Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 428 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#341

Post by tiel88 »

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…

This is basically the same setup as mine, except I built a grocery price crawler, that spits out a weekly menu along with a check-box shopping list straight into my google drive. Wife loves being able to just type "we need toothpaste" or whatever into Telegram and whenever we go to do our weekly shop we get an up to date shopping list optimised for prices and our dietary preferences.

Before getting side-tracked by other projects I was also going to build a kind of family archiving function like someone in the comments also mentioned. Just to quickly be able to record small/funny family moments.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#342

Post by Havoc »

Recently started exploring it and will likely continue. Particularly fascinated by how (fake) self aware it is on configuration and functionality. Can make changes to itself etc

That said hesitant to give it access to emails etc so use will always be limited by that

Found it quite hard to set up though relative to other selfhosted tools. Need for https and all the additional security measures they put in place after some security scares are well beyond what randoms could manage I think

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#344

Post by joshstrange »

superfrank wrote: post #141

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…

> - I have an automation that rolls everything on my todo list over to the next day at 11:59pm

I use Daily Notes in Obsidian as my TODO list and I roll over the unfinished tasks daily. I started doing it manually, then had NanoClaw do it, then after multiple cases of NanoClaw “forgetting” to do it or accidentally running multiple times (apparently “once a day” was too complicated for it), I vibe coded a cron job which was great unless my computer was asleep or similar, so finally I vibe coded a obsidian plugin so that the first time I open my daily note on my phone or computer it will copy over my tasks while leaving behind anything I added to the daily note (aka my scratch pad).

The first 1-2 times NanoClaw did it for me it felt magical. I knew I could do it on a cron but it took me only a minute to explain what I wanted and while I knew it was massive overkill (to use an LLM to do want a simple script could do) I found it acceptable. That is, until it started messing it up.

I’m not saying this is the case for you but I feel like some people see Open/Nano/WhateverClaw do something right a single time and gush about it but I have zero confidence in its ability to reliably and consistently do these things. My task for it was incredibly simple, in fact it was the ONLY thing I asked it to do really, and it failed miserably.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#345

Post by vichoiglesias »

I managed to run a council using OpenClaw twice a day of different models that would discuss my personal projects, and send me to telegram ideas or suggestions for the next steps. It was quite cool and got very nice insights, but was burning tokens like crazy, so I stopped it.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#346

Post by geoffmunn »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #2

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.

We're using OpenClaw to do a massive number of fixes and improvements to our ERP.

It takes Jira tickets, resolves them, and creates a GitHub PR, which is then reviewed by another AI agent. It can even analyse screenshots with MS Paint-style arrows.

So far it's been an amazing tool - I am very impressed.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#347

Post by twoborders12 »

brtkwr wrote: post #230
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…

I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#348

Post by mjsweet »

tonymet wrote: post #234
mjsweet wrote: post #41

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 p…

how did you prompt it to continue in the loop indefinitely without needing supervision? do you have to check in on it?

I think I just used the /loop command to initialise it - ask it to do what you want. More docs here:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#349

Post by seebeen »

Can I tag along to the main question and ask - what are some good OpenClaw guides or plugin/skill collections that you think are must-use?

So much AI generated bullshit online, it's really hard to find good guides from bad ones.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#350

Post by seebeen »

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…

Thank you for this detailed writeup. If it's not a secret - what is your monthly ballpark figure. I'm planning to deploy an instance during the weekend, for light - medium usage. Can't gauge costs.
Post reply on HN