alt Hacker NewsI 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...
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Thank you for this detailed writeup. If it's not a secret - what is your monthly ballpark figure. I'm planning to deploy an instance during the weekend, for light - medium usage. Can't gauge costs.
I used it very similarly to you, but found it to be about $3.50 per day, or $100 a month. It wasn't worth that.
I find it funny you call it an Obsidian project.
It is just folders and MD files. You are not even locked-in with Obsidian.
Or maybe OpenClaw is reading the graph view?
This is basically the same setup as mine, except I built a grocery price crawler, that spits out a weekly menu along with a check-box shopping list straight into my google drive. Wife loves being able to just type "we need toothpaste" or whatever into Telegram and whenever we go to do our weekly shop we get an up to date shopping list optimised for prices and our dietary preferences.
Before getting side-tracked by other projects I was also going to build a kind of family archiving function like someone in the comments also mentioned. Just to quickly be able to record small/funny family moments.
This is roughly how I use it as well, except I made it a little bit more proactive and actively chases me whether it should track certain things in OmniFocus and chases me about completing overdue tasks or other things I would otherwise forget.
I keep data collection out of the LLMs. I have separate scripts that push and pull data from external sources. So I don’t need to provide the LLM with auth keys, and the things it can do is very limited.
Interested in the calorie tracking (have done amateur bodybuilding). Are you mostly cooking your own meals? Wonder if scanning items and tracking more loosely (a more forgiving myfitnesspal) would be helpful for you? Its on the roadmap of things I'm looking to build for myself (just made this last weekend for buying tovala meals: http://brovala.site)
Hi,
You mentioned switching out LLM backends. Would you think that lesser models e.g. one of the recent Qwen variants would work for your use case?
Do you build out your own information hierarchies and tell the model to use as-is, or do you let it organize everything itself?
Great article, thanks for sharing. How much does it run you a month roughly?
That's exactly what I want to use it for, thanks for writing an article about it !
I’ve also found it useful for personal stuff. For example I have my OpenClaw bot in a family group on Telegram and everyday it asks my family members stories from their lives that it meticulously documents and uses as a basis for further questions in the future and has so far managed to build a rich family history spanning 50 odd family members (a project I had always been planning to do for never found the time to).