Every time I've sat down to consider how it could be useful, I can't think of anything that I couldn't build as a series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts. (even using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting at first, but then the tokens are spent and I don't have ongoing cost)

I can only guess it's really not for "us", but rather for those who aren't afraid of technology but aren't really engineers.

Monitors my company's support email, searches though code, GitHub etc to try and triage the issue and shoot me a message to give me a head start.

Connects stripe subscription cancellation with PostHog events to see if something was frustrating.

Does the same leading up to when someone subscribes to describe successful paths.

Lots of novel thinking when events happen on its own being proactive.

Just because people aren't talking about it doesn't mean it isn't useful. Think creatively.

My thoughts exactly. If whatever i wanted it to do was so unimportant that I can trust this thing to have full control over it and to do it successfully why even do it anyways? The risks of giving it full unparalleled API key access and control fully outweigh whatever gain.

It's massive in China. Search for "raise a lobster" and check out the videos from the events.

I think it has obscure uses here and there, like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1shutzt/openclaw_...

My observation is that people who love this stuff are not programmers so they feel like they have been empowered to automate things that they could not otherwise automate.

For people who are already highly skilled in scripting/automation it's a lot less impressive.

They notice all the things that could go wrong. All the non-determinism issues. And they think I could do this better with a custom script myself.

The use cases I have heard all seem like gimmicks to me.

Yes agree, I imagine that's why NVIDIA and OpenAI jumped at them.

I wouldn't touch that vibe-coded mess with a ten foot pole.

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

Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.

That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.

All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.

What a scam.

Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.

There is one usecase: you can laundry your actions and just say "oopsies, llms when rogue I guess"

It's not pretty and not honest but if you're desperate I guess it's an option

"Thing that has huge adoption is fake, they're all morons!"

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