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.