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Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

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Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#71

Post by bobjordan »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
bobjordan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet, but I can tell you that producing "good" code is another layer altogether. I have custom linters, code standardization docs, custom prompts, strictly enforced test architecture (enforced by the custom linters in pre-commit hooks which run before an agent tries to commit). Ultimately, it's a lot of work to get all the agents with a limited context writing code in the way you want. In the main large complex pr…

> but I can tell you that producing "good" code is another layer altogether. I feel like it isn't. If the fundamental approach is good, "good" code should be created as a necessity and because there wouldn't be another way. If it's already a mess with leaking abstractions and architecture that doesn't actually enforce any design, then it feels unlikely you'll be able to stack anything on top of below it to actually f…

Here is my view after putting in my 10,000+ hours learning to code pre-llm days, while also building a pretty complex design + contract manufacturing company, with a lot of processes in place for that to happen. If you have a bunch of human junior devs and even a senior dev or two that join your org to help you build an app, and you don't have any dev/ops structure in place for them, then you will end up with "spaghetti" throughout all your code/systems, from those relatively bright humans. Its the same managing agents. It cannot be expected to build a complex system from simple "one shot me a feature" from a bunch of different agents, each with a finite ~150k token context limit. It must be done in context of the system you have in place. If you have a poor/no system structure, you'll end up with garbage for code. Everything that I said I had to guide the agents, is also useful for human devs. I'm sure that all the FANGS and various advanced software companies also use custom linters, etc., for every code check in. It's just now become easier to have these advanced code quality structures in place, and it is absolutely necessary when managing/coordinating agents to build a complex application.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#72

Post by fzzzy »

bakugo wrote: post #36
nichochar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Karpathy[1] summarized why he thinks this is the case quite well (as described he was himself hyping it up a bit much, but there are some foundational reasons why it's a very interesting experiment). [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406

Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise. Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.

How exactly has Simon been grifting?

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#73

Post by GardenLetter27 »

bobjordan wrote: post #62
woeirua wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just sounds ridiculously expensive. Burning hundreds of dollars a day to generate code of questionable utility.

Personally, I spend $200 on claude code 20x plan + $200 on openAI's similar plan, per month. So, yeah, I spend $400 per month. I buy and use both because they have different and complimentary strengths. I have only very rarely almost reached the weekly capacity limit on either of those plans. Usually I don't need to worry about how much I use them. The $400 may be expensive to some people but frankly I pay some emplo…

Automated usage like you described violates Anthropic's terms of service.

It's just a matter of time until they ban your account.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#74

Post by andix »

revicon wrote: post #4

It is amazing how much they’re gaming the twitter algorithm, everything in my feed is claw/molt/whatever for the last week. It’s a masterclass in spammy marketing, I wonder if it’s actually converting into actual users.

In this case it's only about payout from views/engagement of posts.

There is no commercial interest from the developer of OpenClaw. He doesn't make any money from it. He made enough from selling his startup a few years back.

So when we suspected some companies to game the Twitter algorithm to make money, maybe they were not responsible for it at all.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#75

Post by gavinray »

I genuinely do not understand what the benefit of this tool is, over having Claude Code/Codex running on a VPS or your home machine and accessible over Tailscale.

If you want to be able to interact with the CLI via common messaging platforms, that's a dozen-line integration & an API token away?...

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#76

Post by oceanplexian »

Yes, I’m running it with a minimal set of plugins.

When I’m driving or out I can ask Siri to send a iMessage to Clawdbot something like “Can you find out if anything is playing at the local concert venue, and figure in how much 2 tickets would cost”, and a few minutes later it will give me a few options. It even surprised me and researched the different seats and recommended a cheaper one or free activities as an alternative that weekend.

Basically: This is the product that Apple and Google were unable to build despite having billions of dollars and thousands of engineers because it’s a threat to their business model.

It also runs on my own computer, and the latest frontier open source models are able to drive it (Kimi, etc). The future is going to be locally hosted and ad free and there’s nothing Big Tech can do about it. It’s glorious.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#77

Post by koakuma-chan »

fzzzy wrote: post #72
bakugo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karpathy is one of the biggest tech grifters of our time, so finding out that he's jumped on this grift train as well comes as no surprise. Actually, hang on... yep, to absolutely nobody's surprise, Simon Willison has also hyped this up on his blog just yesterday. The entire grift gang is here, folks.

How exactly has Simon been grifting?

Visit his site.

"Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now"

It's immediately obvious it's bullshit.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#78

Post by andix »

behole wrote: post #69

I made this comment in another thread butttt: I installed and setup (then) clawd bot all willy nilly and paid the price. Woke up in the AM and Clawd had been replying to ANY and ALL of my iMessages. It even got in a circle conversation that it accused itself of mocking ... itself. In the AM, I thought I was losing my mind - DID I WRITE ALL THIS SHIT?? Proceed with caution.

You're supposed to give the Bot a fresh account, or separate phone number. Not connect it to your personal iMessage, Telegram or WhatsApp.

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#79

Post by fzzzy »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #68
jbetala7 wrote: post #26

run 6 OpenClaw agents as employees. Buddy is my PA and manages the others. Katy handles X/Twitter growth. Jerry scouts jobs. Burry trades crypto. Mike does security. Elon builds and ships. They run 24/7 on a VPS, share intelligence through a shared file, and coordinate in a Telegram group. Elon built and deployed an app overnight without being asked. Burry paper-traded to 77% win rate before going live. The setup too…

What are you paying for tokens?

I would guess thousands, but I would be really interested to hear their answer

Re: Ask HN: Any real OpenClaw (Clawd Bot/Molt Bot) users? What's your experience?

#80

Post by Dzugaru »

bobjordan wrote: post #58
vanviegen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine letting a current gen LLM supervise Claude Code instances. How could that possibly lead to even remotely acceptable software quality?

I spec out everything in excruciating detail with spec docs. Then I actually read them. Finally, we create granular tasks called "beads" (see https://github.com/steveyegge/beads ). The beads allows us to create epics/tasks/subtasks and associated dependency structure down to a granular bead, and then the agents pull a "bead" to implement. So, mostly we're either creating spec docs and creating beads or implementing,…

But how is that less work and allows you to do that in Disneyland with your kids? For me, personally, there is little difference between "speccing out everything in excruciating detail in spec docs" and "writing actual implementation in high-level code". Speccing in detail requires deep thought, whiteboard, experimentation etc. All of this cannot be done in Disneyland, and no AI can do this at good level (that's why you "spec out everything in detail", create "beads" and so on?)
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