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Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

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11–20 of 274 posts

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#11
post #5

I see this posted everywhere this week. Is it really that good? I understand this runs on any hardware (not limited to Mac Minis) as long as you have an API key to an LLM (Preferably to Claude). People online make bold promises that it will change your life... It sounds interesting to me, I might install it on a cheap Mini PC with Ubuntu. This can't come at any worst time as storage and RAM has gotten astronomical. I…

I've been really impressed with it.

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#12

I found this HN post because I have a Clawdbot task that scans HN periodically for data gathering purposes and it saw a post about itself and it got excited and decided to WhatsApp me about it. So that’s where I’m at with Clawdbot.

Yeah, it really does feel like another "oh wow" moment...we're getting close.

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#14
This is all starting to feel like the productivity theater rabbit hole people (myself included) went down with apps like Notion/Obsidian. It is clearly capable of doing a lot of stuff, but where is the real impact?

Like it’s cool that your downloads folder, digital notes and emails are all properly organized and tags. But they reason they were in that state to begin with is because you don’t inherently derive value from their organization. Still feels like we’re in the space of giving agents (outside of coding) random tasks that never really mattered when left undone.

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#15
post #4

Clawdbot is interesting but I finally feel like those people who look at people like me raving about Claude code when it barely works for them. I have no doubt clawdBot, when it works, must feel great. But I’ve had the tough time setting it up and found it to be very buggy. My first couple of conversations? It forgot the context literally seconds later when I responded. Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s improving by the da…

I’ve been doing Vim + aider, and now Claude Code. Those tools I understood. I never got into Cursor because I’m too old to give up Vim.

Clawd.bot really annoyed me at first. The setup is super tedious and broken and not fun. That’s mostly because I’m too impatient to tinker like I used to.

However, once you tinker, it’s so-so. I don’t think it’s a lot better than Claude Code or anything, but I think it’s just a focused vector for the same AI model, one focused on being your personal assistant. It’s like Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork. They’re the same thing. But given the low cost of creating custom tools, why not give people something that Clawd.bot that gives them focused guardrails?

Anyway, I could end up abandoning all of this too. And it’s all a kludge around things that should really be an API. But I do like that I can run it on my Mac Mini and have it control my desktop. It’ll be a cold day if I let it message for me; I’d rather it write deterministic code that does that, rather than do it directly.

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#16
What is the intended usage case? I mean beyond what say perplexity app chatbot/search does.

Struggling to see the assistant part here. Interact with other people in WhatsApp on your behalf or something? Guessing that would annoy others fast

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#17
Clawdbot finally clicked for me this week. I was renting out an apartment and I had it connect to FB messenger, do the initial screening messages and then schedule times for viewings in my calendar. I was approving it's draft messages but starting giving it some automatic responses as well. Overall it did 9/10 on this task with a couple cases where it got confused. This is just scratching the surface but this was something that was very valuable for me and saved me several hours of time.

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#19
post #8

How do people think about the sort of access and permissions it needs? "Don't give it access to anything you wouldn't give a new contractor on day one." https://x.com/rahulsood/status/2015397582105969106

Prompt injection is quite dangerous here...

Re: Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

#20
I’ve installed and tested Clawdbot twice and uninstalled it. I see no reason to use this unless it’s with local models. I can do everything Clawdbot can do with Claude Code innately and with less tokens. I found Clawdbot to be rather token inefficient even with Claude max subscription. 14k tokens just to initialize and another 1000 per interaction round even with short questions like, “Hey”. Another concern is there are no guarantees that Anthropic isn’t going to lock down Oauth usage with your Max account like they did with OpenCode.
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