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.
For what it's worth, codex doesn't yet seem to be aggressively terminating accounts or invalidating auth tokens if they detect usage in a non-first party tool. Whether that will continue to be the case or not a gamble though.
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 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 work on something called Town (town.com) and your morning debriefer is basically a preset workflow we ship out of the box. You connect your Google Calendar and email, flip it on, and it just sends you a daily rundown. No cron jobs, no token tuning, no "I fixed myself" lies. Took us a while to get the reliability right but it genuinely doesn't break every other morning. It's free still for early tester, feel free to give it a shot!
Do you just give your Google account to OpenClaw, or create a separate account with limited permission? I'm worried that OpenClaw decides to create an entire website on GCP project without asking if they see a message like "have you already developed and deployed the management dashboard?"
Interesting. How's the performance on the Pi? I also have a Pi 4 running a few containers and thought about running Openclaw on it, but never got around to it because of performance concerns. I ended up installing Nullclaw which is simpler but much more lightweight.
I had a surprisingly large amount of issues getting it to correctly message me on discord if needed as part of heartbeat. Multiple times it broke and we fixed it. Then it was chewing through way too much usage so I set it to 6 hourly heartbeat and it stopped messaging entirely again, haven't bothered to fix.
It is nice though for debugging home server things when I ask it to.
I have a series of skills and scripts that I manually invoke using Pi. It checks my calendar, Slack, email, etc. and keeps pretty good track of my day, to the point that I trust it enough to get a lot of noise out of my head.
agree. it breaks a lot, integrations are hard, it turns out, and openclaw can only fix itself so much before you need human intervention and it just stops
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.
Of course, you need to be careful about what access you give to your agent. I gave my agent its own email, and I can forward it emails if I need it to read anything in my inbox.
Everyone will have their own threshold for what type of access they want to give their agent. some people will give it access to their personal email, bank account, etc, but I wouldn't recommend it yet! But I bet in a couple years this will be standard practice.
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.
It's massive in the sense of people hyping it on social media and grifters trying to profit from it. Pure FOMO, not dissimilar from the earlier "earning a side income using ChatGPT" hype. I doubt there are many people using it successfully for any purpose other than producing social media content promoting courses promising people to teach them how to use OpenClaw, for a fee of course.
Every time I've sat down to consider how it could be useful, I can't think of anything that I couldn't build as a series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts. (even using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting at first, but then the tokens are spent and I don't have ongoing cost)
I can only guess it's really not for "us", but rather for those who aren't afraid of technology but aren't really engineers.
My thoughts exactly. If whatever i wanted it to do was so unimportant that I can trust this thing to have full control over it and to do it successfully why even do it anyways? The risks of giving it full unparalleled API key access and control fully outweigh whatever gain.
> No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.
Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.
That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.
All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.
Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.
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.
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 bought a Mac mini m4 before openclaw to use as a music production machine, when it turned out not to work out I tried setting up openclaw on it after hearing all the noise, but that turned out not to work out either.
I’ve found a much better use for it now. I use it as a Tailscale + ssh + tmux + Claude code machine, which gives me an always on Claude code environment with persistent sessions. I ssh from my phone using termius and from my laptop through ssh, and I can even access my projects through Tailscale with hot reloading for the most part, no deploy needed. It’s really good and my mini isn’t idle at all.
Operations: mostly tasks and reminders, I often think of something while on the road and send a voice message (like I would to a real PA). I use Kokoro-based TTS for local text-to-speech. Anything from "remind me to discuss X with so-and-so tomorrow" to "I have a multiple PoC projects w/ large entities starting next week - think about how I can best handle that" to "brainstorm how can I maximize upfront revenue with them", etc
Sales: using Google/gemini web search API and it's best run off-peak due to rate limits 503 Service Unavailable (everyone is overbooked when it comes to AI) to see what's happening in the space, any new developments involving companies I care about - and send me a daily digest with an overview and conversation topics.
#1 is just Siri/Google Assistant with extra steps (and expense).
#2 could be a scheduled task (cron job or something higher level) that calls a plain old AI provider API. IIRC most providers can even do those natively now.
That would be valid if setting up a scheduled AI task actually took any technical knowledge, but it doesn’t. ChatGPT lets you schedule tasks natively in the UI, and I assume others do as well.
No recurring expense, just the hardware upfront cost. My next step is run the models locally as well. I used to work at FAANG (incl. compliance) and I would never use a cloud-based assistant of any kind.
Some truth to that. I hear it thrown around the office and everyone feels obligated to out agent each other (without actually proving a great use case)
For myself I don't need autonomous agents. I need a smaller version of Claude Code instead (the mcp client not the coding agent) that can run on local models that are under 24B params. I still need to try pi dev.
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.
I think it's great that you were able to build all of that! It sounds very useful. I'd recommend asking Claude Code to evaluate your entire setup and try to identify areas where a script running on a schedule could replace parts of this framework. You could probably get 90% of it from simple repeatable scripts which would let you save more tokens for things that actually need LLM "intelligence". But if you're happy with the ROI then it seems to be working quite well for you!
I actually have a /loop running scheduled tasks like syncing customer data from routeboard (my job scheduler) and a flat file (MD and JSON) agentic CRM I have created that keeps tabs on the status of all the jobs, invoicing etc. This happens at 2am every day.
The great things about NanoClaw is that its actually Claude running in an Apple Container on my Mac. I gave up on OpenClaw fairly quickly because it seems like the biggest security regression ever created in the history of human kind.
I have a Max 5x plan and it'm very happy to pay the money TBH, considering that proposals take only 20 minutes to build, and my conversion rate is quite high.
When I send them for the first time to a new real estate agent they love them because it's easier for them to "sell" my service to their client.
Just be careful. By all accounts I don't believe that the subscription plans cover 3rd party harness support. You may be at risk of all of this being shut down. That's one of the reasons I haven't explored other harnesses. The main one being, I can accomplish everything they can from within CC with some extra steps I know how to do compliant with a CC Max Plan Terms of Service.
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 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.
What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies, even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech.
Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in the future, people's assistants will offer to "solidify" frequently used workflows into software that minimizes or eliminates the LLM's role. For existing Claude Code users, its like "please just skip to that step! its cheaper and more secure and more reliable". But to many people who are interested in automation, perhaps that seems out of reach as a first step.
That's actually the best hypothesis I've heard to date.
My immediate reaction to anything someone says they're using OpenClaw for is "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing, which would be better in every possible way."
My approach to automation projects is just about the polar opposite of something like OpenClaw. How can I take this messy real-world thing and turn it into structured data? How can I build an API for the thing that doesn't have one? How can I define rules and configuration in a way that I can understand more about how something is working instead of less? How can I build a dashboard or other interface so I can see exactly the information I want to see instead of having to read a bunch of text?
It wasn't really until people started building things with coding assistants that I even saw the value in LLMs, because I realized they could speed up the rate at which I can build tools for my team to get things OUT of chat and INTO structured data with clean interfaces and deterministic behavior.
> "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing
As a no-longer-Claw-user, hard disagree. The convenience is being able to ask it to do something while I'm grocery shopping and have it automatically test it etc. Sure, I can set up Claude Code or some other tool similarly, but the majority of us aren't going to take the time to set it up to do what OpenClaw does out of the box.
I had OpenClaw do a lot of stuff for me in the 2-3 weeks I used it than I have with pi/Claude since I stopped using it.
Lots of simple one offs. Stuff like "Here's the URL for a forum thread that has 10 pages of messages. Go through all of them and tell me if information X is in there." Or "Here is the site to after school activities. Check it once a day and notify me if there is anything that begins in March."
Also, got it to give me the weather information I always want - I've not found a weather app that does it and would always have to go to a site and click, click, click.
I can add TODOs to my todo list that's sitting on my home PC (I don't have todos on the cloud or phone).
All of these can be vibe coded, but each one would take more effort than just telling OpenClaw to do it.
I think once I see someone post a use case that I could actually see saving me some serious time, I'll take the plunge. Until then, I'll just let people continue to say how great (or terrible) it is.
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.
You should ask claude code to write a bash script that does this for you. Then run that as a Cronjob every night. You might not need any inference at all to create the flash cards so it would be free.
Why not use Claude one single time to create a service that does this? I have this same question with 90% of the 'simple' use cases I see for these task runners, it always seems more efficient (not to mention consistent) to have it generate the service.
I cringe at my old boss’s handiwork in Claude and power automate sometimes and go “you know I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof, right?”
Then he just shoots back with, “yeah but now I don’t have to ask you.”
This is my kludge, there are many others like it but this one is mine.
Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...
But I actually did appreciate the one time he handed me a Cisco config that was 90% perfect and took me all of 5 minutes to fix. Sometimes the three of us make a hell of a team.
I use both actually. Anki for the reviews since the spaced repetition is hard to beat, but I use Norsha Notes (norshanotes.com) to generate the cards. You upload your notes or study material and it creates flashcards from them using AI, then you can export as .apkg and import straight into Anki. Saves a ton of time over making cards manually.
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 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.
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.
Hey, I'm an engineer on Town (town.com) -- we built the product version of this. Morning briefings, email, calendar, web research, all wired up as a hosted thing. No Mac Mini in a closet, no competing security models gridlocking each other. We spent a lot of time making the "just works" part actually work because honestly that's the hard part nobody talks about. Free right now and would genuinely love your feedback since you clearly know what you want out of this.
I've been working on a framework since the end of January or so. I'm on my 7th draft. As I've gone along, each draft gets markedly smaller. The overlaps between what I'm building and openclaw are significant, but I've realized the elements that make up the system are distinct, small, and modular (by design).
There are only a few primitives:
1. session history
1a. context map + rendered context map (think of a drive partitioning scheme, but for context -- you can specify what goes into each block of context and this gets built before being sent out for inference).
2. agent definition / runtime
3. workflow definition / runtime
4. workflow history
5. runtime history (for all the stuff session and workflow history fail to capture because they are at a lower level in the stack)
That's it. Everything else builds on top of these primitives, including
- memory (a new context block that you add to a context map)
- tool usage (which is a set of hooks on inference return and can optionally send the output straight back for inference -- this is a special case inside the inference loop and so just lives there)
- anything to do with agent operating environment (this is an extension of workflows)
- anything to do with governance/provenance/security (this is an extension of either workflows and/or agent operating environment... I haven't nailed this down yet).
I suppose I should say something about how agents and workflows work together. I've broken up 'what to do' and 'how to think' into the two primitives of 'workflow' and 'agent' respectively. An agent's context map will have a section for system prompt and cognitive prompt, and an agent can 'bind' to a workflow. When bound, the agent has an additional field in their context map that spells out the workflow state the agent is in, the available tools, and state exit criteria. Ideally an agent can bind/unbind from a workflow at will, which means long-running workflows are durable beyond just agent activity. There's some nuance here in how session history from a workflow is stored, and I haven't figured that out yet.
Generally, the idea of a workflow allows you to do things like scheduled tasks, user UI, connectors to a variety of comms interfaces, tasks requiring specific outputs, etc. The primitive lays the foundation for a huge chunk of functionality that openclaw and others expose.
It's been fun reasoning through this, and I'll admit that I've had an awful lot of FOMO in the mean time, as I watch so many other harnesses come online. The majority of them look polished, and are well marketed (as far as AI hype marketing goes). But I've managed to stay the course so far.
I hope you find your ideal fit. These tools have the potential to be very powerful if we can manage to build them well enough.
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 do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails
Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm genuinely curious but also a bit in shock. Do you really let an AI agent autonomously handle and respond to incoming board-level emails for you?
I feel often I'm behind the times, but this makes me feel way behind the times. I still haven't picked up AI into my daily life.
How do you know what the emails said, action items, who's communicating what to you? Do you trust it to handle and make decisions for you that are nuanced and in alignment with you?
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.
I'm an engineer at Town (town.com) -- morning briefing + email digest is literally a stock workflow we ship. You connect your accounts and it just runs. No self-hosted stack to babysit, so it doesn't break when we push updates (that was a fun problem to solve on our end tbh). Free right now if you want to try it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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 was going to try hermes agent after hearing OpenClaw constantly breaks and this hermes buzz is a better one. I t all sounds a lot of maintenance work.
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.
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.
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.
The email use case is interesting, though I feel like dictating via intermediary AI sounds more tedious to me than just using the email app on my phone.
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.
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.
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]
No. They want you to believe in the hype and that LLMs are the death of programmers and limitless. OpenClaw and other such agents are sold as a tool that "can do anything" but behind the scenes, the implication is still that big LLM is driving it. So both are conflated.
When you have insane amounts of capital and your gpu and talent needs are more or less met, there is a capital relief valve known as growth hacking. It only works if the consumer isn’t aware they’re being hacked.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Yep. I had posted a comment earlier detailing my usecases. But I too replaced that with my own system that does those same things.
It's way too bloaty, felt like operating windows start menu search.
But you might have missed so far some of the ideas they have. So it's useful to try it out, see what combination of features you use in particular and then just set those up for yourself with claude code or whatever as the LLM harness. Telegram integration is dead easy.
I ended up using QMD + custom skills to keep it up to date as new data comes in. Essentially a cross-referenced set of markdown files forming a knowledge base: https://github.com/tobi/qmd
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
it's a venture backed software + services company. the things we use openclaw for are not specific to what our company does. It's literally being used as an additional employee(s). Think about what people do -> OpenClaw does a subset of those things. Emailing, pulling data our of our platform to putting them into PDFs because a customer requested it, updating things in our CRM, answering support tickets, internal help desk type work... "how does so and so feature work in xyz edge case"... etc etc etc.
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 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.
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 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'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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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).
Reminds me of how startups now will change their social proof marquee on the landing page from actual testimonials, to "trusted by XYZ", to just one composed of company logos (with the level of corporate engagement to be imagined up by the viewer)
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.
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)
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...
I used it very similarly to you, but found it to be about $3.50 per day, or $100 a month. It wasn't worth that.
Z.ai explicitly allows you to use it with OpenClaw on their plans.
My minimax has liberal usage at $10 per month, if you’re not looking for some amazing model.
Couldn't you use it with a Codex subscription? Plus is $20 per month
I think the claude EULA has now explicitly banned this use https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/907074/a...
That's Anthropic. Codex is OpenAI.
For what it's worth, codex doesn't yet seem to be aggressively terminating accounts or invalidating auth tokens if they detect usage in a non-first party tool. Whether that will continue to be the case or not a gamble though.
Claude is not Codex.
Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?
That's exactly what I want to use it for, thanks for writing an article about it !
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 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 work on something called Town (town.com) and your morning debriefer is basically a preset workflow we ship out of the box. You connect your Google Calendar and email, flip it on, and it just sends you a daily rundown. No cron jobs, no token tuning, no "I fixed myself" lies. Took us a while to get the reliability right but it genuinely doesn't break every other morning. It's free still for early tester, feel free to give it a shot!
Do you just give your Google account to OpenClaw, or create a separate account with limited permission? I'm worried that OpenClaw decides to create an entire website on GCP project without asking if they see a message like "have you already developed and deployed the management dashboard?"
Interesting. How's the performance on the Pi? I also have a Pi 4 running a few containers and thought about running Openclaw on it, but never got around to it because of performance concerns. I ended up installing Nullclaw which is simpler but much more lightweight.
I had a surprisingly large amount of issues getting it to correctly message me on discord if needed as part of heartbeat. Multiple times it broke and we fixed it. Then it was chewing through way too much usage so I set it to 6 hourly heartbeat and it stopped messaging entirely again, haven't bothered to fix.
It is nice though for debugging home server things when I ask it to.
Works perfectly installed as part of a server and at mentioning you there. Direct DMs are finicky in my experience.
I have a series of skills and scripts that I manually invoke using Pi. It checks my calendar, Slack, email, etc. and keeps pretty good track of my day, to the point that I trust it enough to get a lot of noise out of my head.
What kind of noise does it filter out for you?
agree. it breaks a lot, integrations are hard, it turns out, and openclaw can only fix itself so much before you need human intervention and it just stops
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.
How are you handling memory? That's what makes it "not work" for most people.
I hope none of your accounts are associated with that email address that can be read by an LLM that has access to untrusted input.
OpenClaw lives right in the prompt injection lethal trifecta.
The idea of an OpenClaw instance having the ability to reset passwords on your accounts sounds sketchy as shit to me.
Of course, you need to be careful about what access you give to your agent. I gave my agent its own email, and I can forward it emails if I need it to read anything in my inbox.
Everyone will have their own threshold for what type of access they want to give their agent. some people will give it access to their personal email, bank account, etc, but I wouldn't recommend it yet! But I bet in a couple years this will be standard practice.
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.
It's massive in China. Search for "raise a lobster" and check out the videos from the events.
Yes. OpenClaw is (weirdly) tangled with anime/gaming culture in China.
It's massive in the sense of people hyping it on social media and grifters trying to profit from it. Pure FOMO, not dissimilar from the earlier "earning a side income using ChatGPT" hype. I doubt there are many people using it successfully for any purpose other than producing social media content promoting courses promising people to teach them how to use OpenClaw, for a fee of course.
Surprising seems like they'd favor Manus
Every time I've sat down to consider how it could be useful, I can't think of anything that I couldn't build as a series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts. (even using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting at first, but then the tokens are spent and I don't have ongoing cost)
I can only guess it's really not for "us", but rather for those who aren't afraid of technology but aren't really engineers.
My thoughts exactly. If whatever i wanted it to do was so unimportant that I can trust this thing to have full control over it and to do it successfully why even do it anyways? The risks of giving it full unparalleled API key access and control fully outweigh whatever gain.
> No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.
Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.
That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.
All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.
What a scam.
Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.
"Thing that has huge adoption is fake, they're all morons!"
There is one usecase: you can laundry your actions and just say "oopsies, llms when rogue I guess"
It's not pretty and not honest but if you're desperate I guess it's an option
I would prefer it if it could do my laundry. I can launder my actions on my own..
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.
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 bought a Mac mini m4 before openclaw to use as a music production machine, when it turned out not to work out I tried setting up openclaw on it after hearing all the noise, but that turned out not to work out either.
I’ve found a much better use for it now. I use it as a Tailscale + ssh + tmux + Claude code machine, which gives me an always on Claude code environment with persistent sessions. I ssh from my phone using termius and from my laptop through ssh, and I can even access my projects through Tailscale with hot reloading for the most part, no deploy needed. It’s really good and my mini isn’t idle at all.
That's a fair assessment if you look at LinkedIn posts.
Personally though, I am finding it incredibly useful and I use it daily to assist with operations, strategy, sales.
I’d be curious to hear more about how you use it for those 3 categories. Care to share?
Operations: mostly tasks and reminders, I often think of something while on the road and send a voice message (like I would to a real PA). I use Kokoro-based TTS for local text-to-speech. Anything from "remind me to discuss X with so-and-so tomorrow" to "I have a multiple PoC projects w/ large entities starting next week - think about how I can best handle that" to "brainstorm how can I maximize upfront revenue with them", etc
Sales: using Google/gemini web search API and it's best run off-peak due to rate limits 503 Service Unavailable (everyone is overbooked when it comes to AI) to see what's happening in the space, any new developments involving companies I care about - and send me a daily digest with an overview and conversation topics.
#1 is just Siri/Google Assistant with extra steps (and expense).
#2 could be a scheduled task (cron job or something higher level) that calls a plain old AI provider API. IIRC most providers can even do those natively now.
#2 also provides an opinion on why a certain development is significant and how it relates so something else I am working on for that client.
The process is definitely more pleasant to me than setting up cron jobs and scripting things. I have a business to run.
Your comment reminds me of the FTP/Dropbox one.
That would be valid if setting up a scheduled AI task actually took any technical knowledge, but it doesn’t. ChatGPT lets you schedule tasks natively in the UI, and I assume others do as well.
(And OpenClaw is hardly nontechnical!)
I mentioned the same thing and it's getting downvoted lol
No recurring expense, just the hardware upfront cost. My next step is run the models locally as well. I used to work at FAANG (incl. compliance) and I would never use a cloud-based assistant of any kind.
Some truth to that. I hear it thrown around the office and everyone feels obligated to out agent each other (without actually proving a great use case)
For myself I don't need autonomous agents. I need a smaller version of Claude Code instead (the mcp client not the coding agent) that can run on local models that are under 24B params. I still need to try pi dev.
Running neofetch equiv
Yeah, people really took it to the extreme and made a cult out of it for no reason. Mass delusion at its finest.
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
Great use-case!
I think it's great that you were able to build all of that! It sounds very useful. I'd recommend asking Claude Code to evaluate your entire setup and try to identify areas where a script running on a schedule could replace parts of this framework. You could probably get 90% of it from simple repeatable scripts which would let you save more tokens for things that actually need LLM "intelligence". But if you're happy with the ROI then it seems to be working quite well for you!
I actually have a /loop running scheduled tasks like syncing customer data from routeboard (my job scheduler) and a flat file (MD and JSON) agentic CRM I have created that keeps tabs on the status of all the jobs, invoicing etc. This happens at 2am every day.
The great things about NanoClaw is that its actually Claude running in an Apple Container on my Mac. I gave up on OpenClaw fairly quickly because it seems like the biggest security regression ever created in the history of human kind.
I have a Max 5x plan and it'm very happy to pay the money TBH, considering that proposals take only 20 minutes to build, and my conversion rate is quite high.
When I send them for the first time to a new real estate agent they love them because it's easier for them to "sell" my service to their client.
Just be careful. By all accounts I don't believe that the subscription plans cover 3rd party harness support. You may be at risk of all of this being shut down. That's one of the reasons I haven't explored other harnesses. The main one being, I can accomplish everything they can from within CC with some extra steps I know how to do compliant with a CC Max Plan Terms of Service.
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.
> no weird soul.md
The “soul document” actually originated from Claude. It’s not a prompt but embedded in its training.
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.
Could this be a bit of a Dropbox moment?
What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies, even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech.
Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in the future, people's assistants will offer to "solidify" frequently used workflows into software that minimizes or eliminates the LLM's role. For existing Claude Code users, its like "please just skip to that step! its cheaper and more secure and more reliable". But to many people who are interested in automation, perhaps that seems out of reach as a first step.
That's actually the best hypothesis I've heard to date.
My immediate reaction to anything someone says they're using OpenClaw for is "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing, which would be better in every possible way."
My approach to automation projects is just about the polar opposite of something like OpenClaw. How can I take this messy real-world thing and turn it into structured data? How can I build an API for the thing that doesn't have one? How can I define rules and configuration in a way that I can understand more about how something is working instead of less? How can I build a dashboard or other interface so I can see exactly the information I want to see instead of having to read a bunch of text?
It wasn't really until people started building things with coding assistants that I even saw the value in LLMs, because I realized they could speed up the rate at which I can build tools for my team to get things OUT of chat and INTO structured data with clean interfaces and deterministic behavior.
> "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing
As a no-longer-Claw-user, hard disagree. The convenience is being able to ask it to do something while I'm grocery shopping and have it automatically test it etc. Sure, I can set up Claude Code or some other tool similarly, but the majority of us aren't going to take the time to set it up to do what OpenClaw does out of the box.
I had OpenClaw do a lot of stuff for me in the 2-3 weeks I used it than I have with pi/Claude since I stopped using it.
Genuine question, why did you stop using it!
Edit: ah, scrolled down where you answered, thanks
Such as?
Lots of simple one offs. Stuff like "Here's the URL for a forum thread that has 10 pages of messages. Go through all of them and tell me if information X is in there." Or "Here is the site to after school activities. Check it once a day and notify me if there is anything that begins in March."
Also, got it to give me the weather information I always want - I've not found a weather app that does it and would always have to go to a site and click, click, click.
I can add TODOs to my todo list that's sitting on my home PC (I don't have todos on the cloud or phone).
All of these can be vibe coded, but each one would take more effort than just telling OpenClaw to do it.
This is a good description of the role of software engineer in the age of LLMs.
Most people still don’t think this way and need a software person to know enough about these things to describe them to the LLM.
No, Dropbox had a defined use case and solved a particular problem.
I was a fan of Dropbox when it game out because of that fact.
OpenClaw does not serve a particular problem. When/if it does, I will happily use it.
But no, the two couldn't be more different. You'll notice, yet again, in your very message you failed to mention one specific use case of OpenClaw.
If you asked me the same about dropbox when it first came out, I would've said, duh it helps me keep my files synced between devices.
There is no such thing with OpenClaw.
Are these people crypto enthusiasts by any chance?
They were, and then blockchain, and then NFT.
> I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is
People? Or bots.
Folks just pretending to be “influencers” and trying to cash in on the next big thing.
I see a lot of the same. I do know a couple people who do use it and I asked their take and it was kind of "meh".
I'm letting it mature a little before dipping my toe in. I've seem some horror stories, like it deleting repos, system files, and whatnot.
That's pretty much where I'm at with it.
I think once I see someone post a use case that I could actually see saving me some serious time, I'll take the plunge. Until then, I'll just let people continue to say how great (or terrible) it is.
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.
You should ask claude code to write a bash script that does this for you. Then run that as a Cronjob every night. You might not need any inference at all to create the flash cards so it would be free.
> ...useful flashcards...
How would the script do that without inference from free format md files?
Script can still run LLM inference
Why not use Claude one single time to create a service that does this? I have this same question with 90% of the 'simple' use cases I see for these task runners, it always seems more efficient (not to mention consistent) to have it generate the service.
Im curious can't your use case be done with Github self hosted runner ?
Or, like, a cron job.
>scripting and automation
I cringe at my old boss’s handiwork in Claude and power automate sometimes and go “you know I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof, right?”
Then he just shoots back with, “yeah but now I don’t have to ask you.”
This is my kludge, there are many others like it but this one is mine.
Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...
Boss might not even know what Bash is, let alone a crontab.
crontab yes, flavors of shell, no.
But I actually did appreciate the one time he handed me a Cisco config that was 90% perfect and took me all of 5 minutes to fix. Sometimes the three of us make a hell of a team.
You know that was a good answer.
What flashcard app are you using? Anki?
I use both actually. Anki for the reviews since the spaced repetition is hard to beat, but I use Norsha Notes (norshanotes.com) to generate the cards. You upload your notes or study material and it creates flashcards from them using AI, then you can export as .apkg and import straight into Anki. Saves a ton of time over making cards manually.
very cool :)
You should have it also review the cards too! /s
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 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.
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.
Hey, I'm an engineer on Town (town.com) -- we built the product version of this. Morning briefings, email, calendar, web research, all wired up as a hosted thing. No Mac Mini in a closet, no competing security models gridlocking each other. We spent a lot of time making the "just works" part actually work because honestly that's the hard part nobody talks about. Free right now and would genuinely love your feedback since you clearly know what you want out of this.
I've been working on a framework since the end of January or so. I'm on my 7th draft. As I've gone along, each draft gets markedly smaller. The overlaps between what I'm building and openclaw are significant, but I've realized the elements that make up the system are distinct, small, and modular (by design).
There are only a few primitives:
1. session history
1a. context map + rendered context map (think of a drive partitioning scheme, but for context -- you can specify what goes into each block of context and this gets built before being sent out for inference).
2. agent definition / runtime
3. workflow definition / runtime
4. workflow history
5. runtime history (for all the stuff session and workflow history fail to capture because they are at a lower level in the stack)
That's it. Everything else builds on top of these primitives, including
- memory (a new context block that you add to a context map)
- tool usage (which is a set of hooks on inference return and can optionally send the output straight back for inference -- this is a special case inside the inference loop and so just lives there)
- anything to do with agent operating environment (this is an extension of workflows)
- anything to do with governance/provenance/security (this is an extension of either workflows and/or agent operating environment... I haven't nailed this down yet).
I suppose I should say something about how agents and workflows work together. I've broken up 'what to do' and 'how to think' into the two primitives of 'workflow' and 'agent' respectively. An agent's context map will have a section for system prompt and cognitive prompt, and an agent can 'bind' to a workflow. When bound, the agent has an additional field in their context map that spells out the workflow state the agent is in, the available tools, and state exit criteria. Ideally an agent can bind/unbind from a workflow at will, which means long-running workflows are durable beyond just agent activity. There's some nuance here in how session history from a workflow is stored, and I haven't figured that out yet.
Generally, the idea of a workflow allows you to do things like scheduled tasks, user UI, connectors to a variety of comms interfaces, tasks requiring specific outputs, etc. The primitive lays the foundation for a huge chunk of functionality that openclaw and others expose.
It's been fun reasoning through this, and I'll admit that I've had an awful lot of FOMO in the mean time, as I watch so many other harnesses come online. The majority of them look polished, and are well marketed (as far as AI hype marketing goes). But I've managed to stay the course so far.
I hope you find your ideal fit. These tools have the potential to be very powerful if we can manage to build them well enough.
Wow, looks like you've put a lot of thought into this!
I skimmed the breakdown, and you've inspired me try something along these lines...
Thank You For Making And Sharing :)
Please do! My goal with this project has been to build something that helps other people, so if I've inspired you to build, all the better!
Is there a place you share this kind of stuff? I'd love to follow along.
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 do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails
Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm genuinely curious but also a bit in shock. Do you really let an AI agent autonomously handle and respond to incoming board-level emails for you?
I feel often I'm behind the times, but this makes me feel way behind the times. I still haven't picked up AI into my daily life.
How do you know what the emails said, action items, who's communicating what to you? Do you trust it to handle and make decisions for you that are nuanced and in alignment with you?
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.
I'm an engineer at Town (town.com) -- morning briefing + email digest is literally a stock workflow we ship. You connect your accounts and it just runs. No self-hosted stack to babysit, so it doesn't break when we push updates (that was a fun problem to solve on our end tbh). Free right now if you want to try it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for sharing, can you give any specific examples of the kind of personalized tools that you find helpful?
This guy is: https://youtu.be/sxX8BMscce0?si=1MuE3_cCH_uDabrT
I got the AI Slop Tai Chi ad before and thought you tried to be funny.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing.
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 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 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.
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 was going to try hermes agent after hearing OpenClaw constantly breaks and this hermes buzz is a better one. I t all sounds a lot of maintenance work.
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.
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.
It is buggy. It's also good at self-diagnostics and I was able to either fix things or find working workarounds by collaborating with 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.
The email use case is interesting, though I feel like dictating via intermediary AI sounds more tedious to me than just using the email app on my phone.
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.
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.
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.
What does this have to do with OpenClaw? The Powers That Be want us to think there's a large user base of OpenClaw?
No. They want you to believe in the hype and that LLMs are the death of programmers and limitless. OpenClaw and other such agents are sold as a tool that "can do anything" but behind the scenes, the implication is still that big LLM is driving it. So both are conflated.
Who's they? What does this have to do with King Charles?
When you have insane amounts of capital and your gpu and talent needs are more or less met, there is a capital relief valve known as growth hacking. It only works if the consumer isn’t aware they’re being hacked.
I mean the big AI companies are totally keen around it, wouldn’t surprise me?
At my not-small-company, we have a dedicated channel where employees discuss their OpenClaw experiments.
Real people do use it :-)
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
The people who are using it can't post here because OpenClaw deleted their HN account.
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.
Nah, I deleted VM with it. My friends did it too. There is no real usage for it.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. I had posted a comment earlier detailing my usecases. But I too replaced that with my own system that does those same things.
It's way too bloaty, felt like operating windows start menu search.
But you might have missed so far some of the ideas they have. So it's useful to try it out, see what combination of features you use in particular and then just set those up for yourself with claude code or whatever as the LLM harness. Telegram integration is dead easy.
Definitely worth following for ideas.
How did you solve memory in your system?
I ended up using QMD + custom skills to keep it up to date as new data comes in. Essentially a cross-referenced set of markdown files forming a knowledge base: https://github.com/tobi/qmd
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.
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
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
Claude Code already has that with channels. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels-reference
No need for OpenClaw.
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 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'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.
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.
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
It seems a lot like paying to run malware when shell scripts and cron will do.
You have deterministic malware at home
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.
This is a good example: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-openclaw-changed-my-l...
I've heard too many horror stories so I'm waiting.
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.
Care to share more? What specifically is it accomplishing?
What does your company do and what do the open claw agents do?
it's a venture backed software + services company. the things we use openclaw for are not specific to what our company does. It's literally being used as an additional employee(s). Think about what people do -> OpenClaw does a subset of those things. Emailing, pulling data our of our platform to putting them into PDFs because a customer requested it, updating things in our CRM, answering support tickets, internal help desk type work... "how does so and so feature work in xyz edge case"... etc etc etc.
I tried twice and couldn’t extract value. Loaded it with ability. Still couldn’t.
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.
Context and memory storage, plus crons and tools
I'm only using it until I can make my own TUI from scratch in C or Rust.
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.
Heard too many horror stories, pass
I've had success using the underlying harness - pi-mono as a data analyst in a sandbox.
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 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'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"
Yeah it’s a coding beast if you get it dialed in right
openclaw was the scrum of the ai generation. lots of money made by thought leaders and such. largely irrelevant today.
Not using it since Opus is gone
https://openclaw.allegro.earth
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.
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.
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.
Everyone’s just making their own multi agent stacks now
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.
I’m not.
raises hand
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.
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
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.
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).
Reminds me of how startups now will change their social proof marquee on the landing page from actual testimonials, to "trusted by XYZ", to just one composed of company logos (with the level of corporate engagement to be imagined up by the viewer)
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.
…Or is anyone making money directly out of running OpenClaw other than hosted providers or selling OpenClaw courses?
probably not, seems like a money suck. but could it help you coordinate a lot of different systems? i think yes based on Claire Vo's use case
Absolutely not
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
I think the issue for our community is we will just create a LLM wrapper app in a few minutes to solve what we need making OpenClaw have 0 utility.
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)