quite good after.

I outsource a lot of research and so on to it and all my flight and trip emails are forwarded to its mailbox. So it always knows where I am and things like that. I find this very useful.

My wife and I are in a group chat with it and we use it to plan stuff and so on.

I did, it went great until it borked my mac user to the point it's non recoverable (separate mac mini, I just created a new one)

I then moved to Claude CoWork + computer use + dispatch. (before Anthropic disabled the subscription option, although that would have pushed me even more... sadly)

Now use it less and use more Claude Code Remote Routines... all it needs is computer use and I'm selling my Mac Mini... (I probably won't, need something to pay with paperclip, gastown, nanoclaw and the next 100k stars FOMO hype)

I've been using the NousResearch Hermes agent for the past couple of weeks and have to say it's been really good. I tend to hit multiple instances (and accounts)of Claude across three or four machines (between work and personal) and having a competent agent with constant state has been good for memorializing and organizing important info (directly into Obsidian, too), doing some amount of research and planning and it's also been helpful working out a lot of bugs with my burgeoning home automation setup. It's also been helpful dealing with management of several miscellaneous servers in the house, as it's definitely both faster and a better documenter than I am.

I have it running on a cheap VPS and it's fairly locked down. Especially with all of the self-reinforcement learning and skill development it's been improving its usefulness and, overall, I've been pretty pleased. Surprised even, if I'm being honest.

I use it a lot for personal stuff. Off the top of my head: Best way so far to build and use personalized/family tools for dining/recipe/movie/literature/reminder/organizer/security/notes—-in addition to robust text input, all of them have a voice and image UI via telegram without extra code via an intermediate LLM agent, and all data end up on your machine in your format of choice. More fun than codex/claude-code for hobby coding projects (though worse performance, more effort, unless you directly use codex acp). Less intrusive than ChatGPT/Claude for parallel queries while outdoors (speak, then read). Fun way to explore and understand multi-agent setups. A great way to demo the ability of current AI to friends and family.

You dont have to enable scary setups to make it minimally useful. The jump in capability compared to chatbots is dramatic, and the jump in flexibility compared to coding harnesses is also dramatic.

I use it. I never recommend it to anyone, but it’s a fun project I get use out of. There’s a few really good criticisms of the project, the ones that hit home for me are the token hungry aspects and the tinkering aspects.

The most common question is “what do you use it for”, so here are my answers.

1. I have the Obsidian/Openclaw setup that’s so popular with the self hosted crowd. I have a ton of “cron” jobs in openclaw to fetch data and insert it into Obsidian, or to summarize obsidian items I’ve done, or to nudge me about todos in my obsidian. This is where I get the most value, interacting on the .md file layer in automated fashion. For example, I have a cron that will summarize my daily notes into weekly notes, and my weekly notes into monthly notes.

2. Email inbox management. I have jobs that alert me of emails from certain people or subjects. Jobs that process emails into folders based on fuzzy LLM rules, etc.

Personally, better way to phrase might be "Does anybody you've actually met, visually viewed, use OpenClaw? Can you verify them using the software nearby?"

In a few years, it's become so easy to falsify articles, falsify comments, falsify images, difficult to really even trust responses online anyways. As far back as 2016, Microsoft already had bots deployed online that could respond 96,000 times [1] in 16 hours all over social media. Remember Tay? [1][2]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Even official government responses.

The British Royal family went to falsification immediately. [3] Note child's broken fingers bent sideways (lower left, didn't even get circled)

[3] https://inews.co.uk/news/signs-princess-kate-royal-family-ph...

The White House is posting altered arrest images of people. [4]

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-...

Can't trust this stuff much anymore. Obvious caveat with this post.

I find OpenClaw and (more so) Hermes Agent useful for software development, research, and writing - but I refuse to run them anywhere that is not deeply-sandboxed and has no access to most of my digital life data.

OK, everyone makes their own decisions re: privacy and security. Personally, I am comfortable running OpenClaw and Hermes Agent on a rented VPS (preferably in a docker container on a VPS) and allow limited access to (some of) my GitHub repos. Both tools are useful, even in such a limited mode of operation. I just don't see value vs. risk allowing access to email, messaging apps, access to my personal computer, etc.

It is close to zero overhead to SSH/Mosh to a VPS, get inside a container to work. Why risk infecting your personal or corporate computer?

Not anymore. After the claude shut off I decided to look around since I found it heavy. I’m on Hermes now with StepFun 3.5 Flash. I mostly just use it as a glorified calendar manager over signal. That being said, it feels like it meets the cross roads “of a cheap executive assistant”. Granted it’s not wired up to my work slack or anything. StepFun is a good enough model for tool calling that so far has been incredibly cheap that I’m happy with it. I suspect I won’t crack $5 of api cost to run it. But I also don’t think the Hermes harness is good enough for development-via-text like openclaw+opus is. I still find myself in the terminal using open code for that.

In general, AI agents are a good idea, but OpenClaw’s security is weak, so I use an alternative: https://github.com/opentalon/opentalon

I've used claude cowork a bit, which I believe is pretty similar to claw.

Can't think of much use for it at the moment but I have it just read and summarise my email, calendar events and git repo in a daily briefing format, it only has readonly access to both, as I dont trust it to do stuff for me or on my behalf.

The briefing thing is nice though not super useful.

Used it for a few days to summarize top 10 hacker news at scheduled time or send me a joke of the day

I liked how easy I can tell it to do something for me but token usage didn't justify the cost. I 'd either had to use smarter model which could cost a lot more or cheaper model which, in one instance, stuck in a loop

Product-wise, it's an awesome tool. Imagine having your own butler for anything except that the reliability with affordable isn't here yet to do anything serious

I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code.

But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat.

I'm running half my company with Nanoclaw. Same idea, and has some benefits, but I live in CC all day so it's marginal (except for the fact that my laptop has to be on)

I have it installed on a dedicated M4 16GB Mac Mini with Telegram, email, and Google Docs integration (the agent has its own accounts). I can chat with it, incl. sending voice messages via Telegram (it can send voice messages back using free TTS run locally).

Using google/gemma-4-31b-it as primary, google-gemini-3.1-pro-preview as secondary (I don't like how it's rate limited).

It's a great personal assistant. Helps me track industry news, key clients, reminds me of important tasks, and helps brainstorm (the rubber duck effect alone is worth it). Now building other skills.

Next step is to run all models locally (I think using Claude/OpenAI APIs is a huge mistake from a privacy standpoint). Since Mac Studios are sold out (and M5 Ultra is not out yet), will probably go with a GX10 or two.

Me.

It’s fun and it works. I’ve tied it to consumption on open router and the main vendors. The free llm on openrouter are interesting but get exhausted quickly. I heavily suggest making a clean slate and going from there.

It’s amazing, it helps me do misc tasks I wouldn’t do so I can… be more lazy. Most of it is local file system crud but man it’s amazing for that.

Well i built an equivalent of OpenClaw using Claude Code and hooking it up with WhatsApp. For mew I'm currently using it for following things

1. Morning brief + meeting preps 2. Managing client work and action items (tracking status, deliverables, etc) 3. Executing our AI workflows on my laptop. We have built several AI workflows for our agency and this setup gives the ability to seamlessly execute and control them through both mobile and desktop

Next on my to-do list is to build additional workfows for me and my wife around family logistics (travel, childcare, etc)

Yes - I've set it up as an 'office manager,' where it mainly snakily interacts with the local team via Slack, and controls an office TV to show our quote board, PTO calendar, and upcoming events. The Clawe is overkill for the use case, but sometimes is fun.

I'm collecting caught-in-the wild use cases at https://www.clawdrop.org

I use it personally for cold outreach - specifically list building, enriching, and qualifying.

I've got a free hosted one from Zo Computer which sends me a daily news summary but I can't say I really use it. https://zo.computer/ if you want to try. They had $100 free credits for the promo code 'clawconlon'. Not sure if that's still going.

Their talk was quite good https://youtu.be/6rSEOzWY08U?t=2246

I tried it for a few days and then dropped it. The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase. I was mostly interested in having AI writing little toy projects. I used pi over ssh instead, and eventually built myself a little mobile-first web UI wrapping pi.

I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you.

- Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite

- Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder

- Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversations to an sqlite file with full text search enabled

- SOUL.md? IDENTITY.md? USER.md? Stop wasting tokens and just use CLAUDE.md.

I only haven't quite figured out how to get channels working with 3rd party frontends.

I use claude code everyday. Most of my friend circle have a CC max subscription and we talk about and use AI all the time. Not a single one has installed openclaw yet.

For me personally I don't see that it can do a lot of things that CC/codex doesn't do and that _I_ want to do. Also I'm concerned about security.

For a while I wanted some agent I could tell what to do in my PC at home from my phone, so I just vibe coded a web site that can start CC and I used tailscale to secure it.

I'm trying Hermes right now. I can't really find a good use for it. I tried to use it for research type stuff but Google Scholar literally by itself is faster, better, doesn't get rate-limited. Idk. I am pondering connecting it to my other bot I built that has more useful things like access to my thermal receipt printer and task management stuff but even that is kinda dumb because it already does everything I need, so I don't really know where I'm going with it. Honestly, I don't get the idea behind openclaw and hermes.

Nah, I deleted VM with it. My friends did it too. There is no real usage for it.

At one point, it was awesome.

then it became bloated.

then I both found and made gateway agent for different tools that does exactly one thing - connect me to the machine and does nothing else.

No, no subagents, no workflows, nothing, just be my gateway agent and the machine itself runs a whole other ecosystem. It is a nice wrapper/replacement on top of SSH, but only that. I don't need an ounce more.

I have an instance that does search related to my research interests, tracks news related to viruses in the US, events happening around my area and an “urgent” news job that uses searx and for things going on around me. I used Qwen 3.5 9B and tuned some of the jobs with GPT 5.4. I recently switched to use Gemma 4 and there was seemingly no major difference. I’ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers without much effort.

Proactive agents are going to be a thing. OpenClaw is just an early search in the solution space.

For me the prerequisite for leveraging openclaw was developing function oriented repositories of markdown files tied to my roles that capture pretty much everything I know about the subject and ongoing work, and working with agents as assistants off of those as context. As a founder, product manager, for growth etc.

From there it’s pretty natural that I wanted to talk to an always on agent not tied to any particular machine which has the same context plus access to google drive etc.

I use it. I think everyone should try the original version out before it gets too muddled so they get the spirit of the thing even if it doesn't end up being the thing -- in a safe space where you know what data you're allowing it to claw thru.

On a couple of different Ghost sites I maintain, I got suspicious sign-ups from travel-related domains that require email verification.

I suspect they might have used OpenClaw to accomplish the email verification step (no evidence) and were setting themselves up for later comment spam.

Even if you aren't using OpenClaw, it may be using you!

I wanted to try it recently and went to their doc website. Ar first glance it looked surprisingly detailed for such a young project but why not.

I didn't wanted to run a random, possibility vibe coded tool on my computer right away so I decided to run it in a container. That's an option, great ! Tu run it with docker they recommended an install script.

Out of habit I downloaded the script and started skimming through it to figure roughly what it would do to my machine.

The stuff was a mess. Most of it seemed overcomplicated code to do simple thing. Then I ran into inline python code in the shell script. That's not super elegant but there are some valid use cases, why not. Then there was inline JS code... WTF? Then we're back in inline python.

Seriously, that's just a script to run a docker compose file ! We're not yet at setting up providers or anything.

I was not to run that script on my computer, and was happy I decided to go the container way.

I got back to the website to see if they have manual instructions... They did, maybe there's hope after all ? Those instructions ended up being incomplete or broken, even for someone who does devops-y stuff on a daily basis.

I decided to drop the experiment there and it left me with the impression of a pile of code thrown together by an army of monkeys.

In Japan, it's a product targeted by the Ministry of Information and Communications, and some people without programming knowledge are touching it because it claims to automate things, but for now, I don't want to touch it.

I've mostly been using it as a calendar interface and email drafter. I also find it useful for a daily agenda with meals, meeting, weather and so on. I find the responds slowly (10-15s) so I've probably configured it poorly. I'm just using a Hetzner node and OpenRouter but maybe local is better?

I still use it.

We have it as a data analyst that’s been trained via exemplar queries and MD about the underlying databases.

It also does ad creatives analysis and overall paid marketing spend analysis, including delivering briefs and conversing with stakeholders about things such as cross-ad-platform deduplicated cost of customer acquisition.

In general it is used to lower the technical bar required for cross-domain collab.

there is a huge push in china and (tencent). but the main purpose is for the token market, to bring more users as a consumer of tokens. but i dont see any useful outcome from this yet.

tencent is anxiety about it's progress about AI, as Alibaba and ByteDance is iterated much faster. so before it has strcit rules for QQ/Wechat( has 1 billon + users) for AI bot , but now it's open to openclaw (some tencent version i guess).

but it's still a toy for most people.

I gave up on openclaw but I’m presently installing Hermes.

I liked the idea, had it doing a few novel personal things, but it was so fragile and unknowable and 15% broken at every moment. It was expensive to keep and run, but I will essentially be running Hermes for free, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

I tried it a bit, and while the potential is huge, I mostly just use a cli agent (claude/codex) via Blink shell (iPhone/iPad) with Wireguard for technical work or https://agency.nu for any automations using integration, voice chat etc.

How do y'all manage conversations with OpenClaw through platforms like WhatsApp? I mean conversation history and multiple conversations in parallel.

I used openclaw until claude released sheduled routines.

Nowadays i just create a repo insert context and then run sheduled routines with claude windows app against it.

For my use cases thats all i need and the most important part is that I can officially use my claude subscription instead of an API key.

It was very useful as an indication for who you can start ignoring in the ai hype space.

I'm only half joking. Blocked everyone / everything that hyped up openclaw and have been able to find much more interesting and reasonable ai related discussions in my feeds.

The people who are using it can't post here because OpenClaw deleted their HN account.

I tried using it for a specific web search task. I wrote a skill, got it all set up and deployed. It worked. But also, would have worked just as well as a cron job with some LLM looking at Brave API results. Like a lot of AI tools, it was a lot of work for underwhelming results.

I've used I cannot figure out the real benefit of it beyond novelty purposes.

I find Chrome Claude extension more useful for automating tasks online. Before ai I was writing my own macros which basically did the same thing in a more reliable deterministic way.

Tried it in the earlier days and it performed badly. I didn't give it free reign on my computer due to obvious security concerns so sandboxed it to a docker container instead. I think for a lot of tasks it's probably more trouble to set this up than to just DIY it.

I see the hype, but for me I don't see the value yet. It seems neat, but what exact automation brought you real benefits?

Telegram -> 1 Group/agent -> OpenClaw running on an old laptop

Using it for journaling and capturing ideas. Previous workflow as iPhone Memos. Now it's

voice message -> openclaw -> transcribe using parakeet -> git repo

This is a good example: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-openclaw-changed-my-l...

Tried it for a few weeks, was really buggy and unpredictable.

Kudos for the concept though, I ended up rolling my own agentic system with Claude Code from scratch that works much more reliably for my use cases.

On iPhone I use ChatGPT via Shortcuts and a-Shell for tool execution and Files for memory and state. I can schedule it to run or can invoke it from the home-screen via a shortcut.

I'm trying to. Currently there's a bug in the code that strips headers and doesn't allow me to authenticate to my AI Gateway service.

The whole thing is incredibly buggy. The dashboard is horrible, with page after page with similar-looking settings and what feels like hundreds of things I will never use. The categories in the dashbaord are also unintuitive. It's the kind of thing an AI would put together if it got very vague instructions. It doesn't scream quality and thoughtfullness. Not a bit.

IronClaw is much more promising imo. Trying it out right now. Much less issues so far.

I've tried it but after 10 minutes I found myself not comfortable running software this unpolished, specifically managing any sort of private data.

I'm being forced to implement it at my job.

The hype is real. The repository says 5k+ issues and 5k+ prs. There's no way any human being knows what's going on in the codebase. How people trust this to hit their APIs and hang onto their API keys is beyond me.

This is yet another straw on the camel's back; I'm building my industry exit strategy because of AI.

I still try to figure out how to use it to its full potential.

I mainly run it through github-copilot/claude-sonnet-4.6 using GitHub Copilot Pro + at 39$/month

Task management: My entire todo system runs through GitHub Issues. I just tell it things like "mark that done" or "add a task for X" in Slack and it handles the gh CLI calls. Sounds trivial but removing the friction of opening a browser actually changed how consistently I maintain my list.

Morning/EOD briefings: Cron jobs post a structured summary to Slack every morning and evening — calendar, open GitHub issues, important emails. It pushes a RSS feed of my tasks that I can view on a widget on my phone.

Server management agent: I have a different agent which acts as the server admin. It runs Jellyfin, a few *arr apps, AdGuard, mealie, etc. I don't touch config files or docker compose manually anymore. I just describe what I want changed. I have it run its own security audits frequently.

I also have a personnal coach agent which tracks my weight, my weekly exercices using gcal and creates meal plans which gets pushed to mealie so I can know what to buy for grocery and what to cook.

Literature reviews: I describe a research question and it runs a full pipeline — searches Semantic Scholar + Google Scholar, creates a Zotero collection with clean metadata, then tries to fetch PDFs through 9 different strategies (institutional repos, arXiv, Unpaywall, EZproxy with my university credentials, etc.). Gets about 60-65% PDF coverage automatically.

I have a personal shopper agent called Betty which role is to get out there and find deals about stuff I want to buy.

I also use it to run data pipelines for research project. It's instructed to use opencode with openai/gpt-5.4 for coding with beads and gastown.

I still have to figure out how to manage model switching efficiently. I'm not there yet.

It's the first AI setup that genuinely changed how I work rather than just being a fancy search engine.

Yes, at our company we are using it very extensively. I genuinely believe we're near the forefront of usage. We have multiple isolated OpenClaw instances serving as employee within Slack.

I am using it as one the agent that is automating LinkedIn outreach by running a bash script & using ai wherever it needs some decision like finding first name or what message to write, etc.

I adopted openclaw day 1 of the rename. I heavily configured and used it for awhile. If you're using old 'agentic' harnesses, you're being left behind.

That said, I stopped using Openclaw for Hermes. Openclaw released a massive patch that broke openclaw to an unrepairable state. I tried Hermes and havent even considered going back.

Dont use openclaw, use hermes.

ITT: "I don't use it, but ..."

I tinkered with Hermes yesterday but it still seems like a solution to a problem I don't have as a programmer.

i've been engineering things for almost 30 years and getting it wired up to Discord was worse than a root canal. Slack seemed just a tad better but it still doesn't even work.

I feel like most of this can be done with the platform tools at this point or a tiny bit of wiring of your own without the mega-bloat to make something generalized for the whole world.

I still use it daily, mostly for managing information consumption. It reads my twitter feed and scans HN twice per day, and sends me a digest of the discussions on Discord.

The best part is that it reads the comments too, and sends me a quick blurb. For example, this is what it sent me earlier, commenting on [1]:

  TL;DR: A classic essay arguing that compiler construction isn't as hard as thick textbooks suggest, pointing to Jack Crenshaw's accessible "Let's Build a Compiler" series as the real starting point.

  The Vibe: HN agrees most CS textbooks are overcomplicated — developers sharing their own minimal compiler projects and alternative learning resources.

I also have a few custom skills to read transcripts from YT videos and summarize the content, and store summaries in a personal wiki-style folder.

It runs in an isolated vm and doesn't have access to anything other than my X account, so I'm not too worried about prompt injection. I also don't have any skills installed other the ones I developed or carefully vetted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776796

a friend is using it but it seems like it breaks a lot.

ive got the scheduled claude-code running a couple scripts to find what events are going on round town and what food is cheap at grocery stores, but how much am i looking at the results? not super often. its publishing to a discord channel rhat makes it real hard to read

I have openclaw as a default install on all my dev servers. Pretty minimal setup with Telegram and Codex (since oauth is still supported). The setup comes in handy since openclaw can open and connect to tmux sessions and interact with them. I can pretty much do anything from telegram now.

its my remote control for claude code

it whatsapps me when its done or needs input it can not resolve, i start new session which are then done when i come to my computer

the reasons why i not use it more is tokens costs

yeah i could use a cheaper model for openclaw but then its just stupid

i am trying to run it on gamma next week

I've had success using the underlying harness - pi-mono as a data analyst in a sandbox.

I saw some non-technical people automating or creating small great tools with it which they need for their profession. These people are not programmers.

I think everybody who has basic understanding of programming and deployment better should stick to some AI coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode etc etc.

I don't think I'm missing out by not using OpenClaw & Co.

i use it with self hosted model, but often it's failed at using tools

I tried twice and couldn’t extract value. Loaded it with ability. Still couldn’t.

It seems a lot like paying to run malware when shell scripts and cron will do.

I'm only using it until I can make my own TUI from scratch in C or Rust.

I bought a Mac Mini, installed OpenClaw, and was impressed with the overall design and functionality. Then the problems started. Sometimes the gateway would crash, sometimes Signal (a channel I setup) would stop working. Upgrades seemed to break stuff. I had to dip into the terminal a lot to fix various things. It's quite useful if you don't already have Claude Code or similar tools setup, but frankly I haven't found a compelling use case that I can't get done in another more mature agentic harness.

I've heard too many horror stories so I'm waiting.

i switched to hermes agent. works better for me. using it on linux and mac.

Context and memory storage, plus crons and tools

Yeah it’s a coding beast if you get it dialed in right

eh nothing actual mission critical, however managing my home server has become a breeze and kinda fun, I've given my openclaw/nanoclaw a personality whose sole job is to tend to my server and enjoy it.

I have a bunch of telegram notifiers and bot templates laid out already as well as the whole arr stack.

So say a friend wants to track a tv show, I just ask openclaw to track it and setup a bot to notify them, it manages everything and sets it up cleanly (most of the time). They also have access to the public media directory so they can ask the bot when the next episode will come out or if some other show is available etc. Again, not super critical but building out this level of ux would've taken me a lonnnng time, it's pretty nice to have some company in managing my server as well which is a kinda lonely experience. Fun stuff.

I use it daily and also implemented it for a customer for a very specific use case. The Claude subscription change made it less desirable to use but I still enjoy it.

Heard too many horror stories, pass

I'm waiting for it to produce the most destructive worm in the history of personal computing as soon as someone with a sufficiently large list of e-mail addresses and a zero day prompt injection technique decides they want to create some chaos. Maybe I'll trust if it if we ever see AGI, but if we ever see AGI, chances are I'm not going to need it. So. No.

what is the open claw hype and also is it just more of an SF thing?

Not using it since Opus is gone

The main thing why I started using it too late was the slop. it's in the end AI generated, yes it can take your tasks but i never felt in my personal use case how it can help me when it's just generating slop. I used claude cowork more than openclaw after trying once that too in a cloud container since I'm afraid of its security

Frankly everything I have seen about says that the people using LLMs to develop it can not be trusted with LLMs so no. I am not using it. I'm not anti-llm's I'm anti-stupid-llm-usage.

I'm planning to set it up as a auto-marketing and user acquisition agent, but I'm also backpedaling on the idea since (1) people can probably easily tell that it's AI (2) that will produce negative reputation as a "slop company" (3) that's feeding into the dead internet theory

So in short, there's not much to do. I don't really have tasks I can just "hand off to OpenClaw"

I am but that is despite there being many very solid reasons not to. It's mainly painful until you sort out the many plumbing issues. This thread is going to be full of people telling you why not to use it. I'm not going to add more to that pile of great arguments except to acknowledge that, yes, it is super messy, insecure, dangerous, etc. I'm well aware.

So, why use it anyway? The promise of agentic workflows is very real. If you have seriously used agentic coding tools, you probably have figured out that in certain contexts it is a bit magical to see these tools solve real problems and do in minutes what would take you hours or days manually. It will also have exposed you to things like skills, guard rails, etc. that help you use these tools in a way that is a bit more repeatable and less prone to hallucinated outcomes. All this ports over well to OpenClaw. And in fact, you don't actually need OpenClaw as you can get most of what you are going to do in OpenClaw in agentic coding tools instead. Same models, same cli tools, same skills, etc. Try doing that instead if you don't want to go near OpenClaw.

OpenClaw only adds a few elements to this: 1) channels to communicate, 2) "agents" with memories and personalities in the form of markdown files and a feedback loop that updates these things out of the box. You can hack together stuff to add both to your agentic coding tools.

My company sells coaching and consulting services to people who are not programming that are interested in making a dent in the amount of digital drudgery work that they currently have to do. And because we sell it, I need to be able to actually do this. If you are a programmer you don't need our help. However, most of this planet is stuck with tools like ChatGPT that are very limited for this. There just are not a lot of good tools for these people yet. OpenClaw is a very rough, uncut diamond that if you get beyond its scary nature can actually do useful stuff. Tools will get better later. But right now, things just are going to be messy.

What I would recommend curious people: carve out some time to give this a serious try and don't give up too soon. Isolate it all you want. But focus on getting something useful going. You'll be solving lots of plumbing and configuration issues. And you'll need some imagination to make it do useful stuff because out of the box it's a bit useless and dumb until you make it actually do something useful.

Example of what I did recently that is useful and probably should be baked into the product.

Problem: setting up openclaw agents, hooking them up so you can talk to them, and configuring them is super tedious and fiddly in OpenClaw. Solution: an agent that does that.

How? For communication channels, I set up a new self hosted matrix server. Our company is now in there; we're ditching Slack. Because Slack is so locked down that it just can't really work for this. Matrix works really well for this. A lot of SAAS tools are locked down like this and finding workarounds is most of the work with agentic workflows. Replacing them is easier and the power move to make.

Synapse (the matrix server) has a cli and REST API. So, I created an admin bot user for OpenClaw to use that from an OpenClaw admin agent. That agent can create other agents, configure them with a model and a few other things. It gives them a new matrix bot user and hooks up a newly created room in matrix and then invites the team there. I didn't actually create that agent manually either; I made Codex bootstrap the admin agent for me. Because I used Codex to bootstrap the Matrix and OpenClaw vms for me earlier. So it had access already. Then I went on to create a few more agents with a few prompts. I actually made it rearrange my Matrix space and rooms as well. Because tedious and I just gave it access to that so why not. Yes, this involves giving admin access to an OpenClaw bot and this is scary.

We have a slide deck agent that uses reveal.js that you can use to prompt beautiful slides together. We have an SEO agent that figures out the right seo language for us to use and updates that regularly on our website. A competitive landscape agent that crawls a range of competitor websites to stay on top of what they are doing, what they are talking about, who they are linking to as customers, partners, etc. I have loads of plans for additional agents. We focus on agents that our clients would want to have so that we can get them going with those once they ask for that.

Once you get a few things like this up and running, this stuff becomes more useful quickly. It's still scary AF to give it access to all the stuff it needs. And you really really shouldn't. But it can't be useful unless you do. Classic security dilemma here. Throw out the baby with the bathwater or get things done now? Security often loses. And then people scramble to enable doing things in a more responsible way. I don't want to have to wait a few years for that to play out. But I recommend most other people to wait. It's the responsible thing to recommend. But if you don't want to, we can help you along the way and help you mitigate at least some of the risks.

Nope. I spun up a few Openclaws & a Hermes but never enjoyed the end results. Now I just use a telegram plugin for Codex. And run Codex on a miniPC I found in the trash. A $20/mo Codex sub gets me a GPT-5.4 agent that can make its own Automations (cron jobs), search the web, and modify the files and apps on the NAS drive I share. Simple and cheap works for me.

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

I work for a huge company and we've just gotten access to Claude Code and now all the AI folks are pushing super hard to get EIS to open up so they can start using OpenClaw with Claude.

I'm the "internally screaming" meme after having been in several of these meetings where dev teams are pushing for it under the guise of getting better at utilizing AI. "Well, OpenClaw plays extremely well with Claude Code, it could really give our teams a huge boost."

Oy vey the next few months are certainly going to be an adventure!

I've been trying out Hermes this week. OpenClaw felt like too much.

It was really easy to setup and I've been getting some value out of it but hasn't been the craziest thing in the world. I'm using it for:

- Unstructured note-taking: I suck at notes and todos and used to have a WhatsApp chat with myself (this is really common in Brazil) where I dump stuff. Now I dump into Hermes and it sorts whatever I put in there into one of various lists like to-do, to-read, to-try, to-buy, and so on.

- Briefings on a cron: I get reminded of my todos every morning and at the end of the day so I can cross stuff off. Later in the day I get reminded of my to-read list. I also get a summary of what went on from my coding orchestrator.

- Some coding: I built my own remote orchestrator and have been using Hermes to manage tasks, review code, and trigger tasks when on the move. Hermes has been a nice interface to allow me to use the orchestrator on my phone.

Haven't connected email or anything else yet. I feel like the security story here is lacking.

Overall it's been interesting but not mind-blowing. Plus setting up was easy but it's a bit buggy at times, messing up where files were and not being able to configure itself according to its own docs.

EDIT: Ah yes and voice notes via WhatsApp out-of-the-box is really nice

I love it, it is like Claude on steroids, I can just chat with it on my phone and iterate projects… sadly it’s really expensive now to keep using Opus, looking for alternatives that doesn’t gimp the reasoning and creativity is hard.

I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here:

---

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.

I like Openclaw. It's able to interact with a bunch of apps I self-host (e.g. media server, home automation, productivity) and I generally prefer communicating with it over Claude directly. I would not tell people to go out and fork over money for a mac mini to use it. I already had a mac mini sitting idle, so I'm putting it to use.

openclaw was the scrum of the ai generation. lots of money made by thought leaders and such. largely irrelevant today.

I can see some embryonic potential in the concept, almost like a little spark of genius. I'm convinced a variant of an agentic personal assistant will become commonplace within a few years and will likely gain widespread adoption.

That said, OpenClaw and most of its clones are extremely brittle right now. FWIW, I also tried building my own thinking the problem is surely the vibe coded complexity but it's not that, it's in limitations of the models and their training.

I do still have an OpenClaw instance running on an M1 Macbook Pro in my closet with a local ollama instance (qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4). It mostly cleans up my notes in my Trilium instance and it helps monitor prices of homelab components (on eBay and Reddit) daily.

I still haven't found an actual, useful scenario where something like OpenClaw would be a benefit to me. I don't regularly order arbitrary airplane tickets and I don't have a cluttered Desktop that I need AI to organize into folders. I don't run a YouTube channel with a "need" to do research on competitors and I don't get emails in a volume so large that I need automation to filter and summarize it, instead of just spending literally 10 seconds to delete my newsletters that I never read anyway.

I also don't trust AI which hallucinates answers 4/5 times that I ask it, for my technical work, thus I can't use it for PR reviews even if my company was OK with me feeling company property to it.

I also don't go grocery shopping random items and thus don't have a need to ask an assistant for "an inspiring and tasty recipe using the following ingredients".

I feel that OpenClaw and other similar "agentic" solutions are catered to me. But I also feel that I don't need any of it, because at the end of the day, it all just feels like a bunch of "Hello World" quality examples that cannot be applied to everyday life.

...heck, even a "get ready for work" assistant would be pointless, because I don't wake up and get ready with 20 minutes to spare, for some AI assistant to "recommend me the ideal time to leave my home, to arrive in time". Who does that? Who would sit around and do nothing for 10-15 minutes just because an AI agent told them that they didn't need to leave early?

OpenClaw & Friends feel quite useless.

Everyone’s just making their own multi agent stacks now

I’m not.

Never felt a need for it. I can already replicate much of what it does in more sustainable / preferable ways. I don't want agents reacting to things and doing things. I use agents to build reliable scripts which are then automated. I do have data collection points that I use an LLM to evaluate. The last example of this is I built a job polling service using CC. It's just a normal script that hits open APIs to pull job listing results into a SQLite database. I have another report which is run that drops an update of how many new jobs are in the database. If there's enough for me to be interested in, I'll fire up CC and have it parse through the job opportunities for the ones which match the profile we've been building. I've used an agent to literally build and deploy it all and it runs on an automated schedule. It just doesn't do agent shit while I'm not looking.

I could have piped the results of that search into `claude -p` and had it do the analysis "real-time" and only alert me about things I would be interested in. That's closing the loop in a similar way people use OpenClaw for. But I'm just not interested. It adds more failure points and conditions. The automated things should be as simple and predictable as possible. This may change after months or years more of LLM development or even just me refining my working config. But not yet.

i am using Hermes

lots of modern software devs suffer from the same thing notoriously associated with teenagers: strong urge to conform and comply with peer pressure. individuals vary, obvs. but as you age this urge shrinks

I noticed that Clawdbot’s initial acolytes seemed to skew towards solo founders and hustler/grifter types. The Mac minis were likely to spam leads over iMessage. The single top downloaded skill was for Twitter. The fastest way to monetize an openclaw agent is by spamming fake social proof for your product (including for openclaw itself).

raises hand

Nobody. Just another flash in the pan.

OpenClaw has no use. It has functions, but none of them are useful, because LLMs are mostly not useful.

Every OpenClaw "usecase" I've seen was unfalsifiable or just a function.

Use case: Using a calculator to add 2+2 OpenClaw "Use Case": "Read this email, figure out what the client is asking for, look up the relevant project in my task manager, draft a response"

This is unfalsifiable, and it's also something that requires general intelligence. it's also not something OpenClaw does. You do not need openclaw to do this, its not an llm. You could just paste the email and give 1 paragraph of context to chatgpt and get the same result.

WITHOUT making orchestration administration your full time job.

…Or is anyone making money directly out of running OpenClaw other than hosted providers or selling OpenClaw courses?

Absolutely not

I don't use openclaw but I spent few weeks on nanobot and then this week switched to Hermes. I have simple usecases like a news brief in the morning on my areas of interest, checking my email for latest updates on things I care about right now etc.

But I gave my wife access to the discord server, she burned 20% of weekly quota for codex (I use it as the provider) but created a skill which helps her practice dutch her way (she's learning it at A2 level for now). I went through the chats with her when she was showing it to me and it's amazing. She is a non technical person but she has tons of experience developing products. It was amazing (and to be frank very sexy) to see her work pretending as if she has been assigned a junior developer. The whole things a tangled mess of cron jobs, skills and scripts but her point is very simple "it maps perfectly to my learning style and keeps it fresher than flashcards or Duolingo".

Edit: wording. Also she wants me to mention at the end of the lesson it also does roleplaying which no other product gave her.

I had it working great (and using it a ton for sweng tasks) on the Max ($200/mo) plan. Then they intentionally broke it even though my usage was completely within their stated/published usage limits for my plan. It was providing me tons of value - easily $2-3k/mo.

I hate it but I caved, decided I would pay the extra usage charges, and prepaid $1k (because it came with a 30% discount). Set it up using the new sanctioned login method.

It's 5x slower and 80% of the time the requests fail authentication or time out. Now it can't even do basic stuff like my medication tracking system that I had set it up to do.

Fuck Anthropic. I'm a customer, ready and willing to pay whatever they ask for this, and they're treating me like a fucking mark. I'm tired of dicking around with it, jumping through hoops troubleshooting a previously working system simply because they won't just raise prices like a normal business.

No it's slop and most of the hype was manufactured marketing. It has 0 utility, and any perceived utility you can build yourself easily

Yes. They are all lobsters.

Looking at the comments here, it appears people are trying to do too much, too soon, which inevitably backfires. The key is to put OC in a sandbox (don't give access to your real accounts, it must have ints own separate non-admin accounts for everything only "invite" with limited access as you would a contractor) and generally treat it as a new employee during a trial period. You'll be surprised by how effective it can be if you pace yourself.

As for "you can easily do X,Y,Z with a cron job" we tech people often underestimate what hiding the complexity could do for UX.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." -- top comment on "Show HN, Dropbox (2007)