I give it monumental tasks. For example, I will write massive markdown files describing all the features I want to see in an application, and I will use a standard AI chatbot to check my work and consider additional details. Finally, when I have everything written down, I upload it to OpenClaw and tell the agent to make it happen.

Sometimes it toils away for 2+ hours, spawning Claude Code instances, checking its work, testing the code, even using browser automation to make sure everything works the way it is supposed to if it's writing a webapp.

In the end, it consumes like $10-20 worth of tokens and spits out a functional application with everything I asked for.

Claude Code can do this on its own, to an extent, but there's something about getting OpenClaw to iterate through multiple sessions and testing everything to make sure it works the way I described that I really like. It completely offloads the process to the AI, and keeps me mostly out of the loop.

Is the code any good? Probably not. Am I at risk of being exploited by malware? Probably. But I have automated quite a lot of things with the software that OpenClaw builds for me, and I am careful to review the libraries it imports before running the code on any machine with actual access to anything I actually care about.

Personally, anyone using OpenClaw for the "it reads your emails" use case is crazy, because prompt injection is real, and you're basically inviting anyone who knows your email address to take a stab at pwning you, with full access to your personal life. I keep my instances on a VPS, behind a restrictive security group, and only accessible via Tailscale where it has zero access to anything on my tailnet. I only recently gave it its own email account (not mine!), but even then I am skeptical of doing so, and take efforts to prevent it from taking action on any email it receives (e.g., disabling the Heartbeat) because who knows what it'll end up doing. I mostly like that it can email me if I ask it to.