Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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

Care to share more? What specifically is it accomplishing?

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.

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.

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.