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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

brandon.wang

381–390 of 504 posts

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I perceive a lot of the AI being rammed down our throats: questionably useful.

That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively. I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. It will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will b…

I do not doubt that AI and AI-powered and -native applications will become part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives.

What I don't understand is why, outside of "because I can", people need to automate parts of life I did not know the existence of.

- Why, outside of edge cases, do people have to automate the payment of bills beyond the automatic cc processing? - How many times a month do they have to set up their barber appointment?

It seems to me that the applications of Clawd and similar tools either automate trivial stuff or work on actions and circumstances that should not be there.

As an example, the other day I had a doctor visit, and between filling forms online, filling other forms online, confirming three times I would have been there and that I filled the online forms, driving to the doctor's office, and waiting, I probably spent 2 hours of my time (the visit was 2 months after I asked for it, by the way).

The visit lasted 5-7 minutes: the doctor did not have a look at the forms I filled out beforehand, and barely listened to what I was telling him during the visit.

I worry that, since "AI" will do it, there will be more forms to be filled that nobody will read, more forms to be filled to confirm that AI or me or a guardian filled the forms, and longer wait times because AI will bombard our neurons with some entertainment.

But what I want is a visit with a doctor who listens to me, they are not in a rush, and have my problem solved. If AI helps, it's great, but I don't want busy work done by AI, I don't want, because it is not needed, busy work at all.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's set up to wake up periodically and work autonomously for you based on the broad instructions it's been given. Compared to the usual coding agent workloads, this makes it a lot more "assistant"-like.

Four months ago, I was playing with basically the same framework to explore the idea of "consciousness," using Claude Agent SDK as the harness and Opus 4.5 as the LLM. I was thinking: wake up every hour, look at some webcams and the weather forecast (senses, change), maybe look at my calendar, maybe read my personal emails for important things, proactively chat with me for work or just fun via email invites. I played…

Don't worry, you're not an idiot. This is not gonna pan out.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#383
post #7

>all delegation involves risk. with a human assistant, the risks include: intentional misuse (she could run off with my credit card), accidents (her computer could get stolen), or social engineering (someone could impersonate me and request information from her). One of the differences in risk here would be that I think you got some legal protection if your human assistant misuse it, or it gets stolen. But, with the…

I haven't seen any mention or acknowledgement that the model provider is part of this loop too. Technically speaking, none of this is E2EE so you're trusting that a random employee doesn't just read your chats? There will be policies sure, but ultimately someone will try to violate them as has happened many times in the past like at social media companies for example.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#384

If you're on MS stack, this is all stuff that MS 365 Copilot will already do for you, but with much better defined barriers around what it can and cant access.

Every time I ask copilot in 365 to do something with calendar or email, it tells me it has no access but helpfully suggests I could paste some content in... I check in once a month or so and get the same results.

I believe you need to pay for an add-on called "Microsoft 365 Copilot"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365-copilot

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#385

- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings. - Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have? - Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar? - If you have reminders for everything (respond…

> Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have? I agree that removing items and taking pictures takes more effort than it saves, but I would use a simpler solution if one existed because it turns out I cannot remember what we have. When my partner goes to the store I get periodic text messages from them asking how much X we have…

We have forgotten the simple, reliable solutions of the past - a grocery list on the fridge, a weekly planner, a weekly plan itself rather than constant coordination. Cell phones and easy communication led us here.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? More importantly, can Clawdbot even reliably access these sites? The last time I tried to build a hotel price scraper, the scraping was easy. Getting the page to load (and get around bot detection) was hard.

Yes, being on your own devices makes it not look like bots.

Yes, and no in my experience.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#387
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four months ago, I was playing with basically the same framework to explore the idea of "consciousness," using Claude Agent SDK as the harness and Opus 4.5 as the LLM. I was thinking: wake up every hour, look at some webcams and the weather forecast (senses, change), maybe look at my calendar, maybe read my personal emails for important things, proactively chat with me for work or just fun via email invites. I played…

Don't worry, you're not an idiot. This is not gonna pan out.

[deleted]

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#388

- Why do you need a reminder to buy gloves when you are holding them? - Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings. - Cataloguing your fridge requires taking pictures of everything you add and remove which seems... tedious. Just remember what you have? - Can you not prepare for the next day by opening your calendar? - If you have reminders for everything (respond…

> Why do you need price trackers for airbnb? It is not a superliquid market with daily price swings.

I dont know about AirBNB specifically, but I know local hotels I have dealt with can swing by 1000 bucks. Especially if theres a conference or something in town. Often it will swing back just before they risk the room going unoccupied. I have no idea if AirBNB allows similar behavior but I would be surprised if it didnt.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could give it access to a limited budget and review its spending periodically. Then it can make annoying mistakes but it's not going to drain your bank account or anything.

Giving it access to a separate bank account and separate credit card would have been more sane.

Yeah I was thinking a specific Wyse card with a 300 dollar limit, if I was going to do this, but it already seems stupidly expensive token wise.

Re: A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

#390
post #14

Wait I'm ignorant, how long has OpenClaw/Clawdbot existed? This person listed like 6 months of activities that they offloaded to the bot, I thought this thing was pretty new.

FWIW, the screenshots all have the dates spanning the last couple days. But yeah, I can't imagine me getting used to a new tool to this degree and using it in so many ways in just a week.

That makes it even less believable. They talked about how this tool has replaced some other tools such as flight price trackers. How in the world could that happen in 1 week to such a degree that you wrote a whole blog about it?
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