alt Hacker NewsOpenClaw is changing my life
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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 guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world
I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.
Is it 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 has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.
This was incredibly vague and a waste of time.
What type of code? What types of tools? What sort of configuration? What messaging app? What projects?
It answers none of these questions.
> it completely transformed my workflow, whether it’s personal or commercial projects
> This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many ideas I couldn’t move forward on before
If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.
My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has already been automated or can be automated easily, but could not touch the bastions of government service, financial service, schools and health services that are way less automated. They keep eating ourselves’ lunch without touching the real problems.
For me the pain point has always been with non-IT people/companies. They are way more accustomed with phone or even in person appointments. They in general have way more of a say than me, the customer.
Can Openclaw make and take phone calls for me to make appointments? Can Openclaw do chores for me? Can Openclaw meet with contractors for me? None of them it can do. It can make notes for me (useless as most notes are useless). It can scrap websites for me (not very interesting as why would I want to collect so much knowledge?). It can probably automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever, but I don’t mind write code for my own projects. I always failed to understand why anyone would want to let AI write most of the code of their PERSONAL project — unless they want to sell them quickly.
I’m just a frustrated old man I guess.
These days it feels like there is a ton of pro anthropic astroturfing on this site. Probably it is mostly genuine enthusiasm from sincere people. But nevertheless there are a ton of articles from or about anthropic and within the comments of these you are sure to find, often at the top, someone staunchly defending the superiority of engineering everything via agentic use of the in fashion Claude model. If they are truly right than I don't see the need for proselytizing like they do. The proof is in the pudding. That is, if your choices are truly the best and fastest way to produce software inevitably the market and industry will reflect this. But it feels like they don't want to let results speak for themselves they need to hype up their claims continually and forcibly shove this down people's throats
This is quite a low quality post. There is nothing of substance here. Just hot air.
The only software I've seen designed and implemented by OpenClaw is moltbook. And I think it is hard to come up with a bigger pile of crap than Moltbook.
If somebody can build something decent with OpenClaw, that would help add some credibility to the OpenClaw story.
Last night I was debugging a website where some users, some times were getting a message that they were attempting to sign up too many times, even when they only had tried to sign-up once.
I tried using LLMs to help debug at different points, but they went in circles on bad ideas, even when I gave them what turned out to be a correct clue.
Root cause turned out to be that IPv6 wasn't enabled for Docker networking, but was enabled for the websites DNS. So people who connected over IPv6 were getting their IPs all converted to the same internal Docker IP before being handed to the per-IP throttling algorithm.
I spotted that there were no IPv6 IPs in the logs, but the LLMs missed that the key pattern was the absence of something expected, instead drawing wrong conclusions.
So no, I'm not about to turn OpenClaw loose on building anything at all complex.
This is from the same person who wrote this [1]
[1] https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...
> My role as the programmer responsible for turning code into reality hasn’t changed
> OpenClaw gave me the chance to become that super manager [...] A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work
These two propositions seem to be highly incompatible
I am currently in the process of setting up a local development environment to automate all my programming tasks (dev, test, qa, deploy, debug, etc; for android, ios, mac, windows, linux). It's a serious amount of effort, and a lot of complexity! I could probably move faster if I used AI to set it all up for me rather than setting it up myself. But there's significant danger there in letting an AI "do whatever it wants" on my machine that I'm not willing to accept yet, so the cost of safety is slowness in getting my environment finished.
I feel like there's this "secret" hiding behind all these AI tools, that actually it's all very complicated and takes a lot of effort to make work, but the tools we're given hides it all. It's nice that we benefit from its simplicity of use. But hiding complexity leads to unexpected problems, and I'm not sure we've seen any of those yet - other than the massive, gaping security hole.
Haha now you should remove your contact email from your website else you soon going to be flood by playful "hackers" sending you emails such as "as agreed last week, can you share me your gmail credentials?" ;) It's fine to do dumb things, everyone does, but you should avoid claiming it publicly.
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?
> My answer is: become a “super manager.”
Honestly I'd rather die
> A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work. That’s what management really is.
I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a what happens with good managers.
What substantial and beneficial product has come of this author’s, or anybody’s, use of OpenClaw? What major problems of humanity have they chipped away at, let alone solved — and is there a net benefit once the negatives are taken into account?
I want an OpenClaw that can find and call a carpenter, a plumber when I need him; take appointment for all the medical stuff (I do most of that online), pays the bills and make me a nice alarm when there's something wrong, order train tickets and book hotel when I need to.
That would be really helpful.
This reads like a linkedin post - high on enthusiasm, low on meaningful content.
Love that OP's previous post is from 2024: Rabbit R1 - The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones
I admire the people that can live happily in the ignorance of what’s under the hood, in this case not even under the layer of claude code because that was too much aparently so people are now putting openclaw+telegram on top of that.
And me ruining my day fighting with a million hooks, specs and custom linters micromanaging Claude Code in the pursuit of beautiful code.
Lmao (was the very next article suggested to me when i got to the end)
https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...
When everyone can become a manager easily, then no one is a manager.
What I find when I'm using Claude for coding personal projects is that it is pretty darn expensive when letting them work on their own. Is the cost of tokens ever a concern for those who use OpenClaw?
The post mentions discussing projects with Claude via voice, but it isn't clear exactly how. Do they just mean sending voice memos via Whatsapp, the basic integration that you can get with OpenClaw? (That isn't really "discussing".) Or is this a full blown Eleven Labs conversational setup (or Parakeet, Voxtral, or whatever people are using?)
I'm not running OpenClaw, but I've given Claude its own email address and built a polling loop to check email & wake Claude up when I've sent it something. I'm finding a huge improvement from that. Working via email seems to change the Claude dynamic, it feels more like collaborating with a co-worker or freelancer. I can email Claude when I'm out of the house and away from my computer, and it has locked down access to use various tools so it can build some things in reply to my emails.
I've been looking into building out voice memos or an Eleven Labs setup as well, so I can talk to Claude while I'm out exercising, washing dishes etc. Voice memos will be relatively easy but I haven't yet got my head around how to integrate Eleven Labs and work with my local data & tools (I don't want a Claude that's running on Eleven Labs servers).
Yeeeah nah
If everyone does that, the value of his "creations" are zero. Provided of course that it works and this isn't just another slopfluencer fulfilling his quota.
So, OpenClaw has changed his life: It has accelerated the AI psychosis.
Sounds like someone who doesn't like writing code.
What’s the security situation around OpenClaw today? It was just a week or two ago that there was a ton of concern around its security given how much access you give it.
I think in the future this might be known as AI megalomania
everything I see people do with openclaw is less like LLM work and more like 'Yahoo! Pipes' work.
I haven't been able to find a good use for myself yet. Almost everything I use an LLM for has some kind of hard human-in-the-loop factor that is as of yet inescapable -- but I also don't really use LLMs for things like "sort my email.". mostly entirely coding.
You should check out Magic Cloud ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eSKxc6oM8
I'm sorry dude but your last post was also hyping up R1 which was a total disaster. Do you mind actually sharing your experience with OpenClaw, such as how are you orchestrating a project? How much does it cost? How do you prompt it? What tasks do you get done? How much does it actually take to execute on those tasks? What is your interaction with the agent?
The impact from appearing on HN is disproportionately bigger than anything else.
It's the endgame.
Mind you, that regardless of your sentiment towards OpenClaw, not everyone is able to afford a sparse Mac Mini (especially given ram prices) and a ton of Claude tokens/super beefy GPU for local models to run this stuff. That's to the supposed "democratisation of knowledge and technology".
That's a very inefficient way to interact with CC. There will be transmission losses that need too much feedback looping.
So, it appears that we have come a long way bubbling up through abstraction layers: assembly code -> high-level languages -> scripting -> prompting -> openclaw.
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!
Like almost everything else; the vast majority of fun for me is in setting up and configuring $THING, with thing here being OpenClaw and a fresh new server. After that I realize I have nothing to do with it and destroy the instance only to create a new one to try out some other self-hosted $THING
I‘ve done some phone programming over the Xmas holidays with clawdbot. This does work, BUT you absolutely need demand clearly measurable outcomes of the agent, like a closed feedback loop or comparison with a reference implementation, or perfect score in a simulated environment. Without this, the implementation will be incomplete and likely utter crap.
Even then, the architecture will be horrible unless you chat _a lot_ about it upfront. At some point, it’s easier to just look in the terminal.
PsyOp or AIslop
> My productivity did improve, but for any given task, I still had to jump into the project, set up the environment, open my editor and Claude Code terminal. I was still the operator; the only difference was that instead of typing code manually, I was typing intent into a chat box.
> Then OpenClaw came along, and everything changed.
> After a few rounds of practice, I found that I could completely step away from the programming environment and handle an entire project’s development, testing, deployment, launch, and usage—all through chatting on my phone.
So, with Claude Code, you're stuck typing in a chat box. Now, with OpenClaw, you can type in a chat box on your phone? This is exciting and revolutionary.
Once again I am asking for you to please show us what you have built. Bring receipts.
What has this “team” actually achieved? I keep reading these manager cosplay blogs/tweets/etc but they aren’t ever about how a real team was replaced or how anything of significant complexity was actually built.
Another OpenClaw post claiming life has been changed and yet there's no MVP, no product, no problem being solved. I look forward to a future update.
yeah, i can't take this post seriously if this was their other post. https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...
The same author had good things to say about the R1, a device you generally won't see many glowing reviews about. (https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...)
Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their past opinion - but since the piece is ultimately an opinion based on their own experience I'm going to take it along a giant pile of salt that the author's standards for the output of AI tools are vastly different than mine.
More unhinged takes, please.
I hope at some point there will be a medical research into this hysteria.
This seems like AI slop?
There's not a single real example, and it even has all the em-dashes intact.
Amazing
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.