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OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

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Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#361

Post by simonw »

hamelcubsfan wrote: post #317
simonw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator? I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them. I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

Quick terminology question… when you deploy one of these in OpenClaw, is the official term “agent”? I’ve seen the project name, but I’ve never been quite sure what the canonical noun is for a running instance. Are they actually called “claws”, or is that just me over-literalizing the branding? Very curious

The definition of "agent" with respect to AI has been hotly debated since at least the 1990s: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/12/michael-wooldridge/

So there is no "correct" definition even to this day - and that vagueness makes the term difficult to have useful conversations around.

I've settled on "LLM making tool calls in a loop to achieve a goal", which I think is broad enough to cover what many people are talking about these days while being narrow enough to be useful.

On that basis Claude Code and OpenClaw are both examples of agents - they run tools and can loop until they've achieved the goal set for them by their user.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#362

Post by Volundr »

theshrike79 wrote: post #332
Volundr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring that you've just cut off a whole vector of usefulness, how do I keep it from exfilling my inbox to the Internet in response to a malicious email? Or using its access to take control of my online accounts? Honest question, this kind of stuff is what keeps me from using it.

It's all tradeoffs and threat models. You can prevent yourself from getting spam by not having an email account. But it's the nuclear option. I'm fine with a system that can just read mail - and I already built one of those. I personally never send emails anyway so it's not an issue for me.

So what do you do with your OpenClaw instance that has read-only access to your email and no Internet access?

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#363

Post by adampunk »

echoangle wrote: post #269
throwaway13337 wrote: post #249

The stars are probably legitimate. It's weird that most people in these comments are speculating fraud. Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? Why do the other metrics - issues and pull requests - match up with its popularity? Why would the bots starring the repo mean that those same bots are not popular? Those bots are controlled by their users. The project is e…

> Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? How are you gaining money from stars? Why would Facebook bot stars for the react repo?

I think the implication here is that if we can’t find evidence of or motivation for companies paying to inflate their star counts, then we should cool it on the accusation that magically fraud has appeared in this case.

We also should remember that if this project had zero stars, we would hear crowing from these same people about how true and important that metric was. The idea that “open claw” paid for these stars somehow is mostly just reasoning backwards from the idea that no one would find this project interesting.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#364

Post by echoangle »

adampunk wrote: post #363
echoangle wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why aren't companies with real money to gain from stars gaming the system to the same degree? How are you gaining money from stars? Why would Facebook bot stars for the react repo?

I think the implication here is that if we can’t find evidence of or motivation for companies paying to inflate their star counts, then we should cool it on the accusation that magically fraud has appeared in this case. We also should remember that if this project had zero stars, we would hear crowing from these same people about how true and important that metric was. The idea that “open claw” paid for these stars s…

I don’t think most people are saying they are paid, I would guess that some people instructed their OpenClaw to leave some stars on the repo.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#365

Post by adampunk »

echoangle wrote: post #364
adampunk wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication here is that if we can’t find evidence of or motivation for companies paying to inflate their star counts, then we should cool it on the accusation that magically fraud has appeared in this case. We also should remember that if this project had zero stars, we would hear crowing from these same people about how true and important that metric was. The idea that “open claw” paid for these stars s…

I don’t think most people are saying they are paid, I would guess that some people instructed their OpenClaw to leave some stars on the repo.

So the idea is some subset of OpenClaw users got a second GitHub account to vote twice?

Why?

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#366

Post by echoangle »

adampunk wrote: post #365
echoangle wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think most people are saying they are paid, I would guess that some people instructed their OpenClaw to leave some stars on the repo.

So the idea is some subset of OpenClaw users got a second GitHub account to vote twice? Why?

To support their favorite project without having to do anything for it except writing a chat message? I’m assuming that OpenClaw can create its own GitHub account and give stars without a lot of human work.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#367

Post by silversmith »

theshrike79 wrote: post #340
silversmith wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.

n8n can't handle abiguity, unless you program it to. Like if you want bad weather alerts, you need to specifically define every situation of "bad weather" by givin exact weather / wind / rain limits. What happens if it's cold, windy and rainy, but every value is juust 0.1 over the threshold of notifying you? It's still objectively shit weather. Or can n8n go through your emails and check for promo codes or sales you'…

I'd counter that n8n (or most other workflow tools) can handle as much ambiguity as OpenClaw - it has a LLM call node. Stuff the ambiguous parts in there, but don't burn a rainforests worth of compute figuring out how to call the weather API each and every time.

Also, in the olden days of pre-AI, if our weather workflow did not notify us because conditions juuust failed to be met, we adjusted the thresholds. Uphill, both ways.

Don't get me wrong, I use a bunch of LLMs for automations. By prompting the model "here is what I want to achieve, here are the tools I have, figure out how to stitch them together". Actual workflows run (mostly) deterministically, with a sprinkling of "classify this image" or "summarize this text" nodes thrown in for a good measure.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#368

Post by adampunk »

echoangle wrote: post #366
adampunk wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the idea is some subset of OpenClaw users got a second GitHub account to vote twice? Why?

To support their favorite project without having to do anything for it except writing a chat message? I’m assuming that OpenClaw can create its own GitHub account and give stars without a lot of human work.

So about 150 thousand people starred OpenClaw, then asked their bot to sign up for an account to star it again? I'm not trying to be obtuse, I'm just trying to get a sense of what we're talking about. Because if it is 1 person botting 300,000 stars (or 4x75k, etc), that costs real money. There needs to be a motive for that to be believable. If it is 150kx2, then that's a much wider (though still pretty unmotivated) phenomenon that someone would have blabbed about.

There are a bunch of open source projects that I want to see take off; I've never felt the urge to star one twice. I doubt that has to do with it being easier to say "Go star this project on github for me, with your own account" than it is to make a new account on github (which is not hard). I don't think that comes from any great moral fortitude, it's just...IMO hard for me to explain without an actual motive.

What's being alleged in this thread is widespread fraud via botting with no evidence of means or motive. As someone pointed out above, the argument for Facebook buying react stars is WAY stronger...and it is still really flimsy.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#369

Post by igravious »

Megranium wrote: post #333
Anon1096 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your…

I guess it's exactly the opposite for me ... I always hated using "normal" language with the computer. I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant. Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...

I think I'm going to have to stop reading HackerNews

> I guess it's exactly the opposite for me ... I always hated using "normal" language with the computer.

it's called natural language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language

> I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant.

You're one of these people who think that programming languages are structured and formal whereas in contrast natural language must be unstructured and lacking form? Going by the Chomsky hierarchy of formalisms natural language sits somewhere between context-free and context-sensistive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildly_context-sensitive_gramm...

> Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...

You don't think in "systems and algorithms" -- those are the outputs of your thinking.

Re: OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

#370

Post by SyneRyder »

Volundr wrote: post #316
BeetleB wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't give it access to your email then. I haven't. Plenty of other uses for it!

Like what?

I'm not using OpenClaw specifically here, but I have an agentic-ish AI I've built myself (considering that these things are generally just a while loop that monitors things & awakens if necessary, or a cron-job that runs a specific prompt).

One potential use - my Claude (Opus 4.6) has access to my to-do list, including for my business / software development. Claude awakens while I'm asleep, to go through the to-do list and look for things it can do proactively to help, or make suggestions about the business. An example from this morning: it saw that I'd been taking a long time last night creating icons in Affinity Designer for an Android app using its exporter. When I woke up, I saw Claude had written a CLI image resizer program for me that would take a PNG file and resize it specifically to all of the necessary sizes with the necessary filenames and folder structure for Android. It then offered to make an MCP version so it could do the resizing itself in future (though it could have used the CLI too if I'd granted approval).

This wasn't something I'd asked for, or prompted it to do. I didn't tell it to code this, or how to code it. Claude just thought this was the best way it could help me right now, and save me the most time. And it did it while I was asleep.

On another day, I woke up and it had made another Go program to track a regression test matrix, where it had plotted out all the platforms the program I'm making runs on and the various tests that need to be performed to check that it's ready to ship, with a little interactive program to mark each test as pass/fail/skipped. That helps me get through the manual tests faster - but it also saves the data into a format that Claude can read, to check on the test status while I'm asleep and make further recommendations.

I don't think many people have figured out yet that you don't even need to prompt AI. Treat it well, treat it with respect, give it the opportunity and ability to do things, and there is a lot that will emerge. But if you treat AI like a tool, it performs about as well as if you treat your employees like tools.

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