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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#161

Post by haneul »

robryan wrote: post #157
bigpapikite wrote: post #84

I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short: I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast…

I had a surprisingly large amount of issues getting it to correctly message me on discord if needed as part of heartbeat. Multiple times it broke and we fixed it. Then it was chewing through way too much usage so I set it to 6 hourly heartbeat and it stopped messaging entirely again, haven't bothered to fix. It is nice though for debugging home server things when I ask it to.

Works perfectly installed as part of a server and at mentioning you there. Direct DMs are finicky in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#163

Post by razingeden »

senorrib wrote: post #96
valleyer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...

Boss might not even know what Bash is, let alone a crontab.

crontab yes, flavors of shell, no.

But I actually did appreciate the one time he handed me a Cisco config that was 90% perfect and took me all of 5 minutes to fix. Sometimes the three of us make a hell of a team.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#164

Post by tstrimple »

mjsweet wrote: post #105
tstrimple wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just be careful. By all accounts I don't believe that the subscription plans cover 3rd party harness support. You may be at risk of all of this being shut down. That's one of the reasons I haven't explored other harnesses. The main one being, I can accomplish everything they can from within CC with some extra steps I know how to do compliant with a CC Max Plan Terms of Service.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#166

Post by newswasboring »

I don't use openclaw but I spent few weeks on nanobot and then this week switched to Hermes. I have simple usecases like a news brief in the morning on my areas of interest, checking my email for latest updates on things I care about right now etc.

But I gave my wife access to the discord server, she burned 20% of weekly quota for codex (I use it as the provider) but created a skill which helps her practice dutch her way (she's learning it at A2 level for now). I went through the chats with her when she was showing it to me and it's amazing. She is a non technical person but she has tons of experience developing products. It was amazing (and to be frank very sexy) to see her work pretending as if she has been assigned a junior developer. The whole things a tangled mess of cron jobs, skills and scripts but her point is very simple "it maps perfectly to my learning style and keeps it fresher than flashcards or Duolingo".

Edit: wording. Also she wants me to mention at the end of the lesson it also does roleplaying which no other product gave her.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#167

Post by browningstreet »

I gave up on openclaw but I’m presently installing Hermes.

I liked the idea, had it doing a few novel personal things, but it was so fragile and unknowable and 15% broken at every moment. It was expensive to keep and run, but I will essentially be running Hermes for free, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#168

Post by mv4 »

Looking at the comments here, it appears people are trying to do too much, too soon, which inevitably backfires. The key is to put OC in a sandbox (don't give access to your real accounts, it must have ints own separate non-admin accounts for everything only "invite" with limited access as you would a contractor) and generally treat it as a new employee during a trial period. You'll be surprised by how effective it can be if you pace yourself.

As for "you can easily do X,Y,Z with a cron job" we tech people often underestimate what hiding the complexity could do for UX.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." -- top comment on "Show HN, Dropbox (2007)

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#169

Post by disqard »

all2 wrote: post #44
lxgr wrote: post #15

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, t…

I've been working on a framework since the end of January or so. I'm on my 7th draft. As I've gone along, each draft gets markedly smaller. The overlaps between what I'm building and openclaw are significant, but I've realized the elements that make up the system are distinct, small, and modular (by design). There are only a few primitives: 1. session history 1a. context map + rendered context map (think of a drive p…

Wow, looks like you've put a lot of thought into this!

I skimmed the breakdown, and you've inspired me try something along these lines...

Thank You For Making And Sharing :)

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#170

Post by sbinnee »

browningstreet wrote: post #167

I gave up on openclaw but I’m presently installing Hermes. I liked the idea, had it doing a few novel personal things, but it was so fragile and unknowable and 15% broken at every moment. It was expensive to keep and run, but I will essentially be running Hermes for free, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

I was going to try hermes agent after hearing OpenClaw constantly breaks and this hermes buzz is a better one. I t all sounds a lot of maintenance work.
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