Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

[dead]

Yeah, people really took it to the extreme and made a cult out of it for no reason. Mass delusion at its finest.

I still use it and find it helpful.

My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via WhatsApp, but instead of the memory being locked away with a specific vendor, it's stored in version control that I can read and edit. That reason alone makes it compelling to me. When a better LLM comes along, I can just switch, and my memory and system prompts come with it.

However, I also use it for calorie/weight/workout tracking, to-do lists (bill, birthday, event reminders), and to support my various life admin tasks. I don't give it access to much at all, except a few skills that give it read-only access to some data.

Hasn't given me a 10x productivity boost or anything. It's just handy.

I wrote an article on it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...

I still use it but totally not the "This one trick will supercharge your profits" kind of way. I do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails and execute tasks I want to delegate but honestly could have had any our AI agent handle it. There was some manual task I told myself I would automate but never got around too, Openclaw made is just easier to prompt it in to being.

The next biggest thing I like is just the shared context from machine to machine and the fact its always running and I have given it yolo access to my local stack. Home Assistant crashes? Now the wife can ask the bot to restart it. I see an interesting HN blog, i can get it to add it to my obsidian make me a useful doc (I am starting to use the llm-wiki trend but Claude Cowork seems to be really killer for this). I see an Reddit post about some new service to run locally? I can ask it to spin up an lxc of it and configure it for my use case and it will do the wiring for me.

I will say since the killing of Claude oAuth i am finding a lot of its magic did come from Opus just being so aggressive. An example was I had a task of someone sending me an image and I would have to turn it in to a table and then upload it to this really crappy portal for my non-profit. I threw the task at Openclaw (and at the time running Opus 4.6) and i watched in real time as it reverse engineer the sites backend API and found a way for it to post the data itself and it wrote itself a python script to make it repeatable. I dont see that same kind of killer instinct of doing whatever you need to do to get the task done with other models (Codex and now MiniMax).

I have a series of skills and scripts that I manually invoke using Pi. It checks my calendar, Slack, email, etc. and keeps pretty good track of my day, to the point that I trust it enough to get a lot of noise out of my head.