From my perspective there are some people that have never built real processes in their life that enjoy having some processes now. But agent processes are less reliable slower and less maintenable then a process that is well-defined and architectured and uses llm’s only where no other solution is sufficient. Classification, drafting, summarizing.
I’ve had a Whatsapp assistant since 2023, jailbraked as easy assistant. Only thing I kept using is transcription.
https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt was released 3 years ago and many have extended it for more capabilities and arguably its more performant than Openclaw as it can run in all your chat windows. But there’s still no use case.
Fully agree with your comment regarding real processes. Being a Six Sigma Black Belt, studying processes and reducing the errors is critical.
The Openclaw processes at the moment scare me.
I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.
I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default.
The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough.
If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry.
I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
It would’ve happened eventually anyway, but OpenClaw is basically what kickstarted the beginning of the end of token subsidies. It’s a almost begging to be used wastefully. And agents would miss and lose nothing without it. It’s devoid of a reason to exist.
I don't follow the thinking here. If you are using it for coding maybe, but the main use case of openclaw is as a personal assistant. I'm using a $10 a month minimax subscription for it, and I've never used more than 10% usage of a 5 hour window.
Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?
Mine is not connected to any of that. It is only connected to my Obsidian vault. Daily habits are reminded and checked off. It asks about calories etc. Think more of a manager or accountability partner than 'email on steroids.' I use it to track personal projects primarily. Lots of other tools could accomplish task tracking, but this one is more proactive than those. If you read my other comments today you will see I am not an openclaw-maxi.
If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it).
I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time.
I will say, it's still amongst the best tools to do a variety of tasks. Yes, each one of those could be done with just a coding agent, but I found it's less effort to get OpenClaw to do it than you writing something for each use case.
Very honest question: One of the use cases I had with OpenClaw that I'm missing now that I don't use it: I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list.
How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw? How would you do it?
(My TODO list is strictly on a home PC - no syncing with phone - by design).
(BTW, the reason I stopped using OpenClaw is boring: My QEMU SW stopped working and I haven't had time to debug).
> I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw?
The general idea is make a simple deterministic program that runs on your PC at home in a never ending loop. Every minute or so, check Telegram for a new message. If a message is received, then the program runs "claude -p" with a prompt, whatever MCP tools or CLI permissions it needs, and the contents of your Telegram message. Just leave the program running on your home computer while you're out, and you're done.
I don't use Telegram, so coding the part to check Telegram would be the hard part. I use email instead, and have the program check every minute for new mail (I leave my email program running and check the local inbox file). I'd already coded up a local MCP server to manage my ToDo list (Toodledo) so Claude just calls the MCP tools to add the task.
For things like TODO, I guess an email will suffice.
However, it was really nice being able to use Telegram and get quick validation. I also had a flow set up where I could send a voice memo. It would take the audio file (ogg), run Whisper, and then pass through an LLM for cleanup, and follow the instructions in my message. Really handy to use while I'm walking around.
I guess I want to create my own OpenClaw like agent, but not with its crazy broad access: Just limited to the functionality I allow, and with the convenience of using Telegram. I don't care about memory, soul, etc.
I did the exact same voice memo thing too, except I had Claude make an Android app to record the file and send it to Whisper. In the end I had the app just email the transcription & trigger Claude that way (ie receiving the email triggers my PC to wake up Claude), rather than sending Claude the audio file directly.
My reverse audio reply loop is convoluted - I have Claude generate its TTS file from Whisper/Mistral, and upload them to a server with an RSS file it updates, so I can play them in my podcast app (AntennaPod), then send me a notification via Pushover that the reply is waiting. I ended up building out an MCP tool for that workflow, so Claude really just calls the MCP tool with the text of what it wants to say, everything else is a deterministic program doing the work.
Memory is really useful to have - it can just be a bucket of searchable Markdown files. It's also useful to have a "reminders to self" Markdown file that Claude reads each time, and that Claude can update. I don't continue the same context window, and that "reminders to self" plus the ability to read previous emails in the conversation seems to be enough to keep the context going for me.
You'll feel better if you know exactly how your Claw is locked down. Mine doesn't have the open email access others are granting, not at all. Claude gets a bit grumpy about that and keeps begging for more access :)
I felt pretty clever until (1) I found a repo where they used this trick to create a full OpenAI compatible API endpoint[0] (lmao, the VC money distortion field spawning truly comical Rube Goldberg machines), and (2) they started banning "unauthorized" usage of the Claude sub, which trend unfortunately seems to be accelerating recently as their lower value consumers have grown in both number and usage.
I think shoving claude -p in your bash script / cronjob / messaging app bot of choice counts as "unathorized 3rd party harness", but your guess is as good as mine...
(claude -p with per-token billing (i.e. paying 7x more) is allowed though, of course)
-- There's also an Agents SDK (formerly Claude Code SDK?) which is basically just claude -p but with more typing, as far as I could tell.
I'd use Obsidian with the sync. Or you can vibe code a telegram bot that calls that API for you in like 50 lines or something.
You can do anything if you believe!
Re: QEMU: For the sandboxing I realized what I actually wanted was "it can't read/nuke my files", so I made a non-privileged linux user and added myself to its group. So I can read/write its files, but not the reverse.
> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list
You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)
The API is on my home PC and not exposed to the outside world. Only OpenClaw via Telegram was. So my question is about the infrastructure:
How do I communicate with something at home (it could be the API directly) using a messaging app like Telegram? I definitely want an LLM in the mix. I want to casually tell it what my TODO is, and have it:
- Craft it into a concise TODO headline
- Craft a detailed summary
- Call the API with the above two.
I'm not asking in the abstract. What specific tools/technologies should I use?
I dunno - my boss has deployed a couple of claw agents that are pretty good at doing SWE and SRE work. They’re available for the whole company to use, and they save us a ton of time. Pretty decent use case! Personally I haven’t found claw agents replace anything really for personal use outside of commercial tools I’d pay for to handle scheduling and stuff, but I also haven’t tried / trusted too many new use cases outside of that cron / daily briefing or some family schedules.
I partly identify with the article. While I don't use OpenClaw itself, I hacked together my own small Claude-in-a-loop/cronjob, and it seems we're all getting our morning briefings and personalized morning podcasts now.
The other common use case seems to be kicking off an automated Claude session from an email / voicetext / text / Telegram, and getting replies back. I'm emailing Claude throughout the day now, and sometimes it's useful to just forward an email to Claude and ask it to handle the task within it for me.
But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted.
Give it enough context, long term memory, and ability to explore all of that, and useful stuff emerges.
Just a heads up if you're using claude -p with the sub your account might be in trouble, they're cracking down on this kind of stuff lately.
Enforcement seems to be a combination of string matching for 3rd party sysprompts, heavy usage, and some random factor.
Not clear if there are any hard rules you can stay on the good side of, the only way to be safe seems to be to pay per token. (There goes the ~90% discount!)
--
Also yeah you get ~80% of Claw by shoving Claude Code in a Telegram Bot ;) It's already a general purpose computer use thing, people forget! (And it's a lot better at extending itself than the actual claws, lol)
I think the least illegal and also least bad option is to just use ngrok and tmux tho
> In every case, when you dig deeper, the story is one of two things: either what they built could already be done with standard AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, any decent LLM with a simple integration), or it’s aspirational
All your use cases are fairly well handled by conventional LLM's. OpenClaw is a security nightmare, so it's probably worth switching away.
OpenClaw was never meant to be a tool that could do things you couldn't do without it.
Also, whenever someone points out you could accomplish something without it, he underestimates the effort needed. In the examples I'm thinking of, someone simply asked OpenClaw to do something, had a few back and forths with it, and it was done. I have yet to see someone say "Oh, I can do that without OpenClaw" and go ahead and do it within 10 minutes.
Not once.
OpenClaw is flawed, but the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.
> the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.
You offered nothing to support this. My openclaw is realistically just an agent in discord versus the CLI. That's not an "order of magnitude" more convenient. Anthropic already has a tool for it https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control
You've got it inverted. My point is the people saying "You could have done that just as easily with ..." are the ones not supporting it. The commenter has already built that thing with OpenClaw. If someone is saying it could easily have done without it - well, demonstrate it!
The difference is I would have to do that myself. It has access to gdrive and cc and does it for me when I send it a message in chat. Sometimes when I’m out I even just send it voicys.
Just an example of how I would accomplish them. The obsession with openclaw is generally misguided. The 'magic' is the LLM. I'm running an OC instance on a server in my home, I have experience here.
I think people are just tired of the fire hose of posts that have been showing up since it came out. It’s so annoying. Why does everyone need to pimp it so hard? It’s like your aunt trying to push Herbalife on you every time you see her.
Nothing of what my agents do, we didn’t previously do. But now I can get moderate to good results with a lot less effort. Allowing the business to expand whilst keeping costs controlled.
As a side note, one thing that seemed to really help was having the agent recursively summarize all the files into a repo map with the same folder/file structure as the repo.
And forcing to always orient itself with that repo map first seemed to really help it from tunnel visioning.
its almost as if its rules should be persisted, versioned and tested in a deterministic way. I also wonder if it might end up useful to try enforcing some kind of constraints to data (memory) itself. like if we could enforce atomicity, consistency, isolation AND durability. and transparency so no place for malware to hide. and deterministic execution, from fully reproducible builds...
er, nevermind. prob just crazy castles in the sky wistful dreams :-)
Some of this stuff is starting to look like technologies that worked, looked promising, but were at best marginally useful, such as magnetohydrodynamic generators, tokamaks, E-beam lithography, and Ovonics.
My biggest issue with OpenClaw is everyone talks about doing things with it but doesn't explain what it actually is doing.
First of all is not an LLM, you're beholden to an api or local llm limitations. Second of all it's always calendars, email replies, summarizing.
You do not need an LLM for that, and an LLM doesn't make it easier either. It sounds like executive cosplay, not productivity. Everything I see people talking about that's actually productive, it's doing probabilistically when deterministic tools already exist and have for in some cases over 20 years.
You don't need an LLM to put a meeting on a calendar, that's literally two taps with your phone or a single click in gmail. Most email services already have suggestions already built in. Emails have been summarized for 10 years at this point. If you're so busy you need this stuff automated, you probably have an assistant, or you're important enough that actually using general intelligence is critical to being successful at all.
The idea of getting an LLM email response sounds great for someone who has never worked a job in their life.
This comment section is full of llm writen responses too, to the point where its absurd. Noticing how most of them just talk in circles like "But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted."
This literally isn't even saying anything. This paragraph does not mean anything. It's not saying what its doing, whats happening or what the result is, just "something is happening".
No, you didn't save time using openclaw, you just changed to managing openclaw instead of doing your actual job.
You don't need custom scripts for most things if its actually something that matters, most tools already exist, and if you do openclaw isn't going to help you do it.
To clarify - we don't read user conversations - what I'm referring to is deploy volume (how many times OpenClaw gets spun up on our infra) and direct conversations I've had with people in my network who deployed OpenClaw independently
It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we are likely to see real movement.
Conventional LLM's are moving fast too. The argument is that OpenClaw isn't any more useful than conventional LLM's, and I suspect it will always be true because the conventional LLM's will gain any useful capabilities.
I think openclaw provides a unique feature of a standardized host environment for a persistent assistant. This is different than the chat interfaces that are presented by anthropic/openai/others that give you a 'while you are here' assistant interface and is very different from the idea of trained llm weights and ways of serving them up like llama.cpp and others. There really is something unique here that will evolve over time I think.
The hype around OpenClaw is a bit confusing but I think I figured it out. For most coders, Claude Code in the terminal was an important event. Letting it access code and change files directly. For normal users, they didn’t see the power is that.
OpenClaw runs Pi in a terminal and exposes the chat thru Telegram or any chatting app. This gave the ah-ha moment to non-coders that coders had had for 6+ months prior.
Good to know that I'm not alone. I now use it for music recommendations (not so great) and keeping track of restaurants I want to try (really good at this but so are a lot of other apps).
I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool.
It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.
But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.
I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.
The author makes some good conclusions; I’m as AI-pilled as the next hopefully-not-soon-to-be-ex-software-engineer, and I struggled to find use cases for my Claw that couldn’t be served with a cronjob and $harness.
If your findings contradict that, we are all ears - genuinely.
Sure, anything it does can be done better with specialized tooling. If you know that tooling.
The memory thing sounds like an implementation limit rather than something fundamentally unsolvable. Just experiment with different ways of organizing state until something works?
I know that headlines are all about eyeballs, but this is seriously just exhausting. Headlines are advertisements and advertisements are about getting engagement. Surely having your audience just getting angry at them isn’t a good thing, right?
Why aren't databases the solution to many memory problems? Maybe this is a naive question:
For example, for the invitations in the OP: Have Openclaw write incoming rsvps to a database, probably a flat file here, and use the db as persistent memory: OpenClaw can compose outgoing update emails based on the database. Don't even suggest to OpenClaws that it try to remember the rsvps - its job is just writing to and reading from a database, and composing emails based on the latter. ?
Does that violate the experiment, by using some tool in addition to OpenClaw?
IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.
They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.
However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.
There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.
We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.
We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.
We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.
In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.
It can integrate apis for you on the fly. That’s one of the biggest usecases IMO. Combine that with skills, cron, and sub-agents, and you get a lot of power there.
From my perspective there are some people that have never built real processes in their life that enjoy having some processes now. But agent processes are less reliable slower and less maintenable then a process that is well-defined and architectured and uses llm’s only where no other solution is sufficient. Classification, drafting, summarizing.
I’ve had a Whatsapp assistant since 2023, jailbraked as easy assistant. Only thing I kept using is transcription.
https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt was released 3 years ago and many have extended it for more capabilities and arguably its more performant than Openclaw as it can run in all your chat windows. But there’s still no use case.
It’s really classification and drafting.
Fully agree with your comment regarding real processes. Being a Six Sigma Black Belt, studying processes and reducing the errors is critical. The Openclaw processes at the moment scare me.
I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.
Amen.
I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default.
The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough.
If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry.
I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
> easy to run on Kubernetes
that sounds like an oxymoron.
I know Twitter has been talking up Hermes Agent by Nous Research a lot or id recommend building your own agent off of Pi.
It would’ve happened eventually anyway, but OpenClaw is basically what kickstarted the beginning of the end of token subsidies. It’s a almost begging to be used wastefully. And agents would miss and lose nothing without it. It’s devoid of a reason to exist.
I don't follow the thinking here. If you are using it for coding maybe, but the main use case of openclaw is as a personal assistant. I'm using a $10 a month minimax subscription for it, and I've never used more than 10% usage of a 5 hour window.
Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?
Mine is not connected to any of that. It is only connected to my Obsidian vault. Daily habits are reminded and checked off. It asks about calories etc. Think more of a manager or accountability partner than 'email on steroids.' I use it to track personal projects primarily. Lots of other tools could accomplish task tracking, but this one is more proactive than those. If you read my other comments today you will see I am not an openclaw-maxi.
If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it).
I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time.
I will say, it's still amongst the best tools to do a variety of tasks. Yes, each one of those could be done with just a coding agent, but I found it's less effort to get OpenClaw to do it than you writing something for each use case.
Very honest question: One of the use cases I had with OpenClaw that I'm missing now that I don't use it: I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list.
How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw? How would you do it?
(My TODO list is strictly on a home PC - no syncing with phone - by design).
(BTW, the reason I stopped using OpenClaw is boring: My QEMU SW stopped working and I haven't had time to debug).
> I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw?
The general idea is make a simple deterministic program that runs on your PC at home in a never ending loop. Every minute or so, check Telegram for a new message. If a message is received, then the program runs "claude -p" with a prompt, whatever MCP tools or CLI permissions it needs, and the contents of your Telegram message. Just leave the program running on your home computer while you're out, and you're done.
I don't use Telegram, so coding the part to check Telegram would be the hard part. I use email instead, and have the program check every minute for new mail (I leave my email program running and check the local inbox file). I'd already coded up a local MCP server to manage my ToDo list (Toodledo) so Claude just calls the MCP tools to add the task.
For things like TODO, I guess an email will suffice.
However, it was really nice being able to use Telegram and get quick validation. I also had a flow set up where I could send a voice memo. It would take the audio file (ogg), run Whisper, and then pass through an LLM for cleanup, and follow the instructions in my message. Really handy to use while I'm walking around.
I guess I want to create my own OpenClaw like agent, but not with its crazy broad access: Just limited to the functionality I allow, and with the convenience of using Telegram. I don't care about memory, soul, etc.
I did the exact same voice memo thing too, except I had Claude make an Android app to record the file and send it to Whisper. In the end I had the app just email the transcription & trigger Claude that way (ie receiving the email triggers my PC to wake up Claude), rather than sending Claude the audio file directly.
My reverse audio reply loop is convoluted - I have Claude generate its TTS file from Whisper/Mistral, and upload them to a server with an RSS file it updates, so I can play them in my podcast app (AntennaPod), then send me a notification via Pushover that the reply is waiting. I ended up building out an MCP tool for that workflow, so Claude really just calls the MCP tool with the text of what it wants to say, everything else is a deterministic program doing the work.
Memory is really useful to have - it can just be a bucket of searchable Markdown files. It's also useful to have a "reminders to self" Markdown file that Claude reads each time, and that Claude can update. I don't continue the same context window, and that "reminders to self" plus the ability to read previous emails in the conversation seems to be enough to keep the context going for me.
You'll feel better if you know exactly how your Claw is locked down. Mine doesn't have the open email access others are granting, not at all. Claude gets a bit grumpy about that and keeps begging for more access :)
>telegram bot that runs claude -p
https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON
It also supports Codex :)
I felt pretty clever until (1) I found a repo where they used this trick to create a full OpenAI compatible API endpoint[0] (lmao, the VC money distortion field spawning truly comical Rube Goldberg machines), and (2) they started banning "unauthorized" usage of the Claude sub, which trend unfortunately seems to be accelerating recently as their lower value consumers have grown in both number and usage.
I think shoving claude -p in your bash script / cronjob / messaging app bot of choice counts as "unathorized 3rd party harness", but your guess is as good as mine...
(claude -p with per-token billing (i.e. paying 7x more) is allowed though, of course)
-- There's also an Agents SDK (formerly Claude Code SDK?) which is basically just claude -p but with more typing, as far as I could tell.
[0] https://github.com/router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI
[0b] Honorable mention https://github.com/kronael/claude-serve
I'd use Obsidian with the sync. Or you can vibe code a telegram bot that calls that API for you in like 50 lines or something.
You can do anything if you believe!
Re: QEMU: For the sandboxing I realized what I actually wanted was "it can't read/nuke my files", so I made a non-privileged linux user and added myself to its group. So I can read/write its files, but not the reverse.
> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list
You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)
> You can use anything to call this API right?
The API is on my home PC and not exposed to the outside world. Only OpenClaw via Telegram was. So my question is about the infrastructure:
How do I communicate with something at home (it could be the API directly) using a messaging app like Telegram? I definitely want an LLM in the mix. I want to casually tell it what my TODO is, and have it:
- Craft it into a concise TODO headline
- Craft a detailed summary
- Call the API with the above two.
I'm not asking in the abstract. What specific tools/technologies should I use?
Just leave the bot running on your home PC, a Telegram bot can be programmed in any language of your choice that can communicate via a network.
If you aren't a programmer it's also the kind of small project that LLMs are great at, there are many examples ingested in their training data.
Tailscale on your PC and phone. Free (as in beer). I run vikunja.io in docker at home and simply web browse to it over the tailnet.
MS todo app, or any number of others. Added benefit of not needing telegram
I dunno - my boss has deployed a couple of claw agents that are pretty good at doing SWE and SRE work. They’re available for the whole company to use, and they save us a ton of time. Pretty decent use case! Personally I haven’t found claw agents replace anything really for personal use outside of commercial tools I’d pay for to handle scheduling and stuff, but I also haven’t tried / trusted too many new use cases outside of that cron / daily briefing or some family schedules.
I partly identify with the article. While I don't use OpenClaw itself, I hacked together my own small Claude-in-a-loop/cronjob, and it seems we're all getting our morning briefings and personalized morning podcasts now.
The other common use case seems to be kicking off an automated Claude session from an email / voicetext / text / Telegram, and getting replies back. I'm emailing Claude throughout the day now, and sometimes it's useful to just forward an email to Claude and ask it to handle the task within it for me.
But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted.
Give it enough context, long term memory, and ability to explore all of that, and useful stuff emerges.
Just a heads up if you're using claude -p with the sub your account might be in trouble, they're cracking down on this kind of stuff lately.
Enforcement seems to be a combination of string matching for 3rd party sysprompts, heavy usage, and some random factor.
Not clear if there are any hard rules you can stay on the good side of, the only way to be safe seems to be to pay per token. (There goes the ~90% discount!)
--
Also yeah you get ~80% of Claw by shoving Claude Code in a Telegram Bot ;) It's already a general purpose computer use thing, people forget! (And it's a lot better at extending itself than the actual claws, lol)
I think the least illegal and also least bad option is to just use ngrok and tmux tho
> 0 legitimate use cases
My teams currently using it for:
- SDR research and drafting
- Proposal generation
- Staging ops work
- Landing page generation
- Building the company processes into an internal CRM
- Daily reporting
- Time checks
- Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)
> In every case, when you dig deeper, the story is one of two things: either what they built could already be done with standard AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, any decent LLM with a simple integration), or it’s aspirational
All your use cases are fairly well handled by conventional LLM's. OpenClaw is a security nightmare, so it's probably worth switching away.
Most of these things I could’ve handled with pen and paper, but that’s missing the point.
None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.
> None of those things require openclaw.
OpenClaw was never meant to be a tool that could do things you couldn't do without it.
Also, whenever someone points out you could accomplish something without it, he underestimates the effort needed. In the examples I'm thinking of, someone simply asked OpenClaw to do something, had a few back and forths with it, and it was done. I have yet to see someone say "Oh, I can do that without OpenClaw" and go ahead and do it within 10 minutes.
Not once.
OpenClaw is flawed, but the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.
> the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.
You offered nothing to support this. My openclaw is realistically just an agent in discord versus the CLI. That's not an "order of magnitude" more convenient. Anthropic already has a tool for it https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control
> You offered nothing to support this.
You've got it inverted. My point is the people saying "You could have done that just as easily with ..." are the ones not supporting it. The commenter has already built that thing with OpenClaw. If someone is saying it could easily have done without it - well, demonstrate it!
It appears that you are confusing who has the burden of proof here. It is the one making the claim contrary to the status quo.
Hint: the status quo is not that openclaw is a tech that is magnitudes better than using LLMs without it.
Listing a bunch of things that are just normal LLM things as reasons why openclaw is great is not making that case.
The difference is I would have to do that myself. It has access to gdrive and cc and does it for me when I send it a message in chat. Sometimes when I’m out I even just send it voicys.
You're contradicting yourself here. Are you controlling it yourself or not? lol
It’s task dependent.
None of those require Claude Code CLI either, you could develop their workflows with a script (bash, python) and any quality LLM.
Just an example of how I would accomplish them. The obsession with openclaw is generally misguided. The 'magic' is the LLM. I'm running an OC instance on a server in my home, I have experience here.
What happens if it makes a mistake? How would you know?
10/80/10
10% done by an assistant that’s been trained on the task (or a dev or me)
80% heavy lifting done by claw
10% review and corrections
I don’t get people’s hate. Let others enjoy it.
I think people are just tired of the fire hose of posts that have been showing up since it came out. It’s so annoying. Why does everyone need to pimp it so hard? It’s like your aunt trying to push Herbalife on you every time you see her.
That, and some people hate being on the receiving end of the output. The old "if you didn't bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it".
somehow I've been able to do that for 40+ years using my brain, eyes, fingers, vi , CLIs and shell scripts. no unsolved problems there.
I did too :D
Nothing of what my agents do, we didn’t previously do. But now I can get moderate to good results with a lot less effort. Allowing the business to expand whilst keeping costs controlled.
I was able to buy stuff from home without the Internet as well.
I do feel like the memory the biggest hurdle I’ve been encountering and I’m curious what solutions people have been doing to make it work.
What seems to be somewhat working for me
1. Karpathy wiki approach
2. some prompting around telling the llm what to store and not.
But it still feels brittle. I don’t think it’s just a retrieval problem. In fact I feel like the retrieval is relatively easy.
It’s the write part, getting the agent to know what it should be memorizing, and how to store it.
As a side note, one thing that seemed to really help was having the agent recursively summarize all the files into a repo map with the same folder/file structure as the repo.
And forcing to always orient itself with that repo map first seemed to really help it from tunnel visioning.
its almost as if its rules should be persisted, versioned and tested in a deterministic way. I also wonder if it might end up useful to try enforcing some kind of constraints to data (memory) itself. like if we could enforce atomicity, consistency, isolation AND durability. and transparency so no place for malware to hide. and deterministic execution, from fully reproducible builds...
er, nevermind. prob just crazy castles in the sky wistful dreams :-)
"Who's in charge here?"
"The Claw."
Some of this stuff is starting to look like technologies that worked, looked promising, but were at best marginally useful, such as magnetohydrodynamic generators, tokamaks, E-beam lithography, and Ovonics.
My biggest issue with OpenClaw is everyone talks about doing things with it but doesn't explain what it actually is doing.
First of all is not an LLM, you're beholden to an api or local llm limitations. Second of all it's always calendars, email replies, summarizing.
You do not need an LLM for that, and an LLM doesn't make it easier either. It sounds like executive cosplay, not productivity. Everything I see people talking about that's actually productive, it's doing probabilistically when deterministic tools already exist and have for in some cases over 20 years.
You don't need an LLM to put a meeting on a calendar, that's literally two taps with your phone or a single click in gmail. Most email services already have suggestions already built in. Emails have been summarized for 10 years at this point. If you're so busy you need this stuff automated, you probably have an assistant, or you're important enough that actually using general intelligence is critical to being successful at all.
The idea of getting an LLM email response sounds great for someone who has never worked a job in their life.
This comment section is full of llm writen responses too, to the point where its absurd. Noticing how most of them just talk in circles like "But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted."
This literally isn't even saying anything. This paragraph does not mean anything. It's not saying what its doing, whats happening or what the result is, just "something is happening".
No, you didn't save time using openclaw, you just changed to managing openclaw instead of doing your actual job.
You don't need custom scripts for most things if its actually something that matters, most tools already exist, and if you do openclaw isn't going to help you do it.
Who is this guy and why is he casually admitting to reading all the user conversations???
To clarify - we don't read user conversations - what I'm referring to is deploy volume (how many times OpenClaw gets spun up on our infra) and direct conversations I've had with people in my network who deployed OpenClaw independently
It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we are likely to see real movement.
Conventional LLM's are moving fast too. The argument is that OpenClaw isn't any more useful than conventional LLM's, and I suspect it will always be true because the conventional LLM's will gain any useful capabilities.
I think openclaw provides a unique feature of a standardized host environment for a persistent assistant. This is different than the chat interfaces that are presented by anthropic/openai/others that give you a 'while you are here' assistant interface and is very different from the idea of trained llm weights and ways of serving them up like llama.cpp and others. There really is something unique here that will evolve over time I think.
The hype around OpenClaw is a bit confusing but I think I figured it out. For most coders, Claude Code in the terminal was an important event. Letting it access code and change files directly. For normal users, they didn’t see the power is that.
OpenClaw runs Pi in a terminal and exposes the chat thru Telegram or any chatting app. This gave the ah-ha moment to non-coders that coders had had for 6+ months prior.
>This isn’t a bug that gets fixed in the next release. It’s a fundamental constraint of how OpenClaw manages context.
Last I checked, it doesn't!
Good to know that I'm not alone. I now use it for music recommendations (not so great) and keeping track of restaurants I want to try (really good at this but so are a lot of other apps).
I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool.
It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.
But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.
I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.
I'm still trying to figure out what to use it for other than news aggregation...
I understand it's the quickest way to expose all your API keys.
The twist? This article and marketing campaign for it are 100% by OpenClaw.
Sounds like an armchair expert
Right back at ya ;)
The author makes some good conclusions; I’m as AI-pilled as the next hopefully-not-soon-to-be-ex-software-engineer, and I struggled to find use cases for my Claw that couldn’t be served with a cronjob and $harness.
If your findings contradict that, we are all ears - genuinely.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Sure, anything it does can be done better with specialized tooling. If you know that tooling.
The memory thing sounds like an implementation limit rather than something fundamentally unsolvable. Just experiment with different ways of organizing state until something works?
Could we stop with the clickbaiting headlines?
You forgot to add, “Here’s why.” /s
I know that headlines are all about eyeballs, but this is seriously just exhausting. Headlines are advertisements and advertisements are about getting engagement. Surely having your audience just getting angry at them isn’t a good thing, right?
Why aren't databases the solution to many memory problems? Maybe this is a naive question:
For example, for the invitations in the OP: Have Openclaw write incoming rsvps to a database, probably a flat file here, and use the db as persistent memory: OpenClaw can compose outgoing update emails based on the database. Don't even suggest to OpenClaws that it try to remember the rsvps - its job is just writing to and reading from a database, and composing emails based on the latter. ?
Does that violate the experiment, by using some tool in addition to OpenClaw?
IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.
They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.
However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.
There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.
We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.
We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.
We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.
In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.
I hope this helps.
I was getting a lot of use case out of it mainly interacting with the file system.
The problem is if not carefully designed it will burn through tokens like crazy.
It can integrate apis for you on the fly. That’s one of the biggest usecases IMO. Combine that with skills, cron, and sub-agents, and you get a lot of power there.
there are zero legitmate use cases? sure bro. you can say that to my claw which is making me more money than my salary
Making Money, the ultimate "legitimate use case".
Please elaborate
Almost certainly some kind of scam
Bounties?
Sure, bro.
[flagged]
Please don't do this here.