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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#51

Post by linkregister »

araes wrote: post #27

Personally, better way to phrase might be "Does anybody you've actually met, visually viewed, use OpenClaw? Can you verify them using the software nearby?" In a few years, it's become so easy to falsify articles, falsify comments, falsify images, difficult to really even trust responses online anyways. As far back as 2016, Microsoft already had bots deployed online that could respond 96,000 times [1] in 16 hours all…

What does this have to do with OpenClaw? The Powers That Be want us to think there's a large user base of OpenClaw?

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#52

Post by rvz »

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.

> No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.

That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.

All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.

What a scam.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#53

Post by john2000stp »

I have openclaw as a default install on all my dev servers. Pretty minimal setup with Telegram and Codex (since oauth is still supported). The setup comes in handy since openclaw can open and connect to tmux sessions and interact with them. I can pretty much do anything from telegram now.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#54

Post by valleyer »

razingeden wrote: post #46
valleyer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, like, a cron job.

>scripting and automation I cringe at my old boss’s handiwork in Claude and power automate sometimes and go “you know I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof, right?” Then he just shoots back with, “yeah but now I don’t have to ask you.” This is my kludge, there are many others like it but this one is mine.

Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#57

Post by tstrimple »

Never felt a need for it. I can already replicate much of what it does in more sustainable / preferable ways. I don't want agents reacting to things and doing things. I use agents to build reliable scripts which are then automated. I do have data collection points that I use an LLM to evaluate. The last example of this is I built a job polling service using CC. It's just a normal script that hits open APIs to pull job listing results into a SQLite database. I have another report which is run that drops an update of how many new jobs are in the database. If there's enough for me to be interested in, I'll fire up CC and have it parse through the job opportunities for the ones which match the profile we've been building. I've used an agent to literally build and deploy it all and it runs on an automated schedule. It just doesn't do agent shit while I'm not looking.

I could have piped the results of that search into `claude -p` and had it do the analysis "real-time" and only alert me about things I would be interested in. That's closing the loop in a similar way people use OpenClaw for. But I'm just not interested. It adds more failure points and conditions. The automated things should be as simple and predictable as possible. This may change after months or years more of LLM development or even just me refining my working config. But not yet.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#59

Post by sixhobbits »

I set it up and had some fun but it was super janky and regularly broke, especially the whatsapp integration

Now I have a separate plugged in macbook running nixos (that claude set up) and a single long-running claude code process with a channel to a Telegram bot. This means I can talk to it much like I could with OpenClaw, but it's much simpler (no weird soul.md etc). It feels more powerful than just claude code directly as it can set up software, build me throwaway websites with research etc, and "do" things, but it's a lot more stable and feels more controllable because I understand how it works and don't have to worry about it signing up to some social media platform and getting poisoned by another claw.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#60

Post by tstrimple »

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…

I think it's great that you were able to build all of that! It sounds very useful. I'd recommend asking Claude Code to evaluate your entire setup and try to identify areas where a script running on a schedule could replace parts of this framework. You could probably get 90% of it from simple repeatable scripts which would let you save more tokens for things that actually need LLM "intelligence". But if you're happy with the ROI then it seems to be working quite well for you!
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