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OpenClaw is changing my life

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Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#291
post #153

Besides that blog post obviously being written by AI, can someone here confirm how credible the hype about openclaw is? I'm already very proficient at using Claude Code anywhere, so what would i gain really with openclaw?

I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting: 1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time. 2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels conti…

> “hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it”

Isn’t the “what he thinks about it” part the hardest? Like, that’s what I want to phrase myself - the part of the conversation I’d like to get their opinion on and what exactly my actual request is. Or are people really doing the meme of sending AI text back and forth to each other with none the wiser?

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year…

>only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later Almost nothing goes obsolete in software; it just becomes unpopular. You can still write every website you see on the Internet with just jQuery. There are perfectly functional HTTP frameworks for Cobol.

obsolete in the software *industry

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#293
post #226
post #165

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving…

>the joy of problem solving It's frontier exploration that brings me joy. If a clanker can do something, then it's a solved problem. I use all the tools at my disposal to push the frontier of problems solved. Wasting my time re-inventing the wheel brings me the opposite of joy.

That's so reductive as to be useless. You might as well replace "clanker" with "computer" or "pencil" or whatever else you want.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#294

These are the same people who a few years ago made blogposts about their elaborate Notion (or Roam "Research") setups, and how it catalyzed them to... *checks notes* create blogposts about their elaborate Notion setups!

There seem to be a lot of posts like this as of late. I truly can't decide if the authors actually believe what they've written or if it's some preposition of themselves to be included in the hype cycle of AI FOMO or what. It feels very cringe as I read it. As if to say OpenClaw has somehow been such a pivotal change in their life, so monumental, that it's an epiphany that has changed them forever. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been surrounded by automation for many years and also using it with agents or LLMs for the past couple that I just don't feel like this is a true sentiment of what actually exists. It feels placed, it feels targeted and it feels like a huge lie. I guess you could also call it low effort marketing.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#295
post #153

Besides that blog post obviously being written by AI, can someone here confirm how credible the hype about openclaw is? I'm already very proficient at using Claude Code anywhere, so what would i gain really with openclaw?

I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting: 1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time. 2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels conti…

> You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"

if one of my friends sent me an obviously AI-written email, I think that I would cease to be friends with them...

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#296
post #165

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue. Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving…

My 15 year old son has been building his own video games with Unreal Engine for a few years.. I was recently looking for mentors to work with him and advance his skills, targeting college aged kids / young 20s.. It was surprising to me how many people I came across in this field at this young age that are trying to focus on the "higher level" game planning aspects and not so much on the lower level implementation spe…

I highly recommend the Handmade Hero series to folks in his situation. Casey has put up an absurd amount of material for everyone for free.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnuhp3Xd9PYTt6svyQPyR...

https://guide.handmadehero.org/hmcon/

https://guide.handmadehero.org/

https://handmade.network/forums

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you get bored with spending many years learning and becoming advanced or an expert in a system paradigm (like different hosting systems), a programming language (i.e. Perl), or a framework (pick your JS framework), only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later? And then in a job interview, when you try to sell yourself on your wisdom as expert on thing X, new to Y, they dismiss you because the 25 year…

Yea, I enjoy being the engineer

Same. The process (and all of its struggles) is an inseparable part of the satisfaction.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#298
There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3 on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right. This can still be useful, but is a far cry from what seems to be the online discourse right now.

As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations. Our main environment is a C# and Typescript monorepo with 2 products being developed, and even with a pretty extensive test suite and a nearly 100 line "AGENTS.md" file, all models I tried basically fail or try to shortcut nearly every task I give it, even when using "plan mode" to give it time to come up with a plan before starting. To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

It almost feels like this is some "open secret" which we're all pretending isn't the case too, since if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do feel like I'm going crazy here.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#299
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting: 1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time. 2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels conti…

> “hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it” Isn’t the “what he thinks about it” part the hardest? Like, that’s what I want to phrase myself - the part of the conversation I’d like to get their opinion on and what exactly my actual request is. Or are people really doing the meme of sending AI text back and forth to each other with none the wiser?

I think in the context of business communication; yeah a lot of people are doing that. Which, to be honest, I don't think it the worst thing ever. Most corporate communication is some basic information padded out with feigned personal interest and rehearsed politeness, so it's hardly a huge loss.

For personal communication between friends it would be horrible. Authenticity has to be one of the things I value most about the people I know. Didn't mean to imply from that example that I did or would communicate that way.

Re: OpenClaw is changing my life

#300

There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3 on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall…

Pretty much every software engineer I've talked to sees it more or less like you do, with some amount of variance on exactly where you draw the line of "this is where the value prop of an LLM falls off". I think we're just awash in corporate propaganda and the output of social networks, and "it's good for certain things, mixed for others" is just not very memetic.
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