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Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#301

Post by TheDong »

nicksrose7224 wrote: post #273
aianus wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MyFitnessPal takes a lot of clicks to log one meal, I can just use natural language with openclaw.

What is the accuracy of this method vs manual entry?

When I message my claw "Mark that I had 825 calories for lunch today", it has marked down 825 correctly 100% of the time so far.

It shows me way fewer ads than all the popular fitness apps and loads way quicker since it doesn't have to load like 10MB of ads for me to enter one number, so it seems like a good improvement.

I do not think it's an improvement over an excel sheet, but as the average openclaw user, I would rather pay anthropic $10/day in API credits than create a google sheets document.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#302

Post by godot »

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 think this is a pretty common experience with setting up openclaw to do useful work. Both the unreliability as well as all the reassuring you it fixed some stuff but not really.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#303

Post by godot »

superfrank wrote: post #141

I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it. What do I use it…

The personality part, wow I thought I was the only one since no one else seems to have mentioned it anywhere. I agree.

During initial setup it even asked how you want its personality to be, I said upbeat and cheery. I know, I know, cliche for AI chatbots, but I kinda like it that way. But after that setup, it was nothing like it. Everything it says is just matter-of-fact-ly/stoic. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't also have this quirk where if you point out its mistakes, it keeps saying it'll fix it, but it still does not work right the next time. It just keeps reassuring you it'll be fine, in that stoic way, and then it's not fine. That's enough to drive me nuts.

I got used to it now though and I don't get mad at it or scold it. I just learned to work with its quirks and still get tasks accomplished.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#304

Post by lta »

I wanted to try it recently and went to their doc website. Ar first glance it looked surprisingly detailed for such a young project but why not.

I didn't wanted to run a random, possibility vibe coded tool on my computer right away so I decided to run it in a container. That's an option, great ! Tu run it with docker they recommended an install script.

Out of habit I downloaded the script and started skimming through it to figure roughly what it would do to my machine.

The stuff was a mess. Most of it seemed overcomplicated code to do simple thing. Then I ran into inline python code in the shell script. That's not super elegant but there are some valid use cases, why not. Then there was inline JS code... WTF? Then we're back in inline python.

Seriously, that's just a script to run a docker compose file ! We're not yet at setting up providers or anything.

I was not to run that script on my computer, and was happy I decided to go the container way.

I got back to the website to see if they have manual instructions... They did, maybe there's hope after all ? Those instructions ended up being incomplete or broken, even for someone who does devops-y stuff on a daily basis.

I decided to drop the experiment there and it left me with the impression of a pile of code thrown together by an army of monkeys.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#305

Post by charlieflowers »

TheDong wrote: post #301
nicksrose7224 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the accuracy of this method vs manual entry?

When I message my claw "Mark that I had 825 calories for lunch today", it has marked down 825 correctly 100% of the time so far. It shows me way fewer ads than all the popular fitness apps and loads way quicker since it doesn't have to load like 10MB of ads for me to enter one number, so it seems like a good improvement. I do not think it's an improvement over an excel sheet, but as the average openclaw user, I would…

I do something similar with Claude Code. I say, "I ate a single serving of that Toasted Beef Ravioli that Aldi sells." Claude web searches, finds it, gets its nutrition info, then uses gspread to add it to the daily food log tab of my spreadsheet.

So much less hassle, lower activation energy needed than with MyFitnessPal.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#306

Post by godot »

hatmanstack wrote: post #268
godot wrote: post #261

I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work. The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of "scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only…

So now all I really want to see is your setup script...you go first.

Hah I don't know if your msg is a "show me the script so I know where the security holes are so I can hack it" or just genuinely want a setup script for yourself to use.

But either way, nowadays it's trivial to ask Cursor/Claude Code to write you such a shell script.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#308

Post by lexandstuff »

brtkwr wrote: post #230
lexandstuff wrote: post #116

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 c…

I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).

Wow. This is a really cool idea. I am using Obsidian for family history, but I never thought to let people chat with it and update it via OpenClaw.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#309

Post by rootsudo »

Me.

It’s fun and it works. I’ve tied it to consumption on open router and the main vendors. The free llm on openrouter are interesting but get exhausted quickly. I heavily suggest making a clean slate and going from there.

It’s amazing, it helps me do misc tasks I wouldn’t do so I can… be more lazy. Most of it is local file system crud but man it’s amazing for that.

Re: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

#310

Post by datadrivenangel »

canadiantim wrote: post #78
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.

Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.

Except it's so janky and unreliable that the audience hasn't fully realized that it's not the winning move.
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