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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#381

Post by brtkwr »

nullandvoid wrote: post #380
brtkwr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I can't relate to this need to fully explore and then document everyone's history - I can have a conversation for an evening and forget everything the next day, and I'm happy with that, the truly important things (to me) will distill themselves naturally. A case of different strokes for different folks I suppose.

In my case, I was curious about my ancestry and Nepal doesn't currently have an equivalent of an ancestry.com therefore the best source of the information is my family themselves while they're still alive.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#382

Post by jimbokun »

BeetleB wrote: post #172
jimbokun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Lots of simple one offs. Stuff like "Here's the URL for a forum thread that has 10 pages of messages. Go through all of them and tell me if information X is in there." Or "Here is the site to after school activities. Check it once a day and notify me if there is anything that begins in March." Also, got it to give me the weather information I always want - I've not found a weather app that does it and would always ha…

Would be interesting to see an OpenClaw feature that offers to vibe code a deterministic script for scheduled or frequently repeating tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#384

Post by djmips »

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).

This is to the people who are highly against this - when you read a book you are doing this - talking to others across time and space. This isn't that much different.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#385

Post by gpjt »

I have it running on a Proxmox VM. It basically just sends me summaries -- it reads a bunch of RSS feeds I pointed it to (news, tech, etc) and gives me a daily summary, along with an image of the day based on that. It also sends me recommendations for times to go for a run based on the weather and my Strava activity, daily recommendations for stargazing (what's visible and when, weather, etc), and a couple of daily reminders for things I tend to forget.

I'm using Claude as the model, though, so it's smart but pricey. Should configure it to use different models for different things, but it's trickier than I would have expected to do that.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#386

Post by ejoso »

mv4 wrote: post #145
ejoso wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be curious to hear more about how you use it for those 3 categories. Care to share?

Operations: mostly tasks and reminders, I often think of something while on the road and send a voice message (like I would to a real PA). I use Kokoro-based TTS for local text-to-speech. Anything from "remind me to discuss X with so-and-so tomorrow" to "I have a multiple PoC projects w/ large entities starting next week - think about how I can best handle that" to "brainstorm how can I maximize upfront revenue with…

Helpful info, thank you for sharing this.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#387

Post by elkos »

godot wrote: post #303
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…

The personality part, wow I thought I was the only one since no one else seems to have mentioned it anywhere. I agree. During initial setup it even asked how you want its personality to be, I said upbeat and cheery. I know, I know, cliche for AI chatbots, but I kinda like it that way. But after that setup, it was nothing like it. Everything it says is just matter-of-fact-ly/stoic. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't…

You may need to add a SOUL.md as per Hermes documentation that I don't have handy right now. Ask you hermes to do it for you. It really improved my interactions with it.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#390

Post by 8fingerlouie »

mandeepj wrote: post #248
redact207 wrote: post #39

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype. No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

I think it has obscure uses here and there, like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1shutzt/openclaw_...

But did it really warrant running an openclaw machine to do that ?

Claude Code, Codex or something else running on your laptop could also have done that, and with Claude Cowork / Dispatch you could leave Claude running on your laptop at home, using your phone to have it do the work.

I have no doubt agentic AI exists in our future, I'm just no so sure about needing openclaw.

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