I talk to a lot of business people that are interested in automating very basic things in their inbox, on their Google drive, in CRMs, etc. The reason is not that they want to be cool and hip but because they are forced to spend lots of their precious time doing very dull and repetitive things. Promising to take some of that pain away is a really easy sell. Hence all the hype around OpenClaw.

If you look around in the business world, there is an absurdly large number of people still doing all sorts of things manually that they probably shouldn't. And its costing them money. Even before AI that was true. But now it's increasingly becoming obvious to these people that there are solutions out there that might work. There's a fair amount of FOMO on that front with more clued in people that have heard of other people allegedly being a bit smarter than them.

From a practical experience point of view, most people probably don't have the hands-on experience to make a good judgment just yet. "I tried Chat GPT once and it hallucinated" doesn't really count as valid experience at this point and many non-technical people are still at that level. There generally are a lot of headless chickens making absurd claims (either way) about what these systems can and cannot do making sweeping statements about how possible or impossible things are.

If you take the time and sit down to automate a few things you'll find that: 1) the tools aren't great right now 2) there are lots of basic plumbing issues that get in the way 3) fixing those plumbing issues is not rocket science and something anyone with basic CLI or scripting skills can solve easily 4) you can actually outsource most of that stuff to coding agents. 5) if you figure some of the basics out, you can actually make OpenClaw or similar systems do things that are valuable. 6) Most people that aren't programmers won't get very far given the current state of tools. 7) this might change rapidly as better tools become available. 8) people generally lack the imagination to see how even basic solutions could work for them with these systems.

I have an OpenClaw up and running for our company. It is doing some basic things that are useful for us. After solving some basic plumbing issues, it's now a lot easier to make it do new things. It's not quite doing everything just yet (lots more plumbing issues to solve) and we have our healthy hesitations about letting it loose on our inboxes. But it's not useless or without value. Every plumbing issue we solve unlocks a few more use cases. There's a bit of a gold rush right now of course. And "picks and shovels" people like myself are probably going to do a brisk business.

You can wait it out or tap into the action now. That's your choice. But try making it an informed choice. And no better experience than the first-hand type.

I find some value as kinda a better alexa.

I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.

I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"

I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.

It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa

It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.

Yep, I’m seeing real value. I use them for tasks that an assistant might have done in the past. It’s much cheaper than hiring a human, and setup is much faster than finding a good assistant. I’m honestly considering giving it access to accounts with payment information so it can book flights and hotels for me.

You can ask it questions like “what classes does my gym offer between 6-8pm today” and just get a good answer instead of wasting time finding their schedule. You can tell it to check your favorite band’s website everyday to see if they announce any shows in your city. You can tell it to read your emails and automatically add important information to your calendar.

This isn’t the space where I get the most value from AI, but it’s nice to have a hyper connected agent that can quickly take care of more smaller and more personal tasks.

Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work.

This is cheap replacement for ordinary people.

It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.

I see the appeal, but I also see the risks.

If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.

The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.

That's all great, until it isn't.

Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.

I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.

> letting an AI into my comms

Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool.

Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails.

Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.

This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant.

It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything.

I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.

> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks?

Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.

There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.

Newb technies love it.

Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.

It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage.

I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol

I ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value.

Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and on a VPS with only access to a local directory in the VPS with a dozen active projects on GitHub. I don't give it access to my GitHub credentials, but allow it to work in whatever branch is checked out.

This setup is fabulously productive. I use it about every other day to perform some meaningful task for me. It is inexpensive also. A task might take 20 minutes and cost $0.25 in GLP-5.1 API costs.

So TLDR: out of the box, I use Hermes at least one hour a week and find it to be a wonderful tool.

It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.

Mostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.

Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.

I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.

no, it's only for scammers

Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.

No.

But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af.

Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.