Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

I tried twice and couldn’t extract value. Loaded it with ability. Still couldn’t.

I saw some non-technical people automating or creating small great tools with it which they need for their profession. These people are not programmers.

I think everybody who has basic understanding of programming and deployment better should stick to some AI coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode etc etc.

I don't think I'm missing out by not using OpenClaw & Co.

It seems a lot like paying to run malware when shell scripts and cron will do.

I'm only using it until I can make my own TUI from scratch in C or Rust.

I bought a Mac Mini, installed OpenClaw, and was impressed with the overall design and functionality. Then the problems started. Sometimes the gateway would crash, sometimes Signal (a channel I setup) would stop working. Upgrades seemed to break stuff. I had to dip into the terminal a lot to fix various things. It's quite useful if you don't already have Claude Code or similar tools setup, but frankly I haven't found a compelling use case that I can't get done in another more mature agentic harness.

i switched to hermes agent. works better for me. using it on linux and mac.

I've heard too many horror stories so I'm waiting.

eh nothing actual mission critical, however managing my home server has become a breeze and kinda fun, I've given my openclaw/nanoclaw a personality whose sole job is to tend to my server and enjoy it.

I have a bunch of telegram notifiers and bot templates laid out already as well as the whole arr stack.

So say a friend wants to track a tv show, I just ask openclaw to track it and setup a bot to notify them, it manages everything and sets it up cleanly (most of the time). They also have access to the public media directory so they can ask the bot when the next episode will come out or if some other show is available etc. Again, not super critical but building out this level of ux would've taken me a lonnnng time, it's pretty nice to have some company in managing my server as well which is a kinda lonely experience. Fun stuff.

Context and memory storage, plus crons and tools

Yeah it’s a coding beast if you get it dialed in right

what is the open claw hype and also is it just more of an SF thing?

I use it daily and also implemented it for a customer for a very specific use case. The Claude subscription change made it less desirable to use but I still enjoy it.

Heard too many horror stories, pass

I'm waiting for it to produce the most destructive worm in the history of personal computing as soon as someone with a sufficiently large list of e-mail addresses and a zero day prompt injection technique decides they want to create some chaos. Maybe I'll trust if it if we ever see AGI, but if we ever see AGI, chances are I'm not going to need it. So. No.

The main thing why I started using it too late was the slop. it's in the end AI generated, yes it can take your tasks but i never felt in my personal use case how it can help me when it's just generating slop. I used claude cowork more than openclaw after trying once that too in a cloud container since I'm afraid of its security

Not using it since Opus is gone

https://openclaw.allegro.earth

Frankly everything I have seen about says that the people using LLMs to develop it can not be trusted with LLMs so no. I am not using it. I'm not anti-llm's I'm anti-stupid-llm-usage.

I am but that is despite there being many very solid reasons not to. It's mainly painful until you sort out the many plumbing issues. This thread is going to be full of people telling you why not to use it. I'm not going to add more to that pile of great arguments except to acknowledge that, yes, it is super messy, insecure, dangerous, etc. I'm well aware.

So, why use it anyway? The promise of agentic workflows is very real. If you have seriously used agentic coding tools, you probably have figured out that in certain contexts it is a bit magical to see these tools solve real problems and do in minutes what would take you hours or days manually. It will also have exposed you to things like skills, guard rails, etc. that help you use these tools in a way that is a bit more repeatable and less prone to hallucinated outcomes. All this ports over well to OpenClaw. And in fact, you don't actually need OpenClaw as you can get most of what you are going to do in OpenClaw in agentic coding tools instead. Same models, same cli tools, same skills, etc. Try doing that instead if you don't want to go near OpenClaw.

OpenClaw only adds a few elements to this: 1) channels to communicate, 2) "agents" with memories and personalities in the form of markdown files and a feedback loop that updates these things out of the box. You can hack together stuff to add both to your agentic coding tools.

My company sells coaching and consulting services to people who are not programming that are interested in making a dent in the amount of digital drudgery work that they currently have to do. And because we sell it, I need to be able to actually do this. If you are a programmer you don't need our help. However, most of this planet is stuck with tools like ChatGPT that are very limited for this. There just are not a lot of good tools for these people yet. OpenClaw is a very rough, uncut diamond that if you get beyond its scary nature can actually do useful stuff. Tools will get better later. But right now, things just are going to be messy.

What I would recommend curious people: carve out some time to give this a serious try and don't give up too soon. Isolate it all you want. But focus on getting something useful going. You'll be solving lots of plumbing and configuration issues. And you'll need some imagination to make it do useful stuff because out of the box it's a bit useless and dumb until you make it actually do something useful.

Example of what I did recently that is useful and probably should be baked into the product.

Problem: setting up openclaw agents, hooking them up so you can talk to them, and configuring them is super tedious and fiddly in OpenClaw. Solution: an agent that does that.

How? For communication channels, I set up a new self hosted matrix server. Our company is now in there; we're ditching Slack. Because Slack is so locked down that it just can't really work for this. Matrix works really well for this. A lot of SAAS tools are locked down like this and finding workarounds is most of the work with agentic workflows. Replacing them is easier and the power move to make.

Synapse (the matrix server) has a cli and REST API. So, I created an admin bot user for OpenClaw to use that from an OpenClaw admin agent. That agent can create other agents, configure them with a model and a few other things. It gives them a new matrix bot user and hooks up a newly created room in matrix and then invites the team there. I didn't actually create that agent manually either; I made Codex bootstrap the admin agent for me. Because I used Codex to bootstrap the Matrix and OpenClaw vms for me earlier. So it had access already. Then I went on to create a few more agents with a few prompts. I actually made it rearrange my Matrix space and rooms as well. Because tedious and I just gave it access to that so why not. Yes, this involves giving admin access to an OpenClaw bot and this is scary.

We have a slide deck agent that uses reveal.js that you can use to prompt beautiful slides together. We have an SEO agent that figures out the right seo language for us to use and updates that regularly on our website. A competitive landscape agent that crawls a range of competitor websites to stay on top of what they are doing, what they are talking about, who they are linking to as customers, partners, etc. I have loads of plans for additional agents. We focus on agents that our clients would want to have so that we can get them going with those once they ask for that.

Once you get a few things like this up and running, this stuff becomes more useful quickly. It's still scary AF to give it access to all the stuff it needs. And you really really shouldn't. But it can't be useful unless you do. Classic security dilemma here. Throw out the baby with the bathwater or get things done now? Security often loses. And then people scramble to enable doing things in a more responsible way. I don't want to have to wait a few years for that to play out. But I recommend most other people to wait. It's the responsible thing to recommend. But if you don't want to, we can help you along the way and help you mitigate at least some of the risks.

I'm planning to set it up as a auto-marketing and user acquisition agent, but I'm also backpedaling on the idea since (1) people can probably easily tell that it's AI (2) that will produce negative reputation as a "slop company" (3) that's feeding into the dead internet theory

So in short, there's not much to do. I don't really have tasks I can just "hand off to OpenClaw"

Nope. I spun up a few Openclaws & a Hermes but never enjoyed the end results. Now I just use a telegram plugin for Codex. And run Codex on a miniPC I found in the trash. A $20/mo Codex sub gets me a GPT-5.4 agent that can make its own Automations (cron jobs), search the web, and modify the files and apps on the NAS drive I share. Simple and cheap works for me.

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

I work for a huge company and we've just gotten access to Claude Code and now all the AI folks are pushing super hard to get EIS to open up so they can start using OpenClaw with Claude.

I'm the "internally screaming" meme after having been in several of these meetings where dev teams are pushing for it under the guise of getting better at utilizing AI. "Well, OpenClaw plays extremely well with Claude Code, it could really give our teams a huge boost."

Oy vey the next few months are certainly going to be an adventure!

I've been trying out Hermes this week. OpenClaw felt like too much.

It was really easy to setup and I've been getting some value out of it but hasn't been the craziest thing in the world. I'm using it for:

- Unstructured note-taking: I suck at notes and todos and used to have a WhatsApp chat with myself (this is really common in Brazil) where I dump stuff. Now I dump into Hermes and it sorts whatever I put in there into one of various lists like to-do, to-read, to-try, to-buy, and so on.

- Briefings on a cron: I get reminded of my todos every morning and at the end of the day so I can cross stuff off. Later in the day I get reminded of my to-read list. I also get a summary of what went on from my coding orchestrator.

- Some coding: I built my own remote orchestrator and have been using Hermes to manage tasks, review code, and trigger tasks when on the move. Hermes has been a nice interface to allow me to use the orchestrator on my phone.

Haven't connected email or anything else yet. I feel like the security story here is lacking.

Overall it's been interesting but not mind-blowing. Plus setting up was easy but it's a bit buggy at times, messing up where files were and not being able to configure itself according to its own docs.

EDIT: Ah yes and voice notes via WhatsApp out-of-the-box is really nice

I love it, it is like Claude on steroids, I can just chat with it on my phone and iterate projects… sadly it’s really expensive now to keep using Opus, looking for alternatives that doesn’t gimp the reasoning and creativity is hard.

I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here:

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IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.

They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.

However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.

There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.

We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.

We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.

We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.

In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.

I hope this helps.

I like Openclaw. It's able to interact with a bunch of apps I self-host (e.g. media server, home automation, productivity) and I generally prefer communicating with it over Claude directly. I would not tell people to go out and fork over money for a mac mini to use it. I already had a mac mini sitting idle, so I'm putting it to use.

openclaw was the scrum of the ai generation. lots of money made by thought leaders and such. largely irrelevant today.

I can see some embryonic potential in the concept, almost like a little spark of genius. I'm convinced a variant of an agentic personal assistant will become commonplace within a few years and will likely gain widespread adoption.

That said, OpenClaw and most of its clones are extremely brittle right now. FWIW, I also tried building my own thinking the problem is surely the vibe coded complexity but it's not that, it's in limitations of the models and their training.

I do still have an OpenClaw instance running on an M1 Macbook Pro in my closet with a local ollama instance (qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4). It mostly cleans up my notes in my Trilium instance and it helps monitor prices of homelab components (on eBay and Reddit) daily.

I still haven't found an actual, useful scenario where something like OpenClaw would be a benefit to me. I don't regularly order arbitrary airplane tickets and I don't have a cluttered Desktop that I need AI to organize into folders. I don't run a YouTube channel with a "need" to do research on competitors and I don't get emails in a volume so large that I need automation to filter and summarize it, instead of just spending literally 10 seconds to delete my newsletters that I never read anyway.

I also don't trust AI which hallucinates answers 4/5 times that I ask it, for my technical work, thus I can't use it for PR reviews even if my company was OK with me feeling company property to it.

I also don't go grocery shopping random items and thus don't have a need to ask an assistant for "an inspiring and tasty recipe using the following ingredients".

I feel that OpenClaw and other similar "agentic" solutions are catered to me. But I also feel that I don't need any of it, because at the end of the day, it all just feels like a bunch of "Hello World" quality examples that cannot be applied to everyday life.

...heck, even a "get ready for work" assistant would be pointless, because I don't wake up and get ready with 20 minutes to spare, for some AI assistant to "recommend me the ideal time to leave my home, to arrive in time". Who does that? Who would sit around and do nothing for 10-15 minutes just because an AI agent told them that they didn't need to leave early?

OpenClaw & Friends feel quite useless.

Everyone’s just making their own multi agent stacks now

i am using Hermes

I’m not.

Never felt a need for it. I can already replicate much of what it does in more sustainable / preferable ways. I don't want agents reacting to things and doing things. I use agents to build reliable scripts which are then automated. I do have data collection points that I use an LLM to evaluate. The last example of this is I built a job polling service using CC. It's just a normal script that hits open APIs to pull job listing results into a SQLite database. I have another report which is run that drops an update of how many new jobs are in the database. If there's enough for me to be interested in, I'll fire up CC and have it parse through the job opportunities for the ones which match the profile we've been building. I've used an agent to literally build and deploy it all and it runs on an automated schedule. It just doesn't do agent shit while I'm not looking.

I could have piped the results of that search into `claude -p` and had it do the analysis "real-time" and only alert me about things I would be interested in. That's closing the loop in a similar way people use OpenClaw for. But I'm just not interested. It adds more failure points and conditions. The automated things should be as simple and predictable as possible. This may change after months or years more of LLM development or even just me refining my working config. But not yet.

lots of modern software devs suffer from the same thing notoriously associated with teenagers: strong urge to conform and comply with peer pressure. individuals vary, obvs. but as you age this urge shrinks

I noticed that Clawdbot’s initial acolytes seemed to skew towards solo founders and hustler/grifter types. The Mac minis were likely to spam leads over iMessage. The single top downloaded skill was for Twitter. The fastest way to monetize an openclaw agent is by spamming fake social proof for your product (including for openclaw itself).

raises hand

Nobody. Just another flash in the pan.

OpenClaw has no use. It has functions, but none of them are useful, because LLMs are mostly not useful.

Every OpenClaw "usecase" I've seen was unfalsifiable or just a function.

Use case: Using a calculator to add 2+2 OpenClaw "Use Case": "Read this email, figure out what the client is asking for, look up the relevant project in my task manager, draft a response"

This is unfalsifiable, and it's also something that requires general intelligence. it's also not something OpenClaw does. You do not need openclaw to do this, its not an llm. You could just paste the email and give 1 paragraph of context to chatgpt and get the same result.

WITHOUT making orchestration administration your full time job.

…Or is anyone making money directly out of running OpenClaw other than hosted providers or selling OpenClaw courses?

Absolutely not

I don't use openclaw but I spent few weeks on nanobot and then this week switched to Hermes. I have simple usecases like a news brief in the morning on my areas of interest, checking my email for latest updates on things I care about right now etc.

But I gave my wife access to the discord server, she burned 20% of weekly quota for codex (I use it as the provider) but created a skill which helps her practice dutch her way (she's learning it at A2 level for now). I went through the chats with her when she was showing it to me and it's amazing. She is a non technical person but she has tons of experience developing products. It was amazing (and to be frank very sexy) to see her work pretending as if she has been assigned a junior developer. The whole things a tangled mess of cron jobs, skills and scripts but her point is very simple "it maps perfectly to my learning style and keeps it fresher than flashcards or Duolingo".

Edit: wording. Also she wants me to mention at the end of the lesson it also does roleplaying which no other product gave her.

I had it working great (and using it a ton for sweng tasks) on the Max ($200/mo) plan. Then they intentionally broke it even though my usage was completely within their stated/published usage limits for my plan. It was providing me tons of value - easily $2-3k/mo.

I hate it but I caved, decided I would pay the extra usage charges, and prepaid $1k (because it came with a 30% discount). Set it up using the new sanctioned login method.

It's 5x slower and 80% of the time the requests fail authentication or time out. Now it can't even do basic stuff like my medication tracking system that I had set it up to do.

Fuck Anthropic. I'm a customer, ready and willing to pay whatever they ask for this, and they're treating me like a fucking mark. I'm tired of dicking around with it, jumping through hoops troubleshooting a previously working system simply because they won't just raise prices like a normal business.

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No it's slop and most of the hype was manufactured marketing. It has 0 utility, and any perceived utility you can build yourself easily