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  • I still remember Karpathy's breathless excitement about "claws" and how all autonomous agents would be called "claws" in the future.

    Now fast forward six months and nobody uses OpenClaw anymore and nobody is talking about "claws".

    I love it.

    by saberience
  • Actually I use Hermes Agent who delegates tasks to OpenClaw. It works perfectly, we run OpenClaw experiments with my partner as an independent drop shipper, it’s much more complicated setup, which cannot disclose publicly, but it works. The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor :)
    by SipitenoMK
  • But hermes agent can do whatever openclaw can. At least in my experience. Then why delegate to claw and not just a hermes profile?
    by newswasboring
  • How do people bypass captcha or robot checks? All I wanted is a price aggregator but it always gets blocked by major retailers.
    by syntaxing
  • I'm with you here. Every demo I asked for where I knew a captcha / cloudflare would block an AI directed scraper was unsuccessful / produced unsatisfactory results. WebMCP for the win, or loss, depending on your perspective. Personally, I could get behind WebMCP if micropayments ever became a thing. Of course, then my incentive to trick your Agent in crawling millions of pages and paying me lots of cash would be rather high.
    by jgalt212
  • 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.
    by arjie
  • How do you deal with auth/bot detection/captchas in that browser? That's where my agent consistently gets stuck
    by hanrelan
  • The story in the "The Daily Claw" thing they are showing is like Claudese dialed up to max
    by viccis
  • I actually think I would like to use OpenClaw but everytime I go to the docs I give up.

    It feels so intimidating. There's so much stuff going on. Maybe it is good for agents who can just motor through that volume, but me personally, I would want something simpler, maybe an `OpenClaw-lite`

    by whinvik
  • See if you like [Msty Go](https://msty.ai/go)
    by himhckr
  • There's a lot of similar projects out there that are closer to what you're looking for. For example, I used nanoclaw for a bit before switching to Hermes.
    by nisegami
  • You may be interested in https://nanoclaw.dev/. It uses Claude by default but can run other harnesses after initial setup. Easier to grok IMHO.
    by joemccall86
  • Which features do you require?

    I built an agent to work with local Ollama models, and it will keep working and iterate on a goal until finished, but it doesn't do sub-agents or or any of the "just burn a million tokens but finish this" pipelines that seem to be the trend now.

    It's a simple D executable that basically consumes no resources in your local machine.

    by Shorel
  • It's not only that, all this complexity leads to stuff breaking with every update. For a tool that's supposed to just answer chat messages it's impressive how crappy and unstable this software feels. I have it running since the release and my primary usecase seems to be to use the CLI to fix whatever broke this week.

    Would not recommend running this, it's the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.

    by LaurensBER
  • I’ve concluded that if you already use a coding agent then openclaw adds very little (at least the multiple rounds I’ve tried it since mid Jan), it mainly brought the power of do-everything coding agents to your phone, available everywhere. But you exchange a low quality messaging interface for that ease of access.

    Just to be clear, I’m not advocating that people that benefit from openclaw move to coding agents. This isn’t a “dropbox is just SFTP” comment, more that if you are already using coding agents, it feels like they do most of what I saw from openclaw at least a few months ago.

    Am I missing something? Would love to be proven wrong.

    by atonse
  • When I tried OpenClaw it quickly turned into a lethargic mess which I really didn't see myself wanting to maintain long term. I looked at other alternatives which were similar enough to do what I was looking for (mostly scheduled tasks using data on my computer and some API data). I saw a mention of nanoclaw which I looked at but didn't try personally. I eventually settled on trying picoclaw[1] because it was extremely small, fast, and had enough features to do the job for me. It is under 10mb, fairly straight forward go codebase, and works with multiple model providers or locally hosted.

    1 https://picoclaw.io/

    by saratogacx
  • OpenClaw is designed for people who are okay with "Don't worry about it" being an acceptable answer to "How does this work?"

    Which is why it's so big with the PM/PO-turned-vibe-coder crowd.

    by ethbr1
  • Still a no from me until these things can display any degree of intuition, and even then it's probably still a no.

    You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.

    OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.

    Also...

    >Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.

    This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol

    by jesse_dot_id
  • nah they have AI bots for checking security, performance, etc so it's all fine!
    by asah
  • Totally. Nothing has really changed since GPT-2.0, it’s a stagnant technology.
    by madaxe_again
  • OpenAI bought a hyped ingenious idea, plagued with holes, thinking it could surf the wave.
    by hirako2000
  • 569 first time contributors yea i shall continue to not use openclaw
    by trueno
  • So at least 569 vibe coders have made a huge mess of an already hugely messy piece of software and they somehow think this is a flex? Yeah I’m gonna continue to not use openclaw. I installed it once in a VM and was immediately like what is this and why would I ever want it? Seriously Claude code already does everything openclaw can and with a much better harness?
    by asaddhamani
  • 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?

    by blfr
  • Job search and language learning. The job market for juniors and mid level is crazy. Everyone has a different form to fill out with the same questions. My wife has countered this by using Hermes and some handcrafted master files/db.

    I personally use the Matt Pocock teaching skill to learn dutch, passed reading using it, on track to pass writing with it.

    by newswasboring
  • 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 tasks for agents to do for me.

    by Flere-Imsaho
  • I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
    by Skunkleton
  • Nobody actually uses openclaw. [0]

    It's all just marketing.

    [0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-...

    by johnnyApplePRNG
  • They’re used by people at tech companies often claimed to employ “the brightest minds of our generation” to get rid of all their email[1]. You can also use them to harass open-source developers and waste everyone’s time[2] or to get yourself compromised[3].

    [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...

    [2]: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

    [3]: https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-sour...

    by latexr
  • I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed.

    My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.

    2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).

    The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).

    by teekert