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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#101

Post by Rekindle8090 »

OpenClaw has no use. It has functions, but none of them are useful, because LLMs are mostly not useful.

Every OpenClaw "usecase" I've seen was unfalsifiable or just a function.

Use case: Using a calculator to add 2+2 OpenClaw "Use Case": "Read this email, figure out what the client is asking for, look up the relevant project in my task manager, draft a response"

This is unfalsifiable, and it's also something that requires general intelligence. it's also not something OpenClaw does. You do not need openclaw to do this, its not an llm. You could just paste the email and give 1 paragraph of context to chatgpt and get the same result.

WITHOUT making orchestration administration your full time job.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#102

Post by mv4 »

I have it installed on a dedicated M4 16GB Mac Mini with Telegram, email, and Google Docs integration (the agent has its own accounts). I can chat with it, incl. sending voice messages via Telegram (it can send voice messages back using free TTS run locally).

Using google/gemma-4-31b-it as primary, google-gemini-3.1-pro-preview as secondary (I don't like how it's rate limited).

It's a great personal assistant. Helps me track industry news, key clients, reminds me of important tasks, and helps brainstorm (the rubber duck effect alone is worth it). Now building other skills.

Next step is to run all models locally (I think using Claude/OpenAI APIs is a huge mistake from a privacy standpoint). Since Mac Studios are sold out (and M5 Ultra is not out yet), will probably go with a GX10 or two.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#103

Post by Kiro »

redact207 wrote: post #39

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype. No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

It's massive in China. Search for "raise a lobster" and check out the videos from the events.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#104

Post by heliumtera »

redact207 wrote: post #39

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype. No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

There is one usecase: you can laundry your actions and just say "oopsies, llms when rogue I guess"

It's not pretty and not honest but if you're desperate I guess it's an option

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#105

Post by mjsweet »

tstrimple wrote: post #60
mjsweet wrote: post #41

I’m a professional maintenance gardener and I have used NanoClaw running on my Mac to do the following: Schedule jobs on my job management tool (I vibed it) using a custom MCP. I’ll ask it questions like “what jobs are on today” etc. start the job, complete the job etc. It will watch Gmail using a MCP for work orders from local real estate agents, where it will schedule quote visits. After the quote visit I add the p…

I think it's great that you were able to build all of that! It sounds very useful. I'd recommend asking Claude Code to evaluate your entire setup and try to identify areas where a script running on a schedule could replace parts of this framework. You could probably get 90% of it from simple repeatable scripts which would let you save more tokens for things that actually need LLM "intelligence". But if you're happy w…

I actually have a /loop running scheduled tasks like syncing customer data from routeboard (my job scheduler) and a flat file (MD and JSON) agentic CRM I have created that keeps tabs on the status of all the jobs, invoicing etc. This happens at 2am every day.

The great things about NanoClaw is that its actually Claude running in an Apple Container on my Mac. I gave up on OpenClaw fairly quickly because it seems like the biggest security regression ever created in the history of human kind.

I have a Max 5x plan and it'm very happy to pay the money TBH, considering that proposals take only 20 minutes to build, and my conversion rate is quite high.

When I send them for the first time to a new real estate agent they love them because it's easier for them to "sell" my service to their client.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#106

Post by daytonix »

It was very useful as an indication for who you can start ignoring in the ai hype space.

I'm only half joking. Blocked everyone / everything that hyped up openclaw and have been able to find much more interesting and reasonable ai related discussions in my feeds.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#107

Post by gleipnircode »

I used openclaw until claude released sheduled routines.

Nowadays i just create a repo insert context and then run sheduled routines with claude windows app against it.

For my use cases thats all i need and the most important part is that I can officially use my claude subscription instead of an API key.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#110

Post by fny »

I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you.

- Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite

- Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder

- Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversations to an sqlite file with full text search enabled

- SOUL.md? IDENTITY.md? USER.md? Stop wasting tokens and just use CLAUDE.md.

I only haven't quite figured out how to get channels working with 3rd party frontends.

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