alt Hacker NewsI think it was obvious, yet nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use.
The feature set is pretty simple:
- Agents that can write their own tools.
- Agents that can write their own skills.
- Agents that can chat via standard chat apps.
- Agents that can install and use cli software.
- Agents that can have a bit of state on disk.
Replies
good summary. i think you forgot heartbeat.md which powers some autonomy.
do you think the agent admin ui mattered at all?
other contributors while i think of them:
- good timing around opus 4.6 as the default model? (i know he used codex, but willing ot bet majority of openclaws are opuses)
- make immediate wins for nontechnical users. everyone else was busy chasing cursor/cognition or building horiztonal stuff like turbopuffer or whatever. this one was straight up "hook up a good bot to telegram"
- theres many attempts at "personal OS", "assistant", but no good ones open source? a lot of sketchier china ones, this was the first western one
Aren't all of these things you can do with Claude Code? Granted, the chat app one is novel, but you could ask Claude Code to set that up.
> nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use
Yet I’ve known many people who have said it is difficult to use; this was a 0.01-0.1% adoption tool. There is still a huge ease of use gap to cross to make it adopted in 10-50% of computer users.