Unpopular opinion: OpenClaw and all its clones are almost useless tools for those who know what they're doing. It's kind of impressive for someone who has never used a CLI, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Nor used any workflow tool like 8n8 or make.
Posted by pacmanpill@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 234 comments
It seems to me that OpenClaw and all its clones are almost useless tools for those who know what they're doing.
It's kind of impressive for someone who has never used a CLI, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Nor used any workflow tool like 8n8 or make.
For these people, asking an AI to create a program or a new tool with a prompt must seem like magic. For those who already use it, it seems like something that simplified the old ones but made them much more chaotic and unsafe.
The only good thing about it is that it made more "ordinary" people interested in these agentic tools. Sending messages via Telegram is much more user-friendly.
HornyGooner4402@reddit
The problem is most of these tools are half-baked and models still aren't optimized for tool calls or the specific scaffolding.
Yes, they're much better nowadays but they're just not as good as on popular scaffold like Claude Code or OpenCode. I find that running OpenCode on my home root works better as an assistant than OpenClaw
superSmitty9999@reddit
I just set up Hermes agent as a private health tracker with signal as the message connector.
I chat with the LLM and it converts it to SQL to directly modify the DB I set up
Working great for me so far
nopeac@reddit
I want to do this, did you follow any specific tutorial?
combrade@reddit
Hermes Agent is absolutely wonderful and relatively lightweight. So, for example, I built this script that has a TTS model API and also an LLM summarizer prompt. I basically give Hermes agent an article URL, and it turns that into a podcast episode. It honestly feels better than notebookllm for me . I have scheduled cronjobs where it runs scripts I built as well. I know I’m in LocalLama but I enjoy using my codex login with it and GPT-5.4-Mini.
It feels honestly more exciting than even Anthropic’s discovery of MCP for me.
burger4d@reddit
What are you using for text to speech?
sivadneb@reddit
Out of curiosity what makes hermes any better than just a script + cronjob approach?
WoodCreakSeagull@reddit
The idea with the Hermes agent is that it builds its memory and skillset automatically the more you work with it and use it to solve complex tasks. As to how effective it can be over the long-term, I'm not sure, but I'm trying it out and it has the benefit of providing a capable harness as is with a bunch of tools I don't have to go out of my way to set up.
freecodeio@reddit
Literally you get to tell your friends how you use ai to automate tasks
rocktrembath@reddit
Very cool. I've been wanting to pair it with paper clip so I have clear management of how everything works. Are you hosting it or just running it locally?
Expensive-Paint-9490@reddit
An agentic app from Nous-research? I didn't know about it, great discovery!
ComeFromTheWater@reddit
My Hermes made 2 websites this weekend. Took some QA passes but it did all the heavy lifting. Most time spent was planning, which I’d have had to do anyhow
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
I love Hermes. I’m actually going to try out a multi agent development pipeline for my next project. I am hoping I can set up the validation process to I can focus al my time on requirements extraction and user acceptance testing.
Timely-Perception-26@reddit
It would be nice if we could share skills somewhere. Some user has probably already created the right skill for every problem.
desexmachina@reddit
When did r/LocalLlama turn into the normie doomer channel?
aski5@reddit
pushback against something not useful = doomer
Timely-Perception-26@reddit
There's the open-source community and the open-source community on Reddit. As we all know, one of them is toxic.
Timely-Perception-26@reddit
This logic comes straight out of political bullshit. How does anyone even come up with the idea of pushing back against something that’s open source and brings joy to some random person? No matter how I look at it, no matter what stance I take, it’s an 85-IQ move. I’m running Hermes locally with llama.cpp and qwen 3.6 as a voice assistant that simply automates a few routine tasks for me.
Pushback against companies? Sure. Pushback against open-source software/open-weight models? Toxic single-celled organisms that should be kicked out of the community.
AnotherBrock@reddit
idk what happened to it, its got way worse over the last few months.
desexmachina@reddit
There was a time when the rest of the internet was sh*ting on exactly the people on this sub because “LLM’s are garbage halulu” & when OC came out it was all haterade like everyone went boomer
Deadhookersandblow@reddit
What part of the post is wrong?
He’s right.
sine120@reddit
Our doomerism should be far more sophisticated.
ANTIVNTIANTI@reddit
🤣🤣🤣💯👆🏻
swiebertjee@reddit
I'm not sure if that's unpopular. I tried Openclaw last weekend and was surprised by how utterly useless it is.
It promises to be your "personal automation agent" yet when I want to connect it to Whatsapp, the docs says it's better to use a separate phone number. How is that personal?
Then I learned it only triggers on incoming messages, so if I use my own number, it doesn't act on anything going out. Then there's also the fact that I asked it to make notes only, it confirmed, yet it started replying to my mother (lmfao).
And lastly, when I ask it to search for a detail in a WhatsApp conversation, it cannot do that by name (it needs an ID? Idk it was complaining) and it was instructed to "not provide direct quotes". Like, what is your purpose?
A WhatsApp MCP server + Open webui with the new automation tools (released today! Basically a cron job) is far, far better
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
OpenClaw is for clueless tech bros who don’t know what a cron job is and want to setup social media bots while sitting in their cybertruck mansplaining how NFT’s are making a comeback, trying paying for a chi half caff triple fluff late with on a vibe coded custom Apply Pay app that uses some obscure meme coin.
It allows any moron to put a ton of time and a fortune in tokens into a dumpster fire security problem that summarizes social media, stock markets, and emails, but needs more babysitting than just doing it by hand.
Ibn-Arabi@reddit
Totally 💯 that is why I was a bit surprised at how quickly and expensively OpenAI bought them. I mean, dudes, you call yourselves the leading frontier lab and you are telling me none of your own uber-highly paid engineers can recreate this in a week?
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
They own the code, but they bought it for the name and popularity.
Ibn-Arabi@reddit
I believe OpenAI is cracking internally. Their unit economics just don’t work. Several things have happened:
I agree that OpenClaw was bought for its popularity and maybe to sell more hardware and tokens. But still, it seemed a bit off and amateur.
Bakoro@reddit
It's not just OpenAI cracking, they're in am extremely precarious position. They were the first big name, so they have a certain mindshare, ChatGPT is to LLMs, what "Google" is to search, and what Xerox was to copy machines, but that hasn't actually translated into paying users, and they have been struggling to find their market niche.
Google has the search revenue, and under Alphabet, they have YouTube, and commercial scale infrastructure, and their own TPUs, and they have GMail, and the Google office suite.
Google/Alphabet has a deep and wide platform, where LLMs and various other modalities can make sense to invest in, regardless of the immediate profitability, and regardless of if it makes sense as a product that they offer outside of the organization. They've got all thr data they need, without any of the legal risks, and they've got all the compute available that they need, where if the market falls apart, those TPUs still have major utility.
Anthropic position led itself early as focusing on software development, and "ethics". They didn't try to chase a dozen different products, they targeted a specific sector and they made a best-in-class product.
They never tried to give away unlimited usage, they cut people off hard and say "pay me", so they haven't been hemorrhaging money the same way as OpenAI.
OpenAI had Microsoft's backing, but that relationship has soured, and Microsoft now wants to bring all the AI R&D in house. Like Google, they've got massive infrastructure and existing platforms where AI can fit in (even though they've been completely shitting the bed with ramming AI into everything).
Then we've got the Chinese open source products putting stress on the closed sourced models. Alibaba is an e-commerce and logistics company, they don't actually need to sell AI products at all, anything they make can help support their existing revenue streams.
Anyone who can run a Qwen model is probably doing so.
Anyone who desperately needs a private trillion parameter model is probably running Moonshot's Kimi.
So what is OpenAI's main differentiator? What's the value-add over any of the other major AI firms? What's the non-AI revenue stream?
They closed down Sora and the Disney deal is dead, so, clearly OpenAI isn't going to be Hollywood's movie special effects entity.
The only real hope I see for OpenAI is if they crack an industry use-case that nobody else thought about, or if the cost of compute goes way down.
If photonic computing has a manufacturing blitz, maybe the costs will go down in a couple years, maybe. But they have to survive that long.
SkyFeistyLlama8@reddit
Microsoft was smart to license OpenAI's models and not get involved with Sam Altman's shitshow. If OpenAI goes down in flames, enterprise users wouldn't even notice as long as Microsoft has a decent replacement model of its own.
And if Qwen 3.6 shows how good a tiny 35B model running at home can be, I'd imagine Microsoft has the hardware and skills to make enterprise LLMs that can easily replace ChatGPT.
Ibn-Arabi@reddit
Don’t forget Microsoft’s own shitshow aka the Copilot aka the Ponzi scheme to charge more for an advanced Clippy. Just when I started to believe in Microsoft, they obliged quickly 😝
standish_@reddit
https://i.redd.it/8f0otcljzowg1.gif
ketoaholic@reddit
I like how you seem to have triggered a bunch of what I'm guessing are crypto bros lol
standish_@reddit
https://i.redd.it/nly3gk3cvowg1.gif
SkyFeistyLlama8@reddit
I hate you for being right LOL!
There's a lot of overlap from the zombie cryptocurrency community and OpenClaw agentic shills. I guess it's a community that eats itself, judging by the number of exploits for draining cryptocurrency wallets.
I'll reserve the word "crypto" for cryptography. I'm old enough to remember the original meaning before it was swiped by NFT and ICO idiots.
Crypt0Nihilist@reddit
After that flaming I now want to find out more about OpenClaw and its users from morbid curiosity! I know the gist of why it's bad...but wow.
SoundHole@reddit
Someone thinks rather highly of themselves.
Sufficient-Farmer243@reddit
Honestly this guy worded it wrong but the other guy nailed my EXACT feeling. I threw openclaw on my unraid server and found it virtually useless. I went through hundreds of skills and couldn’t find anything useful.
Everything on there could basically be replicated by home assistant, cron, something else
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
Hang out in /r/openclaw for 5 minutes, you’ll happily eat those words.
draconic_tongue@reddit
u should try it and ask it to translate your messages to human readable format instead of down syndrome format
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
You should try capitalizing your letters like an adult.
pardeike@reddit
A simple “a tech bro toy” would’ve been sufficient
Momsbestboy@reddit
Small trick: if you need some support for your PC, just add some file access mcp servers to Opencode.ai (or similar).
2 days ago I told opencode I have a problem with sddm service locking my screen with an unknown password if I leave the pc alone for some minutes, and asked how to resolve it. Opencode went through all config files, searched for links, and in the end found the issue and resolved it.
Who needs openclaw if opencode is enough?
socialjusticeinme@reddit
I’ve been wondering that myself - I was able to replicate almost everything a “claw” would be able to do just by piping messages into the Gemini CLI. I haven’t bothered to try it with openclaw on my local hardware, but I’m confident it would do the same.
I’m just hoping once the claw bros tire out and goto the next gimmick we can buy up a ton of cheap used hardware.
Momsbestboy@reddit
Yeah, no idea. I just ran in another problem. Locally compiled Handbrake cli stops with "ERROR: Unknown video codec (0x40050071)". I can either play the copy&paste game with ChatGPT to get some approaches and possible feedback, search on my own, try it, or:
Actually, let me look at this differently. HandBrake is trying to read the video codec and getting 0x40050071. This might be a different FourCC or a libvpx/VP9 FourCC.
Wait, I'm seeing VP9 FourCC codes like VP09 (0x39505630 → 0x30565039 in little-endian) and AV1 codes like AV01 (0x31305641 → 0x41563031 in little-endian). Let me check if 0x40050071 matches any of these patterns.
Breaking down 0x40050071 as individual bytes in little-endian gives me 0x71, 0x00, 0x05, 0x40, which spells out "q\x00\x05@" in ASCII. That's not matching any standard codec FourCC I'm recognizing. Looking at the actual stream info showing h264 with FourCC 0x31637661, I need to reconsider what's happening here—maybe this is about how HandBrake reads the codec identifier from the MP4 container rather than the raw FourCC value. So the container reports AVC1 (H.264), but HandBrake is seeing 0x40050071 somewhere in the decoded stream—likely a codec ID from the MP4 track rather than the FourCC itself. The compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41 confirms this is definitely an H.264 file, so this could be a HandBrake version compatibility issue or something about how the encoder wrote the track. The file is definitely H.264 encoded, yet HandBrake is reporting an unknown codec, which suggests either an outdated HandBrake build without AV1 decode support or a corrupted MP4 header. Let me check which version is installed and whether it properly supports the codecs in this file.
The input file is H.264 (AVC) encoded, not AV1:
Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 3840x2160, 24 fps encoder: Lavc60.3.100 libx264
...
Qwen is already looking at it :)
Western_Objective209@reddit
I use claude code with github and atlassian CLIs, and if I let it make posts/comments/tickets without asking permission it will write the dumbest stuff in the wrong place and make all kinds of mistakes. It's still faster at reading confluence docs and related jira tickets and creating new tickets than I am, but I always ask it to confirm with me first and spell out exactly what it plans on doing before trying to take the action because it's just not at all careful
RedParaglider@reddit
I use it with telegram to report on things that I leave running. If I have a Tmux session running, I'll just ping it to update me on the status every 30 minutes. If I'm on planes all day like today I'll ping it work through planning stuff, or even open a web browser and do playwright based UAT's.
If I'm at home I don't use it much, but when I travel it's pretty handy to have on the tailscale network. One thing most people don't probably realize is telegram works great on free airplane wifi. You can look things up, do research, etc, etc all through that messenger.
LongAssBeard@reddit
I feel like I've read this exact comment somewhere before
Isn't all of that stuff that could be done from over the phone anyway? Simple commands to a WhatsApp conversation or whatever chat interface that triggers stuff in your home PC is rather easy stuff
Why would you give unrestricted access to your home PC to a LLM just to do... That?
RedParaglider@reddit
Who says it has access to my home PC? Mine runs in an old Microsoft surface tablet with a busted screen running Linux. It does have ssh access to my Dev server though.
trashk@reddit
I mean, this seems like busy work to feed your dopamine hits rather than actualy useful. IF you travel often why do you need to micro your setup in the first place?
Chron exists. Timers exist. And if you are mission critical assistants exist lol
RedParaglider@reddit
Sure, I even said there are other ways. I don't see the system as mission critical, but it is handy. It also handles almost any simple use case with qwen3 coder next or qwen 3.6 35b, and I switch to codex if needed.
Mickenfox@reddit
It's wildly popular here. Outside here there's an entire million dollar industry (being very conservative) of people hyping it up.
When OpenAI introduced their whatever it's called browser, most of the internet was laughing at them. My boss comes in the next day super excited to tell us about this revolutionary new product.
This kind of media bubble/separation unironically ought to be studied.
InterestingStick@reddit
I felt the same when Claude released their desktop assistant. Some people hit me up with what you could do with it and I just thought... but you can do that and a lot more already on the CLI??
Part of me thinks that after being in this industry for so long I lost touch with how most people view technology. CLI is probably frightening while an app with a simple UI that does 10% of it is impressive
trashk@reddit
dude, I'm an OG DOS head that has stayed in CLI in either windows or Linux some the 90's nd I can say without a doubt the best Claude experience for me is VSCode lol. You can see the out put, look at the code, play with JSON and chat and save notes in a single view. I prefer it .
ieatpies@reddit
Million dollar industry -> so like 2 Senior Software Engineers?
TheThoccnessMonster@reddit
The entire tenor of GTC has Nvidia selling DGX Sparks as a totally self contained system with nemoclaw which honestly makes it … too tough to use.
Using it to orchestrate, chron and Claude Code itself? Now it’s GLM + Opus banging out features that you can review when you have time etc. it requires setting up the personality and tools in a way that is friendly to the context window of the base model you use but it can be incredibly useful if you spend time actually configuring it.
It’s definitely not for the tech layman for sure.
screenslaver5963@reddit
IIRC its called ChatGPT Atlas. (open source equivalent is browserOS)
mimic751@reddit
That doesn't sound useless though that just sounds like it doesn't meet every single use case
Crawlerzero@reddit
This guy accidentally created MomBot and is sleeping on a gold mine.
“The bot saved me so much time by auto-replying to every video with a Facebook URL that it’s probably AI generated.”
takuonline@reddit
What model where you using with it?
swiebertjee@reddit
GPT 5.4-mini. I doubt any model would've performed well.
TheThoccnessMonster@reddit
And you’d be so crazy wrong its almost not even funny
swiebertjee@reddit
The fact that most of you guys use expensive models to do simple work is even funnier. I have yet to find 1 use case where something like GPT-5.4 could not solve it but Opus could. Simple instructions like "don't text back" not being followed isn't because the model is stupid, it's because the context confuses it.
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
The number of people that install Openclaw, spend days or weeks getting working, and pay hundreds on tokens, just to summarize emails, which can be done with a simple script and 2 hours of vibe coding, is equally ridiculous though.
takuonline@reddit
Sonnet is really good at these kinds of things. I have had a few issue with that model actually for a voice agent I was building.
I have not tried openclaw by the way, but it's just my experience working with these models
Lorian0x7@reddit
Skill issue and misconfiguration.
_bones__@reddit
Yes, they installed openclaw. Clear misconfiguration. /s
Orolol@reddit
I mean, if you hire someone to be your assistant, they will also have their own phone number.
swiebertjee@reddit
It would be more than trivial to hire someone to track conversations via WhatsApp Web. The fact that an LLM can't do it shows that the harness sucks.
Kholtien@reddit
WhatsApp is one of the worst channels to use. Better to use a self hosted matrix server in my opinion
Internal_Werewolf_48@reddit
The Ford Pinto may unexpectedly burst into flames upon collision, but it's best to only use Michelin brand tires.
swiebertjee@reddit
That's great but try telling that to friends and family. It wasn't the channel that was causing these faults.
johnfkngzoidberg@reddit
Soooo many bots in here.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
Well, yeah, OpenClaw shills connected it to their reddit account and it's now defending itself. If there's a slur or two in there it's okay because the AI did it, it's not the user's fault!
mimic751@reddit
To be fair a common rule to spot bot accounts is two word usernames with a number
RadishComplex1@reddit
As someone who is
Too lazy to pick a username
Hates making decisions
And a real human
I am offended by this comment.
mimic751@reddit
That's okay just know that a bunch of people will think you are a bot
RadishComplex1@reddit
I think that you’re a bot.
Who’s to say that the bot creators haven’t gotten smart enough to make one word usernames with three numbers after them in an effort to counter the notion that two word usernames with a number after them are bots
Nice try bot. Better luck next time!
mimic751@reddit
That's fine. I doubt there is many Bots as dumb as me but it's good to be skeptical of everybody dead internet is rapidly approaching
TechnoByte_@reddit
That's a default reddit autosuggested username, lots of humans have them
mimic751@reddit
In my experience it's the best way to spot them I once asked for a commission and got about 150 responses 148 of them were scammers all with two word and a number names. I will always assume that they are Bots
SkyFeistyLlama8@reddit
Here's your banana bread recipe:
Take two spoonfuls of Reddit sauce...
Some of us really like weird rando usernames aight?
RadishComplex1@reddit
You are exempt, you have THREE words, and then a number.
Therefore, you are not a bot. Unlike myself.
Beepboop have a great day.
zdy132@reddit
I just check their comment history. If it's hidden, then I just assume it's a bot pretending to be human. Like the account you replied to.
Not 100 percent accurate, may misidentify privacy conscious people as bots, but good enough for me.
iMakeSense@reddit
How can you tell
draconic_tongue@reddit
takes one to know one
laterbreh@reddit
It was a master class PR scam. Thats what was impressive about it.
bs6@reddit
I created a group chat with my spouse on Telegram and Hermes Agent to introduce her to agents. She’s having fun with it. Baby steps.
Did I need HA in particular for that? Nope. But it helped my wife learn about agents. Her seeing me communicate with it helps her learn how to talk to it. It also helps me see how a non technical person communicates with them.
handsoapdispenser@reddit
But to do what exactly?
jiml78@reddit
I can give you an easy example. I have open-webui setup on my network. I also have ironclaw setup. My wife has access to both.
She can use tailscale to the web-ui. However, what is easier? Open discord and fire off a message to our claw, or start tailscale(it kills battery on iOS if left on) go into a browser, navigate to a website over tailscale(using magic-dns), create a new chat, and wait for the answer?
Just because it doesn't make sense to you, don't mean there aren't use cases. Let me guess someone is gonna say install Enhanted or whatever frontend to use with llama.cpp on iOS. All fine, but discord is stupid easy to use and gets her what she wants.
And for me, it is nice NOT having to manage cronjobs and shit. I have enough on my plate, I just tell claw to schedule tasks and let it do it.
CircuitSurf@reddit
FYI tailscale being hevy for IOS battery was fixed long time ago
jiml78@reddit
Well, I am on the latest iOS on an iphone 16 pro. Tailscale is using 15% of my battery in a day if I leave it connected. I see tons of other people posting in forums and reddit with the same issue. Disconnect tailscale, fixed.
RadishComplex1@reddit
Yeah. It’s not awful but with an aging battery it’s a hit I don’t need.
It was bad enough for me to expose a few services and setup OIDC so I could stop fussing with tailscale for day to day access. The magic DNS auto mode is cool, but it was a little unreliable.
CircuitSurf@reddit
iphone 15 pro - 1-2% per day.
handsoapdispenser@reddit
Ok so it sounds it's mostly just general chat. The same you could do with like the Claude app except you tied it to a local LLM. I'm still left wondering what everyone who is using these tools against cloud LLMs are gaining. They just like texting with AI instead of the apps? I keep expecting to hear people having it do something much more clever.
jiml78@reddit
I don't use claude/openai. I personally have ollama cloud sub(yes I know the issues with ollama in general). For a long time, I used Cerebras Code.
I also do run local models(qwen, gemma) via llama.cpp on another machine that my ironclaw also has access to. Open-webui has access to all my local models and ollama cloud models.
The other thing I will say is that doing it this way hides the fact that I do jump between providers routinely. My wife doesn't give a shit about who is providing the models just that it works.
Killawatts13@reddit
For you to say “I know how to use AI” and your use case is setting up a local chat bot to talk to, doesn’t suggest you know how to use AI, that’s quite basic. What are the local workflows that cut out hours of your day?
doctorfiend@reddit
Brother what do you think 99% of people are doing with AI, just because AI can do other things doesn't mean this is incorrect
jiml78@reddit
Well for one, for the company I work for, I developed a multi-agent harness that delivers features from issue description(in our case jira) to PR. Our software devs can take that PR, ask for modifications(which the agent will follow), then when the PR is merged, the agent will close the issue. Obviously there is a huge amount of things that happen during that process like builds/test/linters. The agent follows the progress and fixes any issues found.
This was all written in rust. Isn't using any existing cli tool like opencode, it is all bespoke because we have specific security requirements.
The only thing I know of that is similar is what Stripe has done. So my cut hours from the day is enabling my company to deliver capability faster.
hesalop@reddit
That reads as real, meaningful AI experience to me. A lot of people here are just gatekeeping because they can’t grasp the value add. They’re not genuinely trying to understand at all
TutorDry3089@reddit
So, just chat then, right? I guess what people are wondering is if all of this effort worth “just another chatbot, but local” or not
screenslaver5963@reddit
what about tailscale funnel or a public website (either relying on openwebui's auth or password protecting the site)
jiml78@reddit
I am a bit too paranoid to have anything like that open on the internet. The only reason I am ok with the discord approach is that the code for ironclaw is easy to review and understand for how you approve people to message it. Could there be bugs? Sure but that code is a way smaller footprint.
Ok_Firefighter_1184@reddit
llm-wrapper is a philosophy anon, what is the point of smelling the roses on the walk or learning to ride a bike with no hands ?
bs6@reddit
It’s literally just a chat group and that’s it. She talks shit to it. Gets recipes. The fact that it’s in a familiar interface is what makes it a novel toy. The purpose is socialization to agentic AI. That’s all it is.
Don’t forget that the general public is still in 2023 regarding AI. This was the same shit I was doing with gpt 2 and lex.page four years ago.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
Your examples so far really don't show the benefits of OpenClaw in particular, which was the question.
All your examples she has been able to do it on good ol' chatgpt, for 5 years.
eribob@reddit
I did the same with hermes for my siblings. They can yap to it, create images etc… or they could rather. The matrix integration broke with the latest update and I havent been arsed to fix it
Ke5han@reddit
I did the same on openclaw for my wife as well, 😆
Xziz@reddit
I’ve already automated 99% of my workflows. OpenClaw will simply make me waste a bunch of time generating new churn creating a time waste loop. Non-deterministic automation is a recipe for extra work.
Queasy-Contract9753@reddit
My theory is that, it's those enormous prompts they send. Entire encyclopedias worth. So the model has a ton of text in context that is not remotely relevant. So the model has to overcomplicate and figure it out.
They often break everything down until far too many steps. Circles around burning millions of tokens. Compared to simply asking the model to do your specific job.
If I wanted an email robot,I'd just feed the text of my emails in and ask. That can be automated just the same ,you don't even need to write anything. Any of the major big free models on free chat sites will code the whole program for you.
TanguayX@reddit
Completely disagree. The ongoing work context, tool history, as well as broader access has been a huge help for my work.
Unpopular opinion: people love to bash OpenClaw and its clones because it’s popular.
SummarizedAnu@reddit
I agree. I like Hermes better cause open claw has a few bugs they haven't fixed.
Anthonyg5005@reddit
From what I've ever seen, Hermes isn't a slop filled project like opencalw either. If I had to choose to use one, I'd definitely trust running Hermes on my devices more
Neighbor_@reddit
It's open-source, just have your agent make a GitHub issue and a PR.
SummarizedAnu@reddit
A or already exists for 3 months. It's not fixed yet
Pleasant_Thing_2874@reddit
It all depends on use case really. I've been a CLI based coder for years with a strong emphasis on harness building/optimization and proper systems rather than just model chasing like what seems to be the bulk of the AI tech bros out there.
I initially avoided openclaw because it seemed gimicky but finally did an exploratory dive into it a few weeks ago and it is working very well for me. But I also don't use it like some sort of gaggle of headless chickens like many seem to use it with. I primarily use it as a multitiered orchestration system for all my opencode harnesses as well as a platform for me to do some serious work into better agent memory, development, organization and reasoning. I actually have a whole reinforced learning system built into it which goes far beyond the memory/dreaming/rag setup to help with its cohesion and a behavioral learning system so it can better match my energy, understand what I need and deliver upon it.
But it allows me a single interface to not only work on my harness expansion testing/research but can also keep track of all my ongoing projects as well for me so even though I have half a dozen CLI opencodes doing their own thing, I don't need to directly work with each one as often.
But I'm not just trying to have 16 copies of it run around trying to open etsy shops trying to make me money with uncontrolled slop production and expecting it to work as soon as the software is installed. Which is likely why I'm finding it more useful.
TanguayX@reddit
Yeah, fair enough. My work resolves around graphics production. And I carefully built it up to support that. And like I mentioned, it'd been a huge help, and accelerated my work. I fashioned it as a coworker, and that's what it's proved itself to be.
And I think that if you work with a computer almost at all, carefully setting it up will help you get more work done. Like you said, if you're farming for clicks or some crap, I spose you might not be happy.
"gaggle of headless chickens" BAHAHAH
sampdoria_supporter@reddit
Why is this post so upvoted?
Lesser-than@reddit
because it has the word "OpenClaw" in it. Purely organic surely ..
sampdoria_supporter@reddit
That didn't even occur to me. So depressing.
No-Yam-4627@reddit
OC is just agentic framework, nicely packaged. You can set up your own ( manually create crons, scripts etc) or use ready made framework. I treating him like freshman employee. Watching over my projects, running analysis, daily briefs on project stats and media, handle support tickets, alerting me when problem arise. Can I do it myself ? Yes. But he can do it better and faster. Autonomously. Cron job just wake him up every 5 min and he is looking at todos, check other systems, emails ... on issues giving suggestions, obv stuff dealing even without my intervention, just reporting to me. Self improving ..learning. (Mostly) not repeating mistakes.
So it is not about OC, it is about agentic frameworks in general. OC is just one of them (first). Having 6-7 specialized agents working 24/7 ... you just need work for them :) And able to manage. If you ever had employees, this is dream :) For almost free ...
Lorian0x7@reddit
I think posts like this and everyone thinking the same have completely missed the point of Openclaw, and they just didn't get how to make use of it.
Openclaw is very different from Opencode/Claude code/Codex. While there is some overlap in what they do, they are not the same thing. OpenClaw is not something to be used like an app, it's more like an employee.
The most similar thing would be a very well made N8N workflow with a telegram bot, with many tools, good formatting, sandbox to run code, database, memory,qmd search, media tools, browser use, multiple interconnected agents configurations for sandboxing and security hardening to reduce risks of PI. All this with the actual AI capable of changing its own workflow.
If you really used N8N to do anything that at least 20% of all this you know how annoying it can be.
Sure, you can build something similar to fit your own needs, but that's not the point, openclaw is structured to fit your needs and my needs as well.
KickLassChewGum@reddit
It's called "any agentic CLI that enables tool use" lol
Lorian0x7@reddit
You don't understand openclaw capabilities then! You can't do what openclaw does with a coding agent! It's not about how it works under the hood but how it's framed. Sure it works in a similar way, it just calls tools at the end of the day, but you can't configure your coding agent to have separation between the agents doing things online, and those working with your private data for example, you can't have it send you a message on telegram after he completed some recurring tasks. It's just a different thing, you can't have your coding agent booking you train tickets with a voice message while you prepare your luggage.
KickLassChewGum@reddit
Try me. Give me a target and an hour or so.
Lorian0x7@reddit
Why didn't you build openclaw before openclaw then ?You could have been rich now. Also...you are talking about building an openclaw clone because you just realised coding agents can't like open code and can't do the same thing. Also... If you spawn a subagent like you said you will probably get prompt injected 5 minutes later. You can't sandbox subagents and limit their access to specific tools, because they are not meant to do the same work.
Can you explain your point? You can build something similar, so what ? It's not useful because everyone can spend a week to code the same? I also can grow an apple tree in my garden but it's just more convenient to go buy them at the supermarket.
KickLassChewGum@reddit
Because there was no point. That's what I've been trying to tell you.
You need to stop making confident statements about things you don't know anything about. There is fundamentally nothing that prevents OpenClaw from getting prompt injected because there is nothing that can prevent any agent from getting prompt injected.
In fact, you can't even trust the OpenClaw marketplace. Someone literally hid an infostealer in the marketplace's top Skill and it siphoned a ton of data before anyone noticed.
To understand the frustration people have with OpenClaw, the metaphor would have to be adjusted a little bit: you're not walking to a supermarket and picking up a bag of apples. You are traveling to an airport, using a private Airbus A380 all on your lonesome to fly to the next town over, getting picked up by a military convoy, only to be taken to a tree, pick a single apple, and then return the way you came, ceremony and everything.
Meanwhile, if you download an agent harness and spend 30 minutes - I promise you, it's not a week - you can have your own personalized drone pick you up as many apples as you want, directly, with none of the pointless waste.
It's the single largest driver of token churn and is the primary hyperaccelerator for the end of token subsidies as we know them, and it uses this to achieve absolutely nothing special in particular.
Lorian0x7@reddit
You really seam to be full of yourself, telling others that they don't know nothing while literally depostrating you know even less. You are just regurgitating social network level informations and you probably didn't even tested openclaw.
For example this is partially true, but because you don't understand how openclaw operates you are missing the complexity behind a proper deployment. While you can't avoid to be prompt injected, you can limit the damage and avoid that your private data is exposed, this thanks to how you can configure and sandbox each agent. Each agent can have it's own memory and tools, so if it gets prompt injected it can't act on that prompt because it doesn't have permissions, it has to report with a clean text to the main agent, and you can even have a specialized proxy agent acting as a guardrail. Unfortunately I'm just wasting words because you are just speaking by hearsay. You keep going with your anti-openclaw rooting while you could just inform yourself and avoid public shaming.
I design corporate AI infrastructure for work, I have designed AI guardrails system and adversiarial scan even before tool calling was a thing, and you are trying to give me a lesson about vibe coding on agent harness? seriously?
Would be better you come down from your pedestal and tey to have a constructive conversation instead of trying to appear superior?
The fact is, you are trying to talk about something you don't know, you haven't try, you refuse to try for whatever reason, and so you have no clue of how it works and you still pretend to be right saying that you can do the same with a coding harness. It can't. full stop, you can build a workflow so to something with a coding agent? yes, you can build an openclaw clone ? yes. Do I have to reinvented the wheel wasting time in front of my pc creating something that books my train ticket and send them to me while I prepare my laggege? no, it would be stupid. Instead I prefer to use that 30 minutes to configure openclaw property (default is shit) so that it can do that and much more, when I need it.
KickLassChewGum@reddit
You have literally. just. described. subagents.
A standard sandboxed subagent. Run-of-the-mill.
You literally tried to sell me an "OpenClaw can't be prompt injected!!!111" because of such wonderful vagueties such as "sandboxing" and "limiting their access to specific tools" as if, again, they're some magical inventions of OpenClaw rather than literally how every subagent in every coding harness under the sun works.
This conversation has run its course.
cosimoiaia@reddit
I agree and I will add that 8n8 is also useless. You can make any workflow you want with a few prompts if you know a little what you're doing, no need for over engineered UI tied to marketplace etc.. etc... Most of it is only hype from clueless managers.
shinkamui@reddit
Yea. And I’m adding any high level language to the mix. python is for noobs who can’t simply be bothered to learn registers and interrupts. Useless garbage. When did we start glorifying making things accessible or giving consumers options. None of these people are true Scotsman 😂😇 and they are ruining my society.
JChataigne@reddit
It handles a lot of the boilerplate: triggers, webhooks, logging... Sure, you can do all that yourself, but it saves time when you just want to be fast
buecker02@reddit
It's called N8N.
cosimoiaia@reddit
Thank you. For some reason my brain did a c&p from op post.
waffleseggs@reddit
It's a good way to waste money and blast your data through 100 untrusted things.
Firm-Okra-1091@reddit
Couldn’t agree more! Try miniloader.ai we don’t get in the way like openclaw
TechnoByte_@reddit
Bad spambot
AnomalyNexus@reddit
They’re very different tools for different use cases so I think the framing here as one superior to the other isn’t quite right.
Simple example is continuity. I want my openclaw agent to remember yesterday. I don’t want my opencode to remember yesterday project because that could fuck up the architecture of today’s project with noise
Zanion@reddit
They literally aren't different tools or use cases...
Openclaw is just an accessible interface to brute force a highly inefficient workflow automations.
AnomalyNexus@reddit
They're both LLMs underneath, but the software surrounding them is geared towards different uses cases.
Claude code comes with things suitable for a coding use case like an LSP, while openclaw comes with assistant focused tooling like heartbeats, channels and say Hue lights integrations.
Jury is still out on openclaw usefulness, but insisting they're the same thing is a bit silly imo
Zanion@reddit
You're making a willful category error of comparing a full orchestration wrapper to a raw CLI harness. A faithful comparison would be orchestration to orchestration.
Specious comparisons with confused abstraction aside, we were writing agentic workflows with these tools for over a year and a half before OpenClaw even existed, and we continue to do so.
AnomalyNexus@reddit
Right so the one is a "full orchestration solution" while the other is "raw CLI harness". I'd say we're off to a rocky start on your literally the same tool assertion...
Right, so the one is pre-bundled for a specific use case, the other is very clearly for a different use (coding) but with enough stuff added it could utilized in a similar way.
That doesn't sound like software made for literally same use case to me per your original assertion.
So the one does the task. The other could make a thing that in turn does the task. Definitely getting "literally the same" vibes here
You're the one arguing they're the same if you just modify the one to make it like the other. (Which is a hilarious line of reasoning btw)
No, we're not abstracting anything...we're comparing two pieces of software that you can download and look at side by side. You're just so laser focused on your one singular use case that you've been hammering away at for year+ that you can't see the forest for all the trees anymore. Your DIY tooling (that I'm sure is great) is not relevant to whether a normal person considers these two pieces of software literally the same tool and your use case is not everyone's use case.
Zanion@reddit
Well, at least your fundamental misunderstanding of the architectures being compared isn't disingenuous.
_supert_@reddit
It really isn't.
pfn0@reddit
None of those have built-in gateways that let me chat with my bot from discord. End of story.
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
Why discord over telegram?
pfn0@reddit
telegram, discord, whatever, multiple channels. I do most of my chatting in discord, flipping over to the discord with my chatbot is very convenient. I don't use telegram at all.
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
I was just wondering if there was a benefit. Sounds like whatever is convenient
pfn0@reddit
it's the idea of having the tool usable and conveniently availably, having it in discord leads to the least disruption in my usual chatting/hanging out flow.
ydnar@reddit
i don't know. it's been pretty useful to me.
i had a 2011 mac mini that i installed an ssd into long time ago laying around, so i put debian 13 headless on it. i connected a telegram bot and have tavily api for search when needed. the agent calls on llama-server running hauhaucs/qwen3.6-35b-a3b-uncensored-hauhaucs-aggressive on a separate 3090 machine.
i go on long walks after work and feed it thoughts by voice. those notes get saved to a sqlite db (i just asked it to set one up). yesterday, after feeding it all my thoughts, i had it generate a presentation in the form of a single html file. it's a solid first draft that requires pretty minimal updates for a meeting i have on monday.
i use it as digital memory i can call on for reminders. everything stays completely private, so i speak freely about family, health, and finances. i also like the idea someone mentioned for turning articles into podcasts. i'll need to look into that.
i haven't spent any extra money beyond the hardware i already had.
Lesser-than@reddit
Here they come.. All the newly minted agent experts to chime in why your wrong.
abhuva79@reddit
I still dont understand the difference between a normal cli agent and this clawdhype thing. I just dont get it. I tried it and it was literally the same.
So what else can this thing supposedly do, that an cli agent like codex, gemini etc. cant?
The only thing i see right now is that i can freely "yolo" there - means i just tell it to always accept everything. But beside this i dont see anything else.
So if someone could drop me a hint what makes this clawd stuff supposedly so great - i would love to get some insights.
GregoryfromtheHood@reddit
I've found it useful for a lot of background tasks that I don't specifically have to tell a cli agent to do. I had my own automations and workflows set up, but have moved stuff over to openclaw because it's the big open source one and people are solving problems that I had, so I figure why not leverage off the community.
I've got it monitoring a bunch of stuff for work, transcribing meetings, scanning through documentation and codebases to find things and report on them. At home I have it controlling my smart home, doing a few fun little things like keeping track of recipes and stuff and also monitoring some cameras and alerting me on things. About to set up a few plant cams so that it can keep an eye on how the plants look and let me know when something is flowering etc with a notification.
It's also handy to have an idea, then fire off a quick message to an assistant that already has a whole bunch of context and memory about your stuff and it can just queue up a background task to go do the thing for you.
Also connecting it up to my pbx for phones so that I can call or it can call me if it needs something has been pretty fun.
Zanion@reddit
Nothing.
It's a coding agent environment with tooling and an accessible interface. The special sauce is that accessible interface means normies with money to burn can brute force highly inefficient and insecure automations they were otherwise incapable of producing.
If you have any level of competency there is no reason to use it.
lukezamboni@reddit
Not everyone has that usage. For me it's a personal assistant that sorts through emails and manages my calendar and a to-do list. These are things almost impossible to make without an LLM.
Purpose-Effective@reddit
Openclaw is a psyop to boost the market cap of private AI companies (especially ChatGPT) and earn them fat revenue from API calls.
aski5@reddit
I wasn't even aware but apparently it went kinda mainstream with nft/crypto people jumping on it? Sounds like they are hyping it up themselves
Purpose-Effective@reddit
Without a doubt.
entsnack@reddit
And Nvidia. Anyone who benefits from higher token usage will pump openclaw.
Purpose-Effective@reddit
Exactly. And the masses fell for it, because it kinda works but nobody actually needs it.
a_beautiful_rhind@reddit
Its just an automation framework. Its as useless or useful as your task. I don't need some AI up in my email.
RegularImportant3325@reddit
Seriously. I'd _never_ give AI access to my email. I have, however, created an email for my AI.
Iron-Over@reddit
To add it is a security nightmare automation framework.
RegularImportant3325@reddit
Hold my beer as I wade into the hate thread...
I found some great usages for it. Giving it it's own github and gmail users allowed me to treat it like a junior developer.
I created a slack channel for each of my projects. It maintains a running dev instance of each application I'm working on that I can update on the fly. I have a Cloudflare tunnel that let's me access my apps to test from anywhere. It watches Sentry and fixes bugs. It receives emails and does triages when it can, or forwards when it cant.
I have a couple of data pipelines and can have it do operations within them easily from anywhere.
For ideation, instead of using a chat thread, I have my agent created a github repo, track plans and thoughts, and push. Because it has it's own github user, all these are under it's account and I "promote" them to my account if/when I want to put serious work into them.
I have daily digests of activity (which, tbh, haven't been super useful) pushed to my Slack, which naturally shows up on my phone as a notification.
It may not be useful to everyone. It's not intuitive. It can be integrated into workflows in pretty interesting ways.
rdsf138@reddit
I use Pi agent with my local setup.
Manitcor@reddit
Its fairly true, however you would struggle to beat the pricing, for now. Agentic frames may turn into a few standards over time.
That will improve things over time.
ThePixelHunter@reddit
I disagree, and that's speaking as someone who does know what they're doing. I've been wrangling my own homelab and dozens of VMs/services for nearly a decade. Getting effortless results like this is a game-changer, and is absolutely a replacement for "doing it by hand" or using a traditional automation platform, because you get 90% quality for 1% effort.
corruptbytes@reddit
skill issue
huseynli@reddit
It is an absolutely pointless thing.
vex_humanssucks@reddit
Largely agree, but I'd flip the framing slightly: it's less that these tools are useless and more that they're solving a problem their target user doesn't know they have yet. Someone who already uses n8n or writes bash glue code doesn't need an AI to do that for them — they've already internalized the mental models. The 'chaotic and unsafe' critique is the real one though — the reliability tax is substantial and most tutorials don't talk about it.
Acrobatic_Stress1388@reddit
I mostly think these posts are spam posts that are probably bot driven. "Openclaw is useless," "What do you actually use it for?" Yadda yadda yadda. It's all the same.
This will probably get downvoted into oblivion by the same bots, but just in case, here goes:
OpenClaw is wonderful. Its magic is not that it does anything that opencode or a Claud code can't do. Its magic is the Interface. All the other tools concentrate heavily on a TUI. That's clunky to use and certainly not something that you would ever want to use with a mobile device. Which is primarily how people interact these days.
Whether you're a professional or not, have a desk job or not, you still want to use AI, you still want to vibe code your favorite app, you still want to have a personal assistant, and OpenClaw fills all of those roles.
I myself am using a speech to text app that I vibe coded on my daily commute a few days ago to type this very message.And sure, it's still clunky to use, messes up its own configuration constantly, and can't effectively do what I really want it to do, such as make its own phone calls. But this is version 0.0001, and all of that is coming.
It's pretty cool to be on the bleeding edge of this stuff.At least at the consumer level.
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
Meh on any claw. I’m a Hermes Stan
Acrobatic_Stress1388@reddit
OpenCode has been taking the number one spot for token usage on OpenRouter for weeks now. So I'm pretty sure it's not going anywhere. And I'm pretty sure people are finding plenty of uses for it.
So it isn't useless or stupid. What it IS though, is a direct threat to cloud providers being able to charge a gazillion dollars for their products.
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
I contend that you don’t understand how to properly leverage them
Fine_League311@reddit
Jepp nutzlos, einmal getestet nur Sammlung von bload, endlich wachen einige auf ;) danke
StardockEngineer@reddit
8n8?
Away-Sorbet-9740@reddit
Why anyone would want to interact with an assistant in telegram or Whatsapp is beyond me. I just made an app so I don't just have a useless chatbox on steroids. This is largely so when I wander away from my desk I can keep working on the same thing, which technically can be done through telegram but it's painful.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
Why would anyone want to use an app they already use instead of making their own is beyond you?
How did you solve the problem that your home pc running your local model isn't accessible when you're out of the home? Did you use tailscale? cloudflare tunnels?
So you made an app and created a network overlay? And it's still beyond you why someone would want to use an existing chat app?
Away-Sorbet-9740@reddit
Also.... Doesn't have to be android native, webui is plenty.
"I've never used a hammer before, but I don't understand why hammers need handles".... Good talk.
Away-Sorbet-9740@reddit
You don't use automated assistants to run tasks on your pc, and you don't understand why a chat window isn't sufficient to actually do anything. Shocker.
It's a continuous stream of text with 0 way to organize conversations, look up what's currently going on in process, stop a specific process, or you know.... Manage agents.
Tailscale is about a 5-10 min setup. Agents are plenty capable building the app also whether it be CC or whatever cli/ide you prefer. It's a day or weekend project for someone with no knowledge.
VoiceApprehensive893@reddit
cli agents are kinda good sometimes but id rather have my skills improve
openclaw is a joke its decent for summarising news but id rather use a dedicated tool for that to avoid inconsistency
CaptainMorning@reddit
almost useless? everything is?
Infiniti_151@reddit
What's wrong with make?
SteppenAxolotl@reddit
Your mileage will vary depending on the tool and the AI backend. Ultimately, even the best tool connected to the best AI still sucks and only foreshadows what it could be like when AI reaches a reasonable level of reliability and competence.
Fantastic_Tell_6787@reddit
For me, openclaw was only useful as glue between n8n automations.
It is decent for things like generating URLs and content customization based off documents for those automations, though.
ArugulaAnnual1765@reddit
This is such a typical reddit user snob comment lmao
Zhanji_TS@reddit
Open Claw was the pop music of AI. It provided an interface that everybody could understand, and that's why it blew up.
DraconPern@reddit
they have product market fit.
Zanion@reddit
"Brawndo's got what plants crave"
dark-light92@reddit
Yes. AI companies produced tokens. OpenClaw consumes it.
What exactly is produced in between that is not slop is anybody's guess...
draconic_tongue@reddit
roleplay is one of the (literally) most sloppiest use cases for llms, and it's by far the biggest one for users of this sub
florinandrei@reddit
I have not used that one either. And certainly neither have you, nor anyone else.
Also, there's something about your phrasing that strongly suggests a large volume of opinion sitting on top of a vanishingly thin layer of knowledge. In other words, social media as usual.
InterestingStick@reddit
Thats a feature not a bug
InterestingStick@reddit
Thats a feature not a bug
Guinness@reddit
Anyone intimately familiar with the Linux command line already knows that almost everything outside of the command line is unnecessary save a few scenarios.
cli or die.
NaturalProcessed@reddit
Very popular opinion
byurhanbeyzat@reddit
That’s literally what I think I never tested or read something about it or watched a video I saw many tweets but it’s nothing I can’t do with other tools most likely easier and more secure and cheaper
I thought but was not able to come up with idea as also there is no way I am giving access to all kind of platforms to it so it was just useless …
loyalekoinu88@reddit
*n8n
Foreign_Yard_8483@reddit
The sole purpose of these tools is to collect usage patterns and data to improve future priority tools.
Well, they already know how programmers code, because we gave them our way of operating. We taught them that they have to plan, think in steps, read files, check before making mistakes, and we told them how they should test to verify that everything is working.
With this in hand, they have greatly improved agentic tools.
OpenClaw, Claude whatever, etc., are tools to understand how the user expects to use the tools on a daily basis. Is it summarizing emails, searching files, scheduling dentist and doctor appointments, or is it to fill in texts that they lack the memory for?
Like the agentic tools of devs, these shoddy tools will be phased out in 1 or 2 years. After they know from users and professionals how they can or want to use the tools, and how to extract value from their own activities.
BlobbyMcBlobber@reddit
Only tried it for a little bit, but it was definitely good. I'm using it sparsely when there's something I want done in the background. I run everything locally so it's a bit slow and prone to error but it does work.
abnormal_human@reddit
I've made a few attempts at using OpenClaw and mostly found it to be trash software.
All I want is something to take over the meal planning I do for the family each week and remember shit for me.
First task was to remind me to buy something from the store at 9AM on Saturday.
Guess which crustacean messaged me at 10AM on Sunday to remind me? It simultaneously fucked up the date AND the time. Which puts it behind Siri in reliability.
Guess who got to make an extra trip to the store?
When it came to meal planning it routinely ignored the list of recipes I had fed it and improvised trendy trash food. It ignored dietary restrictions. It over-liberally interpreted the presence of calendar items to mean that I didn't have to cook those days (they were my wife's calendar items, kids still need to eat).
The thing is, I'm a developer, I know how to build a system that nails this task, and have built agent harnesses before that do far more complex things. And I know more or less how to make OpenClaw succeed at it--put my developer hat on and walk it through building a system around some text files or a little sqlite database or something. But the promise is that you can tell it what you want it to automate for you and it will figure it out like a personal assistant, and that is very far from what it actually does.
In the end, if I need a single purpose agent for meal planning, I'd be way better off just building that.
And that's just one use case.
Cowork is no better, btw. Also can't do that task.
I think the models will get there. This is a lot what coding felt like with AI in 2024. You could get a benefit out of it if you developed skills to hold its hand the right way. Today, AI assisted coding feels more like a wish machine. You can be pretty high level and get a lot done fast. OpenClaw's general purpose nature makes it a more challenging application, and we're just not there yet with the models to make it work well.
Perfect-Flounder7856@reddit
I've had better results and get my meal plane messaged to me via telegram at 3p on Sunday just in time for my wife to head to the grocery store. Thinking I could probably set up ordering and curbside pick up if I wanted. Runs great morning briefing and EOD reviews.
bieker@reddit
I agree that it’s somewhat overhyped but I have been using it and finding it useful for tasks that I could obviously do myself but just don’t want to.
The problem you have with date and time is probably more related to the model than the harness. I do a lot of scheduled jobs and have never had that happen.
I would recommend using the discord channel rather than the others, you can add it to a personal discord server and each channel has its own context etc. you can also allow it to communicate with multiple users so it’s great for family use.
I’m a programmer and can deploy LLMs and write code and set up hosting and build background services and install databases and all that stuff.
But there is something magical about just saying “hey claw, set up a pipeline that watches the Artemis live stream on YouTube and transcribes all the radio communications and drop it in this discord channel.” As I am leaving work and 30 min later it had set up ffmpeg with a watchdog feeding a VAD system using pytorch , installed canary stt and was sending transcripts to the discord.
I could do all that myself, but not while driving home and when I got home I had things to do so I would have put it off till the weekend and missed lots of interesting stuff.
If you set it up right first and give it lots of tools to work with it can be legit fun to work with. It’s like having a Jr. dev who is a keener and can type 5k words a min on permanent 24x7 standby. It will make mistakes, I could do it better, but most of the time I wouldn’t do it at all for these types of things.
Positive_Catch_712@reddit
Entire post is just an nXn ad. He mispelled it on purpose, guess why.
pacmanpill@reddit (OP)
lol
Weird-Consequence366@reddit
Skill issue
draconic_tongue@reddit
so... most people?
Invent80@reddit
Really? I drop a document in my telegram and say analyze this bro and he sends me back a full HTML analysis, response template and 3 matrixs for approval then updates my Twenty CRM with the data under the client name and send a snapshot to my partner via email.
You can't script that when documents are all different sizes, types, languages, etc.
If I can do that with Claude, let me know.
LeucisticBear@reddit
Who do you think is doing it?
Invent80@reddit
It's done locally on my home lab.
nikolaiownz@reddit
Openclaw don’t do anything special. Its just looks and. Cron jobs
FineClassroom2085@reddit
💯 this. You have to realize you’re talking about a dominant majority of the world though.
FineClassroom2085@reddit
Also, the paradox is: these tools are dangerous in the hands of their exact target, and useless in the hands of people who know how to secure them.
nikhilprasanth@reddit
I get the criticism, it’s fair. I’ve been using it mostly to experiment, and it definitely breaks. Not something I’d trust for deterministic workflows.
For my use cases though, it still has some value. Like taking a reel or YouTube link, understanding what’s being talked about and pushing structured notes into Obsidian. Or taking long videos and turning them into clipped reels with captions. Also handling random inputs and figuring out what to do with them before routing to the right tool.
All of this can be done with Python or something like n8n, and for anything that needs reliability that’s still the better option. No arguement there. But the effort is in wiring everything together and dealing with variations. Using skills on top makes it easier to extend these flows without rebuilding everything again and again.
I wouldn’t say these tools are mature. They are inconsistent and sometimes a bit chaotic. But I also wouldn’t call them useless, atleast not if you’ve actually used them. For me it’s more of an experimentation layer right now, and over time as these abstraction layers improve it should get more efficient and predictable. Right now it’s just early.
Alternative-Grand-77@reddit
OpenClaw is really a wrapper over Pi. To me, It seems that OpenClaw adds a lot of complexity and risk compared to what you get by just building your own tool on Pi, but I guess it’s more of a ‘batteries included’ type of philosophy.
If you a running a localLLM I would expect that you value privacy and control and would prefer to build up a tool that works for you - however there are many people who prefer to pay per token and store all their data in the cloud.
_hephaestus@reddit
The one useful bit I see is that it works as a window into your lan via WhatsApp/signal/etc. Normally I’d remote into my lan via wireguard/tailscale, but can’t always do that. Meanwhile airlines like united will charge for internet access generally but give free messaging.
dizvyz@reddit
I haven't even typed openclaw in google to read the blurb about it. It is so obviously hyped to the stratosphere without actually being anything game changing. We can't give our attention to every thing out there. It's like who needs time to figure out why they are pushing Sydney Sweeney so hard when the average onlyfans model has more "talent".
ssalvo41@reddit
“I only use it to collect data on the web , using it like 6 months but never coded with him”
Both_Opportunity5327@reddit
I love all these stories of how useless OpenClaw is, and then how all these geniuses pipe in and agree.
Please stop, if you don't like a tool don't use it.
I like OpenClaw because I like how convenient it is, Telegram integration means that I can split up my thoughts into topics, how I can get instant feed back on my ideas.
Yes I could probably program my own...but I have better things to do.
Infamous_Mud482@reddit
Yeah like, seemingly get upset other people don't like your tool as much as you do. Please stop. Why should anyone that tried it have to stay silent just because you like it, who the hell are you?
Both_Opportunity5327@reddit
Who's getting upset?
I just don't like these high and mighty types that pollute talk about agents.
I get it you could have created it, but you did not...
anotheruser323@reddit
Agree. Anything remotely useful I can think of that it could do, can be done in like 10 lines of python and a TTS (or speech to text). And you can trow in a small LLM there if you want.
I think there's been an insane amount of stealth marketing for that fidget toy.
Business-Wrangler141@reddit
Bro its N8N 😅 But you are right about that. It’s a fun way to spend tokens on telegram chat 😂
false79@reddit
I know what I'm doing but it's so nice to kick off a cron job like I was messaging someone. The alternative involves so many more clicks/keystrokes in set up + validation.
Also it's just another UI to the LLM you are using. I have it running on an old unused Thinkpad connected to Gemma 4. Runs great for the data collection jobs I need, outside of the developer environment.
Maheidem@reddit
To be honest, never even got my attention given my current setup
No_Secret4395@reddit
Telegram , what is it?
AVX_Instructor@reddit
im make agent harness (before release OpenClaw) and i using this for track time in corp Jira, or check logs on corp ssh servers, via voice message in Telegram, this is very comfortable, but i make solution for self problem, and this work pretty well,
btw 95% features in OpenClaw looks useless, i take some feature for reference for my cases only
danigoncalves@reddit
I run nanobot. Codebase is very digestable and if I need something more I just code it and if its worth it I open a PR.
ptear@reddit
It's like the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, I'm trying to find the problem for the solution.
Maximum-Wishbone5616@reddit
It is horrible piece of slop. I have checked the codebase and run a lot of different checks on UI. Horrible.
Objective-Stranger99@reddit
I don't like to give my AI full power over my data. Everything related to AI goes in a Docker container. Llama.cpp is the only thing outside of a sandbox or container.
rudiXOR@reddit
It's not about the tool, it's about the adoption it created. OpenClaw has some nice ideas, but yeah it's true all of that was there before, but it made it accessible.
px403@reddit
The capabilities aren't the magic, it's the UX. I love just being able to talk to my openclaw agents on Signal like they're my buddies while they constantly grind on various tasks I put them on.
Theio666@reddit
Well, I had only negative experience with n8n, so having everything ready seems convenient. I don't openclaw since no time to set up, but if I wanted something like mini assistant which I can connect to obsidian, I'd pick openclaw over making my own tg bot.
PapercutsOnPenor@reddit
Yup. Funny enough, they are the majority of those who are crying at how the seams of their sub-50€ plans are cracking up.
It's the same low tier shidge as the "ha ha my cladue say go to slep human" stuff