I have the same experience giving my brother an OpenClaw as his personal assistant.

His words were: It feels as if I need to know how to program it.

I was expecting he could say something like "Oh, it seems like you don't remember the people I'm referring to, perhaps you need some kind of CRM system. Can you investigate if there are any easily available CRM systems you can interface with, so we don't need to make one for you?"

Whereas my OpenClaw moment was trying to make it manage its own NixOS installation, so that if I ask it to do something, it doesn't yolo `apt install` commands, but rather improves on the same overview of its own installation.

A lot of people had success making their OpenClaw do things without being Linux experts. But you need a tinkerer's mindset, is what I came to conclude.