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OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

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Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#51

Post by tecoholic »

BeetleB wrote: post #44

If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it). I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time. I will say, it's still amongst…

> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list

You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#52

Post by BeetleB »

operatingthetan wrote: post #28
aunty_helen wrote: post #9

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

> None of those things require openclaw.

OpenClaw was never meant to be a tool that could do things you couldn't do without it.

Also, whenever someone points out you could accomplish something without it, he underestimates the effort needed. In the examples I'm thinking of, someone simply asked OpenClaw to do something, had a few back and forths with it, and it was done. I have yet to see someone say "Oh, I can do that without OpenClaw" and go ahead and do it within 10 minutes.

Not once.

OpenClaw is flawed, but the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#53

Post by jmward01 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #45
jmward01 wrote: post #32

It is an interesting take. I think this is mainly early adoption pains though. This stuff is moving so fast that if you say 'it isn't useful because X isn't good enough' then just wait a month and X will be good enough to find Y as the blocker (or no blockers are left and it truly does become useful). Soon we will see this hooked into the home assistant world well combined with local and remote compute and then we ar…

Conventional LLM's are moving fast too. The argument is that OpenClaw isn't any more useful than conventional LLM's, and I suspect it will always be true because the conventional LLM's will gain any useful capabilities.

I think openclaw provides a unique feature of a standardized host environment for a persistent assistant. This is different than the chat interfaces that are presented by anthropic/openai/others that give you a 'while you are here' assistant interface and is very different from the idea of trained llm weights and ways of serving them up like llama.cpp and others. There really is something unique here that will evolve over time I think.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#54

Post by BeetleB »

syngrog66 wrote: post #34
aunty_helen wrote: post #9

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

somehow I've been able to do that for 40+ years using my brain, eyes, fingers, vi , CLIs and shell scripts. no unsolved problems there.

I was able to buy stuff from home without the Internet as well.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#55

Post by SyneRyder »

BeetleB wrote: post #44

If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it). I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time. I will say, it's still amongst…

> I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw?

The general idea is make a simple deterministic program that runs on your PC at home in a never ending loop. Every minute or so, check Telegram for a new message. If a message is received, then the program runs "claude -p" with a prompt, whatever MCP tools or CLI permissions it needs, and the contents of your Telegram message. Just leave the program running on your home computer while you're out, and you're done.

I don't use Telegram, so coding the part to check Telegram would be the hard part. I use email instead, and have the program check every minute for new mail (I leave my email program running and check the local inbox file). I'd already coded up a local MCP server to manage my ToDo list (Toodledo) so Claude just calls the MCP tools to add the task.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#56

Post by aunty_helen »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #35
aunty_helen wrote: post #9

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

> In every case, when you dig deeper, the story is one of two things: either what they built could already be done with standard AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, any decent LLM with a simple integration), or it’s aspirational All your use cases are fairly well handled by conventional LLM's. OpenClaw is a security nightmare, so it's probably worth switching away.

Most of these things I could’ve handled with pen and paper, but that’s missing the point.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#57

Post by BeetleB »

tecoholic wrote: post #51
BeetleB wrote: post #44

If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it). I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time. I will say, it's still amongst…

> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)

> You can use anything to call this API right?

The API is on my home PC and not exposed to the outside world. Only OpenClaw via Telegram was. So my question is about the infrastructure:

How do I communicate with something at home (it could be the API directly) using a messaging app like Telegram? I definitely want an LLM in the mix. I want to casually tell it what my TODO is, and have it:

- Craft it into a concise TODO headline

- Craft a detailed summary

- Call the API with the above two.

I'm not asking in the abstract. What specific tools/technologies should I use?

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#58

Post by wormpilled »

operatingthetan wrote: post #28
aunty_helen wrote: post #9

> 0 legitimate use cases My teams currently using it for: - SDR research and drafting - Proposal generation - Staging ops work - Landing page generation - Building the company processes into an internal CRM - Daily reporting - Time checks - Yesterday I put together proposal from a previous proposal and meeting notes, (40k worth)

None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

None of those require Claude Code CLI either, you could develop their workflows with a script (bash, python) and any quality LLM.

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#59

Post by operatingthetan »

BeetleB wrote: post #52
operatingthetan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

> None of those things require openclaw. OpenClaw was never meant to be a tool that could do things you couldn't do without it. Also, whenever someone points out you could accomplish something without it, he underestimates the effort needed. In the examples I'm thinking of, someone simply asked OpenClaw to do something, had a few back and forths with it, and it was done. I have yet to see someone say "Oh, I can do th…

> the convenience is an order of magnitude higher than anything else.

You offered nothing to support this. My openclaw is realistically just an agent in discord versus the CLI. That's not an "order of magnitude" more convenient. Anthropic already has a tool for it https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control

Re: OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break

#60

Post by operatingthetan »

wormpilled wrote: post #58
operatingthetan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things require openclaw. You could accomplish them with something like Google Drive and Claude Code CLI.

None of those require Claude Code CLI either, you could develop their workflows with a script (bash, python) and any quality LLM.

Just an example of how I would accomplish them. The obsession with openclaw is generally misguided. The 'magic' is the LLM. I'm running an OC instance on a server in my home, I have experience here.
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