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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#82[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#83I’m not.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#84I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short:
I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast for the weeks ahead to see how busy my month was. I spent about 40-50 bucks in one week just working through kinks and having it fix itself until I stumbled onto a post that helped me optimize my model usage for price instead of just throwing Opus and Sonnet at everything.
Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again. At a certain point I just got fed up with it and cut the cron job, it's still running on my pi but I never use it.
Pretty sure Claude has something like this now but I'm pretty thrown off the whole thing, I'd rather just take the 30-45mins to plan out my day in the morning myself.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#85I 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.
Could this be a bit of a Dropbox moment? What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies , even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech. Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in…
No, Dropbox had a defined use case and solved a particular problem.
I was a fan of Dropbox when it game out because of that fact.
OpenClaw does not serve a particular problem. When/if it does, I will happily use it.
But no, the two couldn't be more different. You'll notice, yet again, in your very message you failed to mention one specific use case of OpenClaw.
If you asked me the same about dropbox when it first came out, I would've said, duh it helps me keep my files synced between devices.
There is no such thing with OpenClaw.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#86I still haven't found an actual, useful scenario where something like OpenClaw would be a benefit to me. I don't regularly order arbitrary airplane tickets and I don't have a cluttered Desktop that I need AI to organize into folders. I don't run a YouTube channel with a "need" to do research on competitors and I don't get emails in a volume so large that I need automation to filter and summarize it, instead of just spending literally 10 seconds to delete my newsletters that I never read anyway.
I also don't trust AI which hallucinates answers 4/5 times that I ask it, for my technical work, thus I can't use it for PR reviews even if my company was OK with me feeling company property to it.
I also don't go grocery shopping random items and thus don't have a need to ask an assistant for "an inspiring and tasty recipe using the following ingredients".
I feel that OpenClaw and other similar "agentic" solutions are catered to me. But I also feel that I don't need any of it, because at the end of the day, it all just feels like a bunch of "Hello World" quality examples that cannot be applied to everyday life.
...heck, even a "get ready for work" assistant would be pointless, because I don't wake up and get ready with 20 minutes to spare, for some AI assistant to "recommend me the ideal time to leave my home, to arrive in time". Who does that? Who would sit around and do nothing for 10-15 minutes just because an AI agent told them that they didn't need to leave early?
OpenClaw & Friends feel quite useless.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#87I bought a Mac Mini, installed OpenClaw, and was impressed with the overall design and functionality. Then the problems started. Sometimes the gateway would crash, sometimes Signal (a channel I setup) would stop working. Upgrades seemed to break stuff. I had to dip into the terminal a lot to fix various things. It's quite useful if you don't already have Claude Code or similar tools setup, but frankly I haven't found a compelling use case that I can't get done in another more mature agentic harness.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#88Personally, 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?
No. They want you to believe in the hype and that LLMs are the death of programmers and limitless. OpenClaw and other such agents are sold as a tool that "can do anything" but behind the scenes, the implication is still that big LLM is driving it. So both are conflated.
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#89[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
#90I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short: I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast…
agree. it breaks a lot, integrations are hard, it turns out, and openclaw can only fix itself so much before you need human intervention and it just stops