alt Hacker NewsClaws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents
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AI pollution is "clawing" into every corner of human life. Big guys boast it as catching up with the trend, but not really thinking about where this is all going.
He also talks about picoclaw (a IoT solution) and nanoclaw (running on your phone in termux) and has a tiny code base.
I'm impressed with how we moved from "AI is dangerous", "Skynet", "don't give AI internet access or we are doomed", "don't let AI escape" to "Hey AI, here is internet, do whatever you want".
Did Claws the name from Claude? I haven’t been following but didn’t some make OpenClaude and that turned in OpenClaw and ta-da a new name of a thing?
simonw> It even comes with an established emoji [lobster emoji]
Good thing they didn't call it OpenSeahorse!
I'm genuinely wondering if this sort of AI revolution (or bubble, depending on which side you're in) is worth it. Yes, there are some cool use cases. But, you have to balance those with increased GPU, RAM and storage prices, and OSS projects struggling to keep up with people opening pull requests or vulnerability disclosures that turn out to be AI slop. Which lead GitHub to introduce the possibility to disable pull requests on repositories. Additionally, all the compute used for running LLMs in the cloud seems to have a significant environmental impact. Is it worth it, or are we being fooled by a technology that looks very cool on the surface, but that so far didn’t deliver on the promises of being able to carry complex tasks fully autonomously?
> It even comes with an established emoji
If we have to do this, can we at least use the seahorse emoji as the symbol?
I run a Discord where we've had a custom coded bot I created since before LLM's became useful. When they did, I integrated the bot into LLMs so you could ask it questions in free text form. I've gradually added AI-type features to this integration over time, like web search grounding once that was straightforward to do.
The other day I finally found some time to give OpenClaw a go, and it went something like this:
- Installed it on my VPS (I don't have a Mac mini lying around, or the inclination to just go out and buy one just for this)
- Worked through a painful path of getting it a browser working (VPS = no graphics subsystem...)
- Decided as my first experiment, to tell it to look at trading prediction markets (Polymarket)
- Discovered that I had to do most of the onboarding for this, for numerous reasons like KYC, payments, other stuff OpenClaw can't do for you...
- Discovered that it wasn't very good at setting up its own "scheduled jobs". It was absolutely insistent that it would "Check the markets we're tracking every morning", until after multiple back and forths we discovered... it wouldn't, and I had to explicitly force it to add something to its heartbeat
- Discovered that one of the bets I wanted to track (fed rates change) it wasn't able to monitor because CME's website is very bot-hostile and blocked it after a few requests
- Told me I should use a VPN to get around the block, or sign up to a market data API for it
- I jumped through the various hoops to get a NordVPN account and run it on the VPS (hilariously, once I connected it blew up my SSH session and I had to recovery console my way back in...)
- We discovered that oh, NordVPN's IP's don't get around the CME website block
- Gave up on that bet, chose a different one...
- I then got a very blunt WhatsApp message "Usage limit exceeded". There was nothing in the default 'clawbot logs' as to why. After digging around in other locations I found a more detailed log, yeah, it's OpenAI. Logged into the OpenAI platform - it's churned through $20 of tokens in about 24h.
At this point I took a step back and weighted the pros and cons of the whole thing, and decided to shut it down. Back to human-in-the-loop coding agent projects for me.
I just do not believe the influencers who are posting their Clawbots are "running their entire company". There are so many bot-blockers everywhere it's like that scene with the rakes in the Simpsons...
All these *claw variants won't solve any of this. Sure you might use a bit less CPU, but the open internet is actually pretty bot-hostile, and you constantly need humans to navigate it.
What I have done from what I've learned though, is upgrade my trusty Discord bot so it now has a SOUL.md and MEMORIES.md. Maybe at some point I'll also give it a heartbeat, but I'm not sure...
Im honestly not that much worried there are some obvious problems (exfiltrate data labeled as sensitive, take actions that are costly, delete/change sensitive resources) if you have a properly compliant infrastructure all these actions need confirmations logging etc. for humans this seemed more like a neusance but now it seems essential. And all these systems are actually much much easier to setup.
Perhaps the whole cybersecurity theatre is just that, a charade. The frenzy for these tools proves it. IoT was apparently so boring that the main concern was security. AI is so much fun that for the vast majority of hackers, programmers and CTOs, security is no longer just an afterthought; it's nonexistent. Nobody cares.
inb4 "ClAWS run best on AWS."
Excited to see and work with things in new ways.
It's interesting how the announcement of someone understanding and summarizing it is seen as more blessing it into the canon of LLMS, whereas sometimes people might have been doing things for a long time quietly (lots of text files with claude).
I'm not sure how long claws will last, a lot was said about MCPs in their initial form too, except they were just gaping security holes too often as well.
Why are people buying Mac Minis for this? I understand Mac Studios if you’re self hosting the models. But otherwise why not buy any cheap mini PC?
I'll never understand the hype of buying a Mac Mini for this though. Sounds like the latest matcha-craze for tech bros
I can say with confidence that I will not use "claw" or any derivations because it attracts a certain kind of ilk.
"team" is plenty good enough, we already use it, it makes for easier integration into hybrid carbon-silicon collaboration
What is the benefit of a Mac mini for something like this?
What I don’t get: If it’s just a workflow engine why even use LLM for anything but a natural language interface to workflows? In other words, if I can setup a Zapier/n8n workflow with natural language, why would I want to use OpenClaw?
Nondeterministic execution doesn’t sound great for stringing together tool calls.
I find it dubious that a technical person claims to "just bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend". Like can they not just play with it on an old laptop lying around? A virtual machine? Or why did they not buy a Pi instead? Openclaw works with linux so not sure how this whole Mac mini cliche even started, obviously an overkill for something that only relays api calls.
Ah yes, let's create an autonomic actor out of a nondeterministic system which can literally be hacked by giving it plaintext to read. Let's give that system access to important credentials letting it poop all over the internet.
Completely safe and normal software engineering practice.
Anyone using claws for something meaningful in a startup environment? I want to try but not sure what we can do with this.
Looking forward to seeing what we get next Christmas season, with the Claws / Clause double entendres.
What is anyone really doing with openclaw? I tried to stick to it but just can't understand the utility beyond just linking AI chat to whatsapp. Almost nothing, not even simple things like setting reminders, worked reliably for me.
It tries to understand its own settings but fails terribly.
So now I will be able to tell OpenClaw to speedrun Captain Claw. Yeah.
> on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code
After all these years, why do we keep coming back to lines of code being an indicator for anything sigh.
so... MCP? can anyone explain what a "claw" is apposed to a "skill" or similar? if not, let's assume in three weeks a new term called "waffle" appears - can you explain what that is?
if not, youre all hype idiots.
its still tokens in, tokens out you fools.
I'm predicting some wave of articles why clawd is over and was overhyped all along in a few months and the position of not having delved into it in the first place will have been the superior use of your limited time alive
So now the official name of the LLM agent orchestrator is claw? Interesting.
OpenClaw is the 6-7 of the software world. Our dystopia is post-absurdist.
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Can't we rename "Claws" -> "Personal assistants"?
OpenClaw is a stupid name. Even "OpenSlave" would be a better fit.
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IMO the security pitchforking on OpenClaw is just so overdone. People without consideration for the implications will inevitably get burned, as we saw with the reddit posts "Agentic Coding tool X wiped my hard drive and apologized profusely". I work at a FAANG and every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way, not for the sake of actual security (that would be fine but would require actual engagement) but just to feel important, it reminds me of that.
I still haven't really been able to wrap my head around the usecase for these. Also fingers crossed the name doesn't stick. Something about it rubs my brain the wrong way.