Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are actually really great examples, because I've done several similar things with a more code-based deterministic approach, still utilizing an LLM.

I also have a number of sites that I query regularly with LLMs, but I use a combination of RSS and crawlers to pull the info into a RAG and query that, and have found the built-in agent loops in my LLM to be sufficient for one-offs.

I also hate most weather apps, so I have a weather section on my Home Assistant dashboard that pulls exactly what I want from the sources I want that my LLM helped me configure.

I also have my main todo list hosted on a computer at home, but since all of my machines including my phone are on the same virtual wireguard network, I use my editor of choice to read and write todos on any device I use as if it were a local file, and again, it's something my local LLM has access to for context.

I don't think either approach is wrong, but I much prefer being able to have something to debug if it doesn't behave the way I expect it to. And maybe part of the reason I'm skeptical of the hype is that a lot of the parts of this setup aren't novel to me: I had crawlers and RSS readers and a weather dashboard and private access to a well-organized filesystem across devices before LLMs were a thing - the only difference now is that I'm asking a machine to help me configure it instead of relying on a mix of documentation, example code, and obscure Reddit posts.

Interested in the calorie tracking (have done amateur bodybuilding). Are you mostly cooking your own meals? Wonder if scanning items and tracking more loosely (a more forgiving myfitnesspal) would be helpful for you? Its on the roadmap of things I'm looking to build for myself (just made this last weekend for buying tovala meals: http://brovala.site)

On strategy do you ever worry that we trend towards the same patterns? This being relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDL3Ch7Nz8c&t=4m7s

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