Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#191

Post by causal » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

pama wrote: post #143

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…

Thanks for sharing, can you give any specific examples of the kind of personalized tools that you find helpful?

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#192

Post by smrtinsert » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #94

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#193

Post by littlemishka » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

bigpapikite wrote: post #84

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…

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!

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#194

Post by causal » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

ryanmcgarvey wrote: post #38

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#195

Post by towledev » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

lexandstuff wrote: post #116

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 c…

Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#196

Post by lz400 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#197

Post by bryan0 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

tcoff91 wrote: post #188

bryan0 wrote: post #184

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#198

Post by BeetleB » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

bryan0 wrote: post #184

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…

How are you handling memory? That's what makes it "not work" for most people.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#199

Post by baby_souffle » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

tcoff91 wrote: post #189

johnzim wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#200

Post by littlemishka » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

lizardking wrote: post #152

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…

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.