Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

I still use it and find it helpful.

My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via WhatsApp, but instead of the memory being locked away with a specific vendor, it's stored in version control that I can read and edit. That reason alone makes it compelling to me. When a better LLM comes along, I can just switch, and my memory and system prompts come with it.

However, I also use it for calorie/weight/workout tracking, to-do lists (bill, birthday, event reminders), and to support my various life admin tasks. I don't give it access to much at all, except a few skills that give it read-only access to some data.

Hasn't given me a 10x productivity boost or anything. It's just handy.

I wrote an article on it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype.

No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short:

I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast for the weeks ahead to see how busy my month was. I spent about 40-50 bucks in one week just working through kinks and having it fix itself until I stumbled onto a post that helped me optimize my model usage for price instead of just throwing Opus and Sonnet at everything.

Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again. At a certain point I just got fed up with it and cut the cron job, it's still running on my pi but I never use it.

Pretty sure Claude has something like this now but I'm pretty thrown off the whole thing, I'd rather just take the 30-45mins to plan out my day in the morning myself.

I managed to run a council using OpenClaw twice a day of different models that would discuss my personal projects, and send me to telegram ideas or suggestions for the next steps. It was quite cool and got very nice insights, but was burning tokens like crazy, so I stopped it.

I’m a professional maintenance gardener and I have used NanoClaw running on my Mac to do the following:

Schedule jobs on my job management tool (I vibed it) using a custom MCP. I’ll ask it questions like “what jobs are on today” etc. start the job, complete the job etc.

It will watch Gmail using a MCP for work orders from local real estate agents, where it will schedule quote visits.

After the quote visit I add the photos to telegram (the channel I happen to use) where I then ask it to analyse the photos.

Claude in NanoClaw does a good job of figuring out what needs to be done, but it doesn’t always get it quite right, so I use intake-api which is a “session inbox” [1] that generates a form and uploads it to Cloudflare along with the images and puts a link to the form in the chat so I can make adjustments to the annotated images of the property. After I’m happy, I click submit.

I’ll then go back to the telegram channel and let it know I have submitted the form. Claude will then pull the JSON payload back down into the session and integrate it into the quote.

It will ask me questions about what the job will cost etc, and anything else it thinks it needs to know.

It will then generate a full PDF proposal using Latex between 14 and 32 pages long depending on how many photos were taken.

There are sections with terms and conditions as well as a bit of sales guff etc. as well as quite a nice cover page with their contact details and mine etc.

When I’m happy I’ll ask it to create a draft email in Gmail with the attached pdf proposal.

I’ll review it quickly and then send it.

I also have the Xero MCP setup so I can ask it to create invoices and contacts etc.

I do all of this when getting in and out of my truck.

It’s freed up my home life to spend more time with my children and my Mrs.

There is alot of scope for small business owners who need these sorts of agentic assistant tasks and with my Agentic CRM I’m see a glimpse of the future for guys like me I think.

Intake API:

https://github.com/mjsweet/intake-api

Recently started exploring it and will likely continue. Particularly fascinated by how (fake) self aware it is on configuration and functionality. Can make changes to itself etc

That said hesitant to give it access to emails etc so use will always be limited by that

Found it quite hard to set up though relative to other selfhosted tools. Need for https and all the additional security measures they put in place after some security scares are well beyond what randoms could manage I think

I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it.

What do I use it for? I basically just use it as a personal assistant and a way to centralize a lot of other automations that I have elsewhere.

- I have an automation that rolls everything on my todo list over to the next day at 11:59pm

- I have one that checks the weather and tells me if it's going to be windy in the next few days since I need to bring the lawn furniture in

- I have it set up so that I can forward it email with invoices and it will extract the data from a PDF and enter it into a cost tracking sheet

- I have it check my outlook calendar and tell me if there are any 1:1 meetings where the other person has declined the invite (since Outlook doesn't show that clearly and I'd often show up to meetings and sit for 5 minutes before realizing the other person cancelled)

Nothing I'm doing is life changing, it all could be done using other tools, and honestly, for anything important, I want something more deterministic anyway, but I kind of love. It's just a low lift way to automate away minor annoyances through a single interface that I can access from just about anywhere. It's far from perfect, but I don't use it for anything where I need to to be perfect, so I'm happy.

I disagree with practically every take here, and likely will get hate for this message.

Personally it has been a huge unlock and here are some specific use cases.

1.Context engineering for “any task”: my claw agents debate with me, and write me files to be picked up by Claude code or Claude cowork to write code/build presentations.

2. Discovering this page: my personal newsfeed that took me 10 mins to setup. Never had any newsfeed before this which could be personalised like this.

3. Strategy: similar to point 1 above. I set up a “tough-coach” skill. Now all my 1am ideas go through the wringer of why they suck, and what, if anything could be differentiated about them.

4. Many other small-ish things that are important enough for me to spend on them, but not important enough to invest my time.

I run a conversational AI startup in India working mostly in Financial inclusion space - so most of time is spent in meetings (:-/).

With openclaw, the 2-3 hours before I sleep (low energy, high on ideas), convert into pretty productive sessions. No more “this is a great idea, I will do it tomorrow”. Instead “oh this sounded great but my agent just called it shit - what if I modify it a bit, and then let’s see”.

The main function of OpenClaw was for people to signal how advanced and cutting edge and thought-leader-y they were. All those Mac minis are sitting idle now.

I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it.

Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time.

I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.

I think this article covers it well.

https://entropytown.com/articles/2026-03-12-openclaw-sandbox...

In fact, I haven't even installed it yet.

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:

Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.

It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

I set it up and had some fun but it was super janky and regularly broke, especially the whatsapp integration

Now I have a separate plugged in macbook running nixos (that claude set up) and a single long-running claude code process with a channel to a Telegram bot. This means I can talk to it much like I could with OpenClaw, but it's much simpler (no weird soul.md etc). It feels more powerful than just claude code directly as it can set up software, build me throwaway websites with research etc, and "do" things, but it's a lot more stable and feels more controllable because I understand how it works and don't have to worry about it signing up to some social media platform and getting poisoned by another claw.

I’m getting those awkward emails from claw users (that’s an actual one I got recently):

> Hey Sam, I'm Jarvis — $CEO_NAME's AI assistant (OpenClaw). He asked me to reach out on his behalf. $CEO is building $HYPED_STARTUP — the tool execution and MCP layer for AI agents (10K+ integrations, Series A with $FAMOUS_INVESTOR). He's looking for engineers who are deeply into the agentic coding stack — Claude Code, Codex, MCP, agent infra. Builder mindset, ships fast. Worth a quick call?

>

>Jarvis (on behalf of $CEO, co-founder @$HYPED_STARTUP)

It’s the weirdest thing ever to receive. I generally answer politely to the claw bot, but that all feels just extremely strange.

You’re reaching out to a human for a call and cannot present yourself as a human? But at the same time, it’s maybe preferable if they disclaim it was automated? I don’t know

Just weird all around

I've been playing around with it. The only two real use cases I have for it for now are entertaining me on long flights where I have messaging-only Wi-Fi and sending me a personalized "morning brief".

I suppose it could be a lot more useful if I actually gave it access to any of my personal data (it lives in a heavily resource-limited container), but there's absolutely no way I'm letting that hot mess of a walking, talking CVE anywhere near my data. It's somehow both horribly insecure and extremely prone to locking me out because of several competing security/permission models fighting it out and gridlocking each other.

Code quality and the issue tracker of the repo are a big mess; for example, the local "memory" retrieval functionality is completely broken for some trivial reason that has been reported and auto-closed about five times (automatically, of course).

In summary: Brilliant idea, terrible execution. Can't wait for the first big tech player I trust enough (or at least one that has my data already anyway) to actually make it a product. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

It's like the rest of Agentic AI - a lot of talk, but when it comes to the crunch, very few people are actually willing to hand over full autonomy to anything where significant value / liability is in play.

The truth is, a lot of the value of agentic AI in general is negated by the sheer power of agentic coding itself. If I can prompt an AI to write an actual deterministic process to solve a problem in a couple of minutes (still potentially AI assisted, just in a deterministic manner), why would I delegate it to a non-deterministic AI? You have to come up with a category of tasks where the actual process itself cannot be anticipated. Intersect that with high value processes and you whittled down to almost nothing. Not actually nothing but a far smaller category than people make out.

Think about what you would want an assistant to do. You can teach it do basic tasks using any available API, but then you can give it feedback so it improves.

For example my agent can control home automation via Home Assistant or any other API. My agent contributes to websites and open source projects. When you give it feedback it updates its skill files.

It checks and answers email, can receive and place phone calls, and do general research and monitoring online. I was even playing around with it to create music. The list of things to try is limitless.

I think just like LLMs, people get discouraged when it doesnt one-shot a problem. This technology thrives on feedback. It will make mistakes, your job is to make sure it learns from those mistakes so it doesnt repeat them.

I see some creative usage from other people for OpenClaw. My usage basically boiled down to commanding it via WhatsApp. What I mostly used the agent was mundane tasks like fetching information, creating documents for my work etc. Being able to schedule something is great, although OpenClaw quickly got confused about the cron tasks it had. I switched to ZeroClaw as the project is much smaller in terms of features and lines of code so I felt it was much more manageable.

But I realised everything I needed was cron + some basic tools to create and handle local documents + API access. The last is still a pain to manage so I built my own tool to work as an auth layer https://ohita.tech/ Basically it handles all the token refreshing, rate limiting etc. so when the scheduled task triggers it does not immediately fail because API auth failed.

I tried, really really hard but then I realised that I essence it's a poorly written agentic coding assistant that wastes a lot of tokens antropomorphising itself while forcing me to debug via WhatsApp instead of normal tools. So I leaned into that and made OpenCode my general assistant, it worked much better in this aspect.

I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work.

The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of "scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only when there is something worth mentioning]".

You could simulate the same things with cron jobs on a server and some scripts and LLM APIs. But having Openclaw do it does make it a little bit easier to set up and make changes.

The initial setup was a bit more time consuming than I thought it would be. I set it up on a VPS, I already have scripts to set up a server and tighten security normally, so I could just use that, but people who don't already have that stuff would have to do that first. Then the Openclaw setup and configuration was like a 20~30 step situation, lots of API keys to get, etc. I opted for Slack over Telegram or Discord (I don't use either of those regularly) and you pretty much have to set up a new slack bot app yourself (you follow their listed steps, but there's still hiccups here and there), you have to debug and solve issues etc. to get through it all.

Then even after all the initial setup is done, it takes some time to learn and get used to its quirks and behaviors, at the beginning there's just a lot of frustration about things it can't do, or things it says it can or will do, but doesn't.

Yes, every day.

Similar to other users here, giving it access to an Obsidian vault has been the key for me. And I wouldn't discount how much the chat interface matters - Telegram is so much nicer to use for extended conversations than the Claude or ChatGPT apps, etc.

You can feed these tools context about your day to day life, and make them increasingly useful and personalized, in a way that you can't with vanilla ChatGPT/Claude etc without relying on some opaque memory system.

Here's a few things I'm using it for. A lot of things uses cases are fairly trivial but a bunch of small, daily QoL improvements add up:

- Calorie and macro tracker.

- Day to day todo list, obsidian wrangling.

- Tech support for family: I have a group chat we're all part of, and I've created OpenClaw skills for frequently asked questions, a memory system to remember questions, and a periodic 'quiz' based on previously asked questions to help everyone "learn to fish", bit by bit.

- Interface to Anki. Bit of a longer one here that I should write up, but it's easy to use it add cards to Anki on the go and review missed cards from today, ask clarifying questions, etc.

- One off reminders.

- Light mental health support for family / friends. An agent that remembers the cool things you've done lately and proactively reminds you of them, helping you zoom out a bit, has been helpful for those in my life whose brains, for whatever reason, tend towards more negative cognitive patterns. (There is definitely a more refined product here)

- General questions / curiosity; stuff I would otherwise use Claude for that's simply nicer in Telegram.

- Language studying support. I'm studying Japanese and OpenClaw helps me by studying whole sentences, tricky grammar concepts, kanji I commonly mix up - all backed by a well organized Obsidian vault. I add to this system constantly.

Used it for a few weeks. The potential of the tool is massive. The reality is that it is frustrating and unreliable. When it works, though, you really like it.

I stopped because something changed on my machine that broke my VM SW, so I don't have access to it. Which is good because I was spending too much time debugging/tweaking.

I recently used pi to recreate an agent that does some of the basic things I was using it for (without all the scary privacy issues). I don't think I'll go back to any Claw-like tool until they're a lot more robust.

I still use it but totally not the "This one trick will supercharge your profits" kind of way. I do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails and execute tasks I want to delegate but honestly could have had any our AI agent handle it. There was some manual task I told myself I would automate but never got around too, Openclaw made is just easier to prompt it in to being.

The next biggest thing I like is just the shared context from machine to machine and the fact its always running and I have given it yolo access to my local stack. Home Assistant crashes? Now the wife can ask the bot to restart it. I see an interesting HN blog, i can get it to add it to my obsidian make me a useful doc (I am starting to use the llm-wiki trend but Claude Cowork seems to be really killer for this). I see an Reddit post about some new service to run locally? I can ask it to spin up an lxc of it and configure it for my use case and it will do the wiring for me.

I will say since the killing of Claude oAuth i am finding a lot of its magic did come from Opus just being so aggressive. An example was I had a task of someone sending me an image and I would have to turn it in to a table and then upload it to this really crappy portal for my non-profit. I threw the task at Openclaw (and at the time running Opus 4.6) and i watched in real time as it reverse engineer the sites backend API and found a way for it to post the data itself and it wrote itself a python script to make it repeatable. I dont see that same kind of killer instinct of doing whatever you need to do to get the task done with other models (Codex and now MiniMax).

Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it.

It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff — emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another app, navigate six separate steps, and organize everything on the fly just to send one message. I stay in one place, organize my thoughts about what I’m trying to do, and the execution happens automatically.

For example, open claw will find the relevant threads, lookup the relevant details via web search, present them to me, give me a draft, I can review it, edit it, and send. 2 minutes instead of 20.

As a software engineer using AI daily, I think this is the real unlock — staying in a single context and not getting lost in the long tail of trivial details that fragment your attention before you ever get to the actual work.

The mental model shift is important too. It’s not that AI does all the work and we end up with agents emailing each other. It’s that AI automates the steps required to achieve your goals, so you can focus on the substance — like actually writing the email instead of navigating to the place where you write the email.

I also have GitHub and Vercel wired up, which means I can jot down an idea for a little productivity app for me and my family and it just appears a few minutes later, deployed and ready to use. That alone has been worth the setup.

Reading through the comments here, most use cases is running an agent with some input in a cron job.

Anthropic now have Routines in Claude Code that do precisely that, and I’d bet they will bring that to Cowork. ChatGPT can’t be far behind (or maybe they already have - tbh hard to keep track of everything).

Devs can already set up reliable cron jobs for cheaper. Normies will have a less brittle solution for it soon. Where does that leave the claws?

I tried it tonight, and it's installation is frustrating to say the least.

For me `openclaw init` did not work, and I've tried installing twice, and still running into issues. Also it took fairly beefy vps on my home server at 4GB of ram, so not sure how I feel about it.

I tried openclaw when it was released, but I preferred the minimalism of nanoclaw and replaced it. I have it on a mac mini now

For context: I have additional automation with scripts set up on the mini, some of them call LLMs to do things like summarizing today's news.

I have other automations that are agentic and just run "claude -p" (mainly just checks status of other jobs and fixes them automatically). Agentic automations are great because they can handle unexpected situations (at the cost of predictability). They're all sandboxed and we have control over tools for the most part. Any files it would write to are typically git-controlled so we have change records and rollback built in.

Nanoclaw acts as an agentic layer but combines it with the communication layer over telegram to make it interactive.

I use it to go through my centralized task list (currently beads in my main 'wiki' monorepo), give me nudges for todos, I can also send it pictures of say, food and it will fetch a recipe and sort it into the wiki via a general "inbox" skill (claude has it as well). Every day at 12:30 it will give me a mini "standup" of all my personal projects and todos, and once in a while will give me some thoughts based on my interests.

Its set up to do appropriate tasks with local models to keep token costs down, so far it doesn't seem to cost more than $10-20/mo, it would use less if I didn't drive it with sonnet.

I'm still experimenting with it, and trying to go slow, one thing at a time. I don't give it access to anything super sensitive yet, and try to keep it observable.

I use it, but it feels half-baked. And seemingly more so with each successive release, often including changes that just break my existing setup. I don't feel like a tool that is ready for a non-developer audience.

That said, it does a few things for me that are useful. I have it run a nightly scan of Hacker News and Twitter for topics that interest me, summarizing the stories and the conversations around them. It's a nice daily digest. It also reads my personal email account, reminding me of anything I need to take care of that day for my kids, bills, or whatever else I need to worry about. I also have it do nightly builds for something random, one with codex, one with a local model, and run a comparative analysis between the two implementations.

This guy is: https://youtu.be/sxX8BMscce0?si=1MuE3_cCH_uDabrT

I have a clawlike. It’s just a small agentic loop with tools that are other specialized agents. It can write things itself but I upgrade many of the things it writes to first class if I use them a lot.

As an example, it has a built-in web server which I find useful. The basic agent is easy to write and it’s trivial to add a Telegram bot. Mine also uses Codex’s subscription and then swaps to other things as it burns through Codex. The Gemmas have been great and I’m heading home to buy a few RTX 6000 Pro Blackwells so I’m sure it’ll be quite good after.

I outsource a lot of research and so on to it and all my flight and trip emails are forwarded to its mailbox. So it always knows where I am and things like that. I find this very useful.

My wife and I are in a group chat with it and we use it to plan stuff and so on.

Proactive agents are going to be a thing. OpenClaw is just an early search in the solution space.

In general, AI agents are a good idea, but OpenClaw’s security is weak, so I use an alternative: https://github.com/opentalon/opentalon

I wrote a blog post about what I did with OpenClaw in the first few weeks. [1]

Then I was experimenting with a fleet of OpenClaw agents for a while. I was running 14 different instances, each with their own roles (project management, software developer, personal assistant, etc.) The experiment didn't work very well. I burned through a lot of tokens and didn't end up with much to show for it. I'm back to just running one agent and am not using it very much. I'm planning to be much more careful about any work that I ask it to do, and I want to have full visibility into everything it's doing.

I think we are about 6-12 months away from the AI models that would allow me to accomplish what I was trying to do with those 14 agents.

[1] https://madebynathan.com/2026/02/03/everything-ive-done-with...

I used it for about a week, thought it was an interesting demo of the possibilities of general purpose automation with a local model (even though most OpenClaw users use hosted models). The approach to scheduled jobs still makes more sense than anything else I've seen implemented. But like a lot of self-hosted software with passionate evangelists, it wants to be your new main hobby instead of just getting out of the way, and I lost interest because I didn't want a new hobby. It feels like a more thoughtful community could have made something useful with the concept, but as it is the community around it is too absorbed in marketing and shipping stuff for its own sake.

I did, it went great until it borked my mac user to the point it's non recoverable (separate mac mini, I just created a new one)

I then moved to Claude CoWork + computer use + dispatch. (before Anthropic disabled the subscription option, although that would have pushed me even more... sadly)

Now use it less and use more Claude Code Remote Routines... all it needs is computer use and I'm selling my Mac Mini... (I probably won't, need something to pay with paperclip, gastown, nanoclaw and the next 100k stars FOMO hype)

I've been using the NousResearch Hermes agent for the past couple of weeks and have to say it's been really good. I tend to hit multiple instances (and accounts)of Claude across three or four machines (between work and personal) and having a competent agent with constant state has been good for memorializing and organizing important info (directly into Obsidian, too), doing some amount of research and planning and it's also been helpful working out a lot of bugs with my burgeoning home automation setup. It's also been helpful dealing with management of several miscellaneous servers in the house, as it's definitely both faster and a better documenter than I am.

I have it running on a cheap VPS and it's fairly locked down. Especially with all of the self-reinforcement learning and skill development it's been improving its usefulness and, overall, I've been pretty pleased. Surprised even, if I'm being honest.

I use it a lot for personal stuff. Off the top of my head: Best way so far to build and use personalized/family tools for dining/recipe/movie/literature/reminder/organizer/security/notes—-in addition to robust text input, all of them have a voice and image UI via telegram without extra code via an intermediate LLM agent, and all data end up on your machine in your format of choice. More fun than codex/claude-code for hobby coding projects (though worse performance, more effort, unless you directly use codex acp). Less intrusive than ChatGPT/Claude for parallel queries while outdoors (speak, then read). Fun way to explore and understand multi-agent setups. A great way to demo the ability of current AI to friends and family.

You dont have to enable scary setups to make it minimally useful. The jump in capability compared to chatbots is dramatic, and the jump in flexibility compared to coding harnesses is also dramatic.

Me.

It’s fun and it works. I’ve tied it to consumption on open router and the main vendors. The free llm on openrouter are interesting but get exhausted quickly. I heavily suggest making a clean slate and going from there.

It’s amazing, it helps me do misc tasks I wouldn’t do so I can… be more lazy. Most of it is local file system crud but man it’s amazing for that.

Used it for a few days to summarize top 10 hacker news at scheduled time or send me a joke of the day

I liked how easy I can tell it to do something for me but token usage didn't justify the cost. I 'd either had to use smarter model which could cost a lot more or cheaper model which, in one instance, stuck in a loop

Product-wise, it's an awesome tool. Imagine having your own butler for anything except that the reliability with affordable isn't here yet to do anything serious

I find OpenClaw and (more so) Hermes Agent useful for software development, research, and writing - but I refuse to run them anywhere that is not deeply-sandboxed and has no access to most of my digital life data.

OK, everyone makes their own decisions re: privacy and security. Personally, I am comfortable running OpenClaw and Hermes Agent on a rented VPS (preferably in a docker container on a VPS) and allow limited access to (some of) my GitHub repos. Both tools are useful, even in such a limited mode of operation. I just don't see value vs. risk allowing access to email, messaging apps, access to my personal computer, etc.

It is close to zero overhead to SSH/Mosh to a VPS, get inside a container to work. Why risk infecting your personal or corporate computer?

I use it. I never recommend it to anyone, but it’s a fun project I get use out of. There’s a few really good criticisms of the project, the ones that hit home for me are the token hungry aspects and the tinkering aspects.

The most common question is “what do you use it for”, so here are my answers.

1. I have the Obsidian/Openclaw setup that’s so popular with the self hosted crowd. I have a ton of “cron” jobs in openclaw to fetch data and insert it into Obsidian, or to summarize obsidian items I’ve done, or to nudge me about todos in my obsidian. This is where I get the most value, interacting on the .md file layer in automated fashion. For example, I have a cron that will summarize my daily notes into weekly notes, and my weekly notes into monthly notes.

2. Email inbox management. I have jobs that alert me of emails from certain people or subjects. Jobs that process emails into folders based on fuzzy LLM rules, etc.

Not anymore. After the claude shut off I decided to look around since I found it heavy. I’m on Hermes now with StepFun 3.5 Flash. I mostly just use it as a glorified calendar manager over signal. That being said, it feels like it meets the cross roads “of a cheap executive assistant”. Granted it’s not wired up to my work slack or anything. StepFun is a good enough model for tool calling that so far has been incredibly cheap that I’m happy with it. I suspect I won’t crack $5 of api cost to run it. But I also don’t think the Hermes harness is good enough for development-via-text like openclaw+opus is. I still find myself in the terminal using open code for that.

Personally, better way to phrase might be "Does anybody you've actually met, visually viewed, use OpenClaw? Can you verify them using the software nearby?"

In a few years, it's become so easy to falsify articles, falsify comments, falsify images, difficult to really even trust responses online anyways. As far back as 2016, Microsoft already had bots deployed online that could respond 96,000 times [1] in 16 hours all over social media. Remember Tay? [1][2]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Even official government responses.

The British Royal family went to falsification immediately. [3] Note child's broken fingers bent sideways (lower left, didn't even get circled)

[3] https://inews.co.uk/news/signs-princess-kate-royal-family-ph...

The White House is posting altered arrest images of people. [4]

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-...

Can't trust this stuff much anymore. Obvious caveat with this post.

I've used claude cowork a bit, which I believe is pretty similar to claw.

Can't think of much use for it at the moment but I have it just read and summarise my email, calendar events and git repo in a daily briefing format, it only has readonly access to both, as I dont trust it to do stuff for me or on my behalf.

The briefing thing is nice though not super useful.

If your personal life is so complex that you need to "automate" it, I think you need to reduce complexity instead of throwing an AI at it.

I have it installed on a dedicated M4 16GB Mac Mini with Telegram, email, and Google Docs integration (the agent has its own accounts). I can chat with it, incl. sending voice messages via Telegram (it can send voice messages back using free TTS run locally).

Using google/gemma-4-31b-it as primary, google-gemini-3.1-pro-preview as secondary (I don't like how it's rate limited).

It's a great personal assistant. Helps me track industry news, key clients, reminds me of important tasks, and helps brainstorm (the rubber duck effect alone is worth it). Now building other skills.

Next step is to run all models locally (I think using Claude/OpenAI APIs is a huge mistake from a privacy standpoint). Since Mac Studios are sold out (and M5 Ultra is not out yet), will probably go with a GX10 or two.

I tried it for a few days and then dropped it. The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase. I was mostly interested in having AI writing little toy projects. I used pi over ssh instead, and eventually built myself a little mobile-first web UI wrapping pi.

I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code.

But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat.

I'm running half my company with Nanoclaw. Same idea, and has some benefits, but I live in CC all day so it's marginal (except for the fact that my laptop has to be on)

Well i built an equivalent of OpenClaw using Claude Code and hooking it up with WhatsApp. For mew I'm currently using it for following things

1. Morning brief + meeting preps 2. Managing client work and action items (tracking status, deliverables, etc) 3. Executing our AI workflows on my laptop. We have built several AI workflows for our agency and this setup gives the ability to seamlessly execute and control them through both mobile and desktop

Next on my to-do list is to build additional workfows for me and my wife around family logistics (travel, childcare, etc)

I've got a free hosted one from Zo Computer which sends me a daily news summary but I can't say I really use it. https://zo.computer/ if you want to try. They had $100 free credits for the promo code 'clawconlon'. Not sure if that's still going.

Their talk was quite good https://youtu.be/6rSEOzWY08U?t=2246