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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#11

Post by aeblyve »

XTXinverseXTY wrote: post #6

I noticed that Clawdbot’s initial acolytes seemed to skew towards solo founders and hustler/grifter types. The Mac minis were likely to spam leads over iMessage. The single top downloaded skill was for Twitter. The fastest way to monetize an openclaw agent is by spamming fake social proof for your product (including for openclaw itself).

Reminds me of how startups now will change their social proof marquee on the landing page from actual testimonials, to "trusted by XYZ", to just one composed of company logos (with the level of corporate engagement to be imagined up by the viewer)

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#12

Post by gneuron »

rvz wrote: post #8

…Or is anyone making money directly out of running OpenClaw other than hosted providers or selling OpenClaw courses?

probably not, seems like a money suck. but could it help you coordinate a lot of different systems? i think yes based on Claire Vo's use case

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#14

Post by sputknick »

I tried using it for a specific web search task. I wrote a skill, got it all set up and deployed. It worked. But also, would have worked just as well as a cron job with some LLM looking at Brave API results. Like a lot of AI tools, it was a lot of work for underwhelming results.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#15

Post by lxgr »

I've been playing around with it. The only two real use cases I have for it for now are entertaining me on long flights where I have messaging-only Wi-Fi and sending me a personalized "morning brief".

I suppose it could be a lot more useful if I actually gave it access to any of my personal data (it lives in a heavily resource-limited container), but there's absolutely no way I'm letting that hot mess of a walking, talking CVE anywhere near my data. It's somehow both horribly insecure and extremely prone to locking me out because of several competing security/permission models fighting it out and gridlocking each other.

Code quality and the issue tracker of the repo are a big mess; for example, the local "memory" retrieval functionality is completely broken for some trivial reason that has been reported and auto-closed about five times (automatically, of course).

In summary: Brilliant idea, terrible execution. Can't wait for the first big tech player I trust enough (or at least one that has my data already anyway) to actually make it a product. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#16

Post by dsiegel2275 »

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:

Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.

It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#17

Post by atonse »

I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code.

But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat.

I'm running half my company with Nanoclaw. Same idea, and has some benefits, but I live in CC all day so it's marginal (except for the fact that my laptop has to be on)

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#18

Post by gessha »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #2

I 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.

Are these people crypto enthusiasts by any chance?
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