Here’s a copy of a post I made on Farcaster where I’m unconvinced it’s actually being used at all:

I've used OpenClaw for 2 full days and 3 evenings now. I simply don't believe people are using this for anything majorly productive.

I really, really want to like it. I see glimpses of the future in it. I generally try to be a positive guy. But after spending $200 on Claude Max, running with Opus 4.5 most of the time, I'm just so irritated and agitated... IT'S JUST SO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS.

1. It goes off on these huge 10min tangents that are the equivalent of climbing out of your window and flying around the world just to get out of your bed. The /abort command works maybe 1 time out of 100, so I end up having to REBOOT THE SERVER so as not to waste tokens!

2. No matter how many times I tell it not to do things with side effects without checking in with me first, it insists on doing bizarre things like trying to sign up for new accounts people when it hits an inconvenient snag with the account we're using, or it tried emailing and chatting to support agents because it can't figure out something it could easily have asked ME for help with, etc.

3. Which reminds me that its memory is awful. I have to remind it to remind itself. It doesn't understand what it's doing half the time (e.g. it forgets the password it generated for something). It forgets things regularly; this could be because I keep having to reboot the server.

4. It forgets critical things after compaction because the algorithm is awful. There I am, typing away, and suddenly it's like the Men in Black paid a visit and the last 30min didn't happen. Surely just throwing away the oldest 75% of tokens would be more effective than whatever it's doing? Because it completely loses track of what we're doing and what I asked it NOT to do, I end up with problem (1) again.

5. When it does remember things, it spreads those memories all over the place in different locations and forgets to keep them consistent. So after a reboot it gets confused about what is the truth.

Disclaimer: Haven't used any of these (was going to try OpenClaw but found too many issues). I think the biggest value-add is agency. Chat interfaces like Claude/ChatGPT are reactive, but agents can be proactive. They don't need to wait for you to initiate a conversation.

What I've always wanted: a morning briefing that pulls in my calendar (CalDAV), open Todoist items, weather, and relevant news. The first three are trivial API work. The news part is where it gets interesting and more difficult - RSS feeds and news APIs are firehoses. But an LLM that knows your interests could actually filter effectively. E.g., I want tech news but don't care about Android (iPhone user) or MacOS (Linux user). That kind of nuanced filtering is hard to express as traditional rules but trivial for an LLM.

I spun up an Debian stable ec2 vm (using an agent + aws cli + aws-vault of course) to host openclaw, giving it full root access, and I talk to it on discord.

It's a little slow sometimes, but it's the first time I've felt like I have an independent agent that can handle things kind of.

The only two things I did were 1. Ask it to create a Monero address so I could send it money, and have it notify me whenever money is sent to that address. It spun up its own monerod daemon which was really heavy and it ran out of space. So I had to get it to use the Monero wallet instead, but had to manually intervene to shut down the monerod daemon and kill the process and restart openclaw. In the end it worked and still works. 2. I simply asked it "@ me the the silver price every day around 8am ET" and it just figured out how to do it and schedule it. To my understanding it has its own cron functionality using a json file. 3. Write and host some python scripts I can ping externally to send me a notification

I've had it done other misc stuff, but ChatGPT is almost always better for queries, and coding agents + Zed is much better for coding. But with a cheap enough vm and using openrouter plus glm 4.7 or flash, it can do some quirky fun stuff. I see the advantage as mainly having control of a system where it can have long term state (like files, processes, etc) and manage context itself. It is more like glue and it's full mastery and control of a Linux system gives it a lot of flexibility.

Think of it more as agent+os which you aren't getting with raw Claude or ChatGPT.

I've done nothing that interesting with it, it's absolutely a security nightmare, but it's really fun!

I couldn't really use OpenClaw (it was too slow and buggy), but having an agent that can autonomously do things for you and have the whole context of your life would be massively helpful. It would be like having a personal assistant, and I can see the draw there.

I have no idea. the single thing I can think of is that it can have a memory.. but you can do that with even less code. Just get a VPS. create a folder and run CC in it, tell it to save things into MD files. You can access it via your phone using termux.

Yeah, I don't get it either. Deploy a VM that runs an LLM so that I can talk to it via Telegram... I could just talk to it through an app or a web interface. I'm not even trying to be snarky, like what the hell even is the use case?

One significant advantage over Claude/ChatGPT is that your own agent will be able to access many websites that block cloud-hosted agents via robots.txt and/or IP filters. This is unfortunately getting more common.

Another is that you have access to and control over its memory much more directly, since it's entirely based on text files on your machine. Much less vendor lock-in.