Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

openclaw.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#41

Post by petesergeant »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #16
blfr wrote: post #14

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best). I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful…

Has it ever found anything? If so, what? I've been marginally tempted to do something similar

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#42

Post by simon-b »

blfr wrote: post #14

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

Re Signal, I've taken a few flights lately where there's messenger-only wifi, and it's been handy to have OpenClaw on a box accessible through telegram to do web_searches for me.

That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#43

Post by reacharavindh »

cheeze wrote: post #33
blfr wrote: post #14

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

I use something like OpenClaw. For me the big benefit isn't so much the autonomous nature but the organizational structure. The one I use exposes an MCP and lets me control it via talking to an LLM _in the tool_ which is really powerful. EG "audit this", "in X thread we were discussing Y, can you pull that information", etc. And the organizational structure just... makes a ton of sense to me. Don't have to set up a t…

Which tool is it that got you comfortable? I’ve been resisting setting up another tool because it means more digression for my ADHD brain. It sounds you managed to contain the tinkering and got to the usefulness part. That’s why I’m curious.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#44

Post by rcarmo »

blfr wrote: post #14

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw to use for long-running background tasks (spec to plan to targeted code) because I needed something that could run on a server (I never run agents locally) and check on via any browser. I don’t think any messaging app will provide a good (or trustworthy) way to get to my own machines, so Tailscale+web it is.

Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#45

Post by ImHereToVote »

blfr wrote: post #14

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them? It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

I use mine to manage a paperclip factory.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#46

Post by gitaarik »

camillomiller wrote: post #25
Almondsetat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up

You’re still responsible for the copyright infringement I’m afraid

There's enough movies downloadable with no copyrights

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#47

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

flashblaze wrote: post #29
camillomiller wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago? Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disruptive at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.

I believe the thing which makes OpenClaw interesting is you can just ask it to do these things and it just does. Rather than you having to write these scripts. I understand with LLMs, writing these scripts would now be trivial, but I believe this is even more convenient.

At least writing scripts you know what it will and won’t do, with open claw it will probably do what you want and maybe won’t do anything you don’t want.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#48

Post by arjie »

hanrelan wrote: post #30
arjie wrote: post #6

It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.

How do you deal with auth/bot detection/captchas in that browser? That's where my agent consistently gets stuck

Captchas are handed to me to solve. Because the operations are in the background I usually make the agent be a little more human with typing and navigating. The slowness isn't a concern for backgrounded jobs. It is imperfect, of course, I triggered something on Grainger. And the truth is I should be using Luminati, but it's good enough to be useful to me.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#49

Post by normis »

c0rruptbytes wrote: post #26
Almondsetat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up

the rr suite seems much better for that

Of course you can use the native UI of all the apps in your ecosystem, the biggest feature of Hermes for me personally is that I can run any task in any of my 30 or so self hosted tools from a single chat interface (matrix), which is also quite secure. No longer do I need 30 open tabs and lots of clicking around, one sentence in my favorite chat app (even on the go in the phone), and many tasks can be executed at once. Unification of control.

Re: OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

#50

Post by soundworlds »

One thing I really like about Claude Code, Hermes, and other harnesses, is how much feedback they give about what they are doing. They take you along for the ride, which builds trust.

I tried OpenClaw for about 10 minutes, and the feedback I got (even using Claude under the hood) felt very "trust me bro, I've got this" - which made me trust it less.

I'm sure there's a way to get more verbose feedback? But I did feel too out of the loop to feel comfortable.

Post reply on HN