alt Hacker NewsCan someone explain what value openclaw provides over like claude code? It seems like it's literally just a repackaged claude code (i.e. a for loop around claude) with a model selector (and I guess a few builtin 'tools' for web browsing?)
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The main one is that you can run and/or host it remotely, unlike Claude Desktop. By this I mean, you can run OpenClaw on a service like Tailscale and protect your actual machine from certain security/privacy concerns and - regardless of the choice - you can connect your access to OpenClaw via any chat agent or SSH tunnel, so you can access it from a phone. If Claude Cowork comes to iOS/Android with a tunnel option, they can resolve this difference.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
From what I remember, the key differentiating features were:
- a heartbeat, so it was able to 'think'/work throughout the day, even if you weren't interacting with it - a clever and simple way to retain 'memory' across sessions (though maybe claude code has this now) - a 'soul' text file, which isn't necessarily innovative in itself, but the ability for the agent to edit its own configuration on the fly is pretty neat
Oh, and it's open source
For programmers or people who know computers quite well the difference to claude code is small i would say. But for "Normies" its magical that you can just ask your computer to do anything from anywhere (set timers, install stable diffusion, send you a specific doc in your download folder). You don't even have to write it, you can send it a voice message and it will install whisper or send it to the openai whisper api, etc. Obviously this is more then dangerous, but looking at what passwords people still choose today (probably also the reason why everything requires MFA nowadays), most people don't care about Security.
They serve different purposes. OpenClaw is supposed to be more of an autonomous sidekick assistant thing that can take instructions over different messenger channels. It can also be set up to take ongoing instructions and just churn on general directions.
for me it's that it works remotely and my kids can access it over Discord
Check out https://x.com/jianxliao/status/2020667822800818253?s=46
Just uses claude. I haven't tried it much but it seems to be what you're describing.
Openclaw uses pi agent under the hood. Arguably most of the codebase could be replaced by systemd if you're running on a VPS for scheduling though, and then its a series of prompts on top of pi agent.