Openclaw ia trending down and will disappear soon
Posted by rm-rf-rm@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 334 comments
Posted by rm-rf-rm@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 334 comments
_maverick98@reddit
I am a software engineer. It took me a solid 2 hours to set it up on my mac, then I realized it could run commands as if it was me so I deleted everything. Then it took me a solid day! to run it through a docker sandbox. Then I realized it burns through so much tokens that my 20$ sub on openai won't be able to hold it for a week. So I deleted everything, fun experience though
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
I had Hermes up and running in 20 minutes ,
Elibroftw@reddit
I played Hades for 12 hours
kaspuh@reddit
I currently have been enjoying Hades 2 for 75 hours now after it finally got released on PS5. Amazing game!
_maverick98@reddit
Thanks for this, I did a quick search and Hermes seems to be catching traction. I will try this.
thirteen-bit@reddit
Just in case: docs for running hermes itself in docker/podman are not visible from the README https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/docker
sonicnerd14@reddit
Exactly, and harness like Hermes or Agent Zero are far more efficient and practical than open claw was.
corbanmonoxide@reddit
Manage it like it's a person. Isolate it, give it accounts and permissions. You wouldn't let a random person come into your network and start executing commands, you'd give them an auditable account. This approach should be taken no matter what fully autonomous agent you plan on installing but that's just my personal philosophy. Don't treat a harness as a piece of software, treat it with the respect you'd give to a jr. developer. Trust it to do it's work but also trust it to fuck up.
If that's not good enough for you, you're adopting too early. Wait for the end user platform that works for you instead of giving up on cutting edge agent technology because you don't want to manage it like the extremely powerful AI agent that it facilitates.
Lost-Dragonfruit-663@reddit
Agents should never be given a free hand. It should have rules (like a sub-reddits filter), anything beyond that and the agent is banned from that environment.
redballooon@reddit
On a Mac shouldn't you be able to connect it to a local Qwen3.6 or so?
_maverick98@reddit
I have a Macbook pro M4 16GB Unified. At most it can run 9B parameter models. I thought of using a local model through LM studio, but it was a hassle to connect it to the docker sandbox and I am not sure how fast it would run. Fyi. On LM Studio I have Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen 3.5 9B. I am open to suggestions tho
Shaken_Earth@reddit
Sidenote: the fact that Apple sells MacBook "Pro"s starting at 16 GB of RAM is wild to me.
I say this as a proud MacBook Neo owner btw (it's my alt laptop).
Infamous_Mud482@reddit
It's a perfectly reasonable amount of RAM for plenty of Professional work and use cases. Just not ones that specifically require a shit load of RAM and/or VRAM.
_maverick98@reddit
I think I got it just before it became apparent how much RAM will be needed for the AI era and in general. My model says its Nov 2024.
wanderlotus@reddit
omg same! I’m like damn if I was rebuying a computer just 3 months ago i would have FOR SURE upgraded the ram. it just didn’t seem necessary at the time bc I’m not a coder.
_maverick98@reddit
I am a coder but still I didn't see it coming. I optimized for SSD space because I was burned before. Didn't think we would need that much RAM so fast. I remember I had searched before if 16GBs were good for coding and productivity and most answers were that it was "plenty"
gh0stwriter1234@reddit
would suggest an r9700 in an egpu box... about 1500 usd but you'd be able to run qwen3.6 27b... which currently about as good as you can do locally without going for some of the over hundred billion param models. once llama cpp has turboquant or something even better merged it should be a perfect fit. speculative decoding also helps improve the speed of the model and is being heavily worked on.
farkinga@reddit
I was able to do some one- and two-step tasks using qwen3.5 9b and Opencode. 9b ought to be pretty quick - but it is simply too small to be really useful.
Several tricks that help are: have the agent formulate a plan before starting work and have it follow a checklist while working.
Even then, 9b cannot be relied upon for, like, professional work - but it's still very interesting to play with. I am using Gemma-4 31b and it's the smallest model that has felt "good enough." Qwen3.6 27b is a contender.
Far-Low-4705@reddit
i heard hermes agent is a good and more technical/research focused alternative to an "everyday agent" sort of thing.
Personally i preffer less is more approach, so i like pi agent where you have to add everything yourself and everything is fully transparent
Tramagust@reddit
What were you going to use it for?
SawToothKernel@reddit
Same thing as everyone - summarising emails.
MrPecunius@reddit
I just delete mine, it's quicker and has the same result 98% of the time.
_maverick98@reddit
Basic reminder stuff, note taking maybe. I was also planning to run a subagent that would be a Chinese chat pal so I can practice writing Chinese (I am HSK3 level)
gob_magic@reddit
That learning experience worth way more than what it could do anyway
Cl0wnL@reddit
I had OpenClaw up and running in about 10 minutes. I don't know what the fuck you were doing.
apVoyocpt@reddit
I have Claude code running on lxc container on a Proxmox. For installing openclaw I made a new container and gave the credentials to Claude code. Then it was like:
Hey Claude, download openclaw into 192.168.1.34 and connect it to this api and then connect it my telegram.
It was up and running within 30min connected to my lokal AI.
Writing this because you said it took a day (which it probably would have taken if I did everything by hand)
To add to your statement: I set it up and then had no use case for it.
GrungeWerX@reddit
built my first agent (non-openclaw, just lm-studio) this week and that's been my experience. I'm loving it, it's like living in a sci-fi movie or something. Allows me to be even more creative and iterate ideas fast.
genielabs@reddit
Try with a different software like HomeGenie, a totally different approach and you won't need to buy tokens. It will take you 5 minutes to setup. Follow instructions about running it in a safe environment (running it as a user with no privileges other than on its own folder). I must say I never tried it on a Mac, but it should work I guess 🙄 🪄 I also put a couple of examples/tutorial on the website. From there you can understand if it can be useful for you and then decide if it's worth trying.
BehindUAll@reddit
If you use Hermes agent you won't have these kind of issues
paulqq@reddit
but i think the idea of a personal agent might stay. just not in javascript consuming 200$ + the month. some peeps are building agents soley on ollama or llama.ccp so maybe without the supscriptions and locally is the niche for this tech.
assotter@reddit
Personal agents wont be going anywhere. The idea of having a little AI avatar on your computer has been one of the staples of sci-fi. The popular one right now is hermes agent which I enjoy and run mostly locally.
Though most of the time instead of using hermes agent I just have a small param qwen or gemma-translate model running with a unity pipeline so have a little vroid avatar to chat with and it has MCP access for searches (connects to my searnx docker). All self made, partially coded with help of opencode
ComplexType568@reddit
what made you pick translategemma over gemma 4 or gemma 3 raw?
assotter@reddit
I only have a small 2070 super with 8gbvram and found translate also has a tendency to swear more and use dark hunor
Badger-Purple@reddit
osaurus has this idea for mac
Ell2509@reddit
You just described a local agent assistant man. I am also building one, BTW.
Longjumping_Self5546@reddit
I'm pretty sure everyone is building one.
spyboy70@reddit
Clippy! I mean Clipai!
KptEmreU@reddit
better than openclaw even? My first 2 weeks with openclaw so I am totally noob but just made a qwen3.6 35 work on local for me and I want to use it as agent. Agents are really cool if you ask me 😃
BehindUAll@reddit
Haven't used openclaw but like others said already, the team behind maintaining the project is bad. Hermes agent has a direction at least and I haven't seen anyone complain about it. I use it almost daily on my own VPS.
Elibroftw@reddit
on twitter hemes took over openclaw in popularity before I even bothered experimenting
fatihmtlm@reddit
I've just installed Hermes agent after my first agent experience with nanobot. To be honest it looks much more confusing at first glance but I hope it will worth.
rm-rf-rm@reddit (OP)
huh? this has been a staple desire of computing from the earliest time - from HAL to Siri and Alexa. Its only a matter of time till an actual working, well engineering product is available.
paul__k@reddit
The idea has been around for a long time, but none of these assistants have ever been powerful and reliable enough to be of actual use beyond setting a cooking timer. Most of the time, it's easier to do it yourself, rather than hope the assistants a) understands the instructions correctly, and then b) actually does the right thing. Even if you have to intervene like 20% of the time, it's still too much and will eventually become exhausting to the user. You would need something that is close to 100% accuracy.
RevolutionaryLime758@reddit
No shit
bwjxjelsbd@reddit
It's basically the ultimate UX for computer
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
Yes, but the idea of a "Personal Agent" as it's coming to mean in LLMs is built on OpenClaw. It set the design precedent despite being the worst version of the concept. Your other examples are just names and vauge concepts of a personal assistant.
Timely-Perception-26@reddit
Just build it yourself. You know best what you want. I have an Arduino Nicla Voice for voice activation, which triggers a room microphone; the speech is processed using Cohere and FireRedVAD. Llama.ccp runs in a Docker container, and Qwen3-TTS handles the output.
I have a simple orchestrator. py, a context manager, a drop-in tool manager, a cron manager, a memory manager, a subagent coordinator, etc.
Nothing major.
For tools, I just write a small .py file for each task and put it in the tool folder; it registers itself and works. For that, a simple template that can communicate with the orchestrator.
As tools, I have things like fetching my favorite websites, news, streaming services, calendars, radio, etc.
cutebluedragongirl@reddit
JavaScript is the best language ever. What are you talking about? Thanks to JavaScript, modern web is so so good.
overand@reddit
I was genuinely surprised with how sluggish some of the basic OpenClaw operations were - stuff that didn't even hit the LLM. Administrative stuff line restarting services, etc. Certainly could have been a configuration problem, but damn.
SaratogaCx@reddit
I saw the same thing, tried picoclaw which is a lot smaller and near instant. Openclaw may have been a start but it brought a lot of baggage compared to more performance oriented alternatives.
BehindUAll@reddit
Hermes agent is the best I think
dm_construct@reddit
i feel like even though it is better quality, it still suffers from the same problem as openclaw in that it tries to do way too much.
imo it's better to pick something really small and just fork it with whatever features you personally need
moises325@reddit
I have been using claude code to build my sovereign OS agent using an obsidian vault as it's home. But i use openclaw as my telegram gateway, and every step i take i tell my OS that this is temporary because eventually we won't use openclaw at all. but for now, it would take forever to code my own gateway with google mcp. what is a lightweight harness gateway that might be a better fit?
Shaken_Earth@reddit
Its performance is definitely better than OpenClaw in my experience but still pretty slow. I don't understand why so many go for languages like Python and TypeScript/JavaScript for writing CLIs.
I understand the allure if those are languages you know really well and you're writing the code yourself, but if you're just gonna avoid reading any code you might as well use a language which is much better suited to writing CLIs like Go or Rust.
Maybe one reason is the models perform better with languages like TypeScript and Python because there's more training data? Even then though, I've gotten pretty good results when having LLMs generate Go code.
xoxaxo@reddit
because bottleneck is LLM API not CLI
NandaVegg@reddit
TS seems to be the default vibecode choice for Claude. Without telling what language to build program on, it tends to use it (and yes, 2026 LLMs are good enough at virtually every language that has at least 1000+ repos on GitHub).
px403@reddit
"premature optimization is the root of all evil" ~Knuth
OpenClaw wasn't about being the best at a thing, it was about proving out a new class of workflows, and it did very well at that. Proving that a tool can be useful is the first step, then you start looking for ways to optimize it, and make it more economically sustainable, which is what is happening now in several directions.
dtdisapointingresult@reddit
Dude no one is optimizing OpenClaw. In April it had a staggering 14.5k commits, double what it got in March. I'll paste what I said in my topic on AI assistants.
14.5k commits in April shows this project is a joke. This is such a ridiculous number. "But dt, as long as the lead dev is approving the PRs, it's cool." I'm sorry but the dev is not reviewing and approving 14k commits per month. That would translate to 1.5 commits reviewed per minute, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
TLDR: OpenClaw is just accepting PRs without review.
SkyFeistyLlama8@reddit
Seeing how a well managed project like llama.cpp has zealous PR oversight and it still gets bugs, I can't imagine the technical 1000-year mortgage that OpenClaw has accrued. Slapping AI shit on top of AI shit is what OpenClaw really is.
Eisenstein@reddit
The full quote is much better and doesn't lend itself as easily to being used improperly:
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%"
_bones__@reddit
I follow two rules about optimization:
TylerDurdenFan@reddit
I thought it was actually about generating enough hype to secure a profitable acquisition from OpenAI
Cl0wnL@reddit
It's open source....
TylerDurdenFan@reddit
Yeah, in a most successful acqui-hire. How many millions did the OpenClaw guy get, again?
Freonr2@reddit
Can't believe he got $1B. /s
overand@reddit
I don't disagree, btw!
grizzlybear_jpeg@reddit
I mean it’s a vibecoded piece of shit that doesn’t go through any kind of PR review process. You can’t expect anything more than it being shit
keepthepace@reddit
"Claude, remake it in Rust"
ilostmyaim@reddit
Don't forget the "make no mistakes part"
Prestigious-Crow-845@reddit
This one even works with a real programmers!
ClassNational145@reddit
There's already ironclaw out there
addiktion@reddit
zeroclaw also in Rust.
paulqq@reddit
funny tho, i am wrting eris-system an agent framework in rust. but i call it agentic coding. see my skills list. and yes i toyed with a moltbook loop 😄
Representative
routing_hints(say things like this—the model still decides, and similarity is fuzzy):Representative routing_hints (say things like this—the model still decides, and similarity is fuzzy):
Tool Typical phrasing
vault:list list files, show directory, browse folder, what files exist
vault:read read file, open note, show file, inspect markdown
vault:write save note, write file, append note, create markdown
memory:query search memory, do you remember, what is my name, who am I, user preferences, my identity, recall context
memory:stage remember this, stage memory, temporary memory, hold in staging
memory:staged_list show staged memory, list staged ids, what is staged
memory:commit commit staged memory, persist one memory, save to vault, keep forever
memory:commit_all commit all memories, flush staged memory, bulk commit staged
agenda:push add task, remind me, todo, queue task
agenda:list show tasks, list agenda, pending tasks
agenda:remove remove task, cancel agenda, delete from list, drop task, never mind
agenda:remind_at remind me at/in/about, remember to, nudge/ping me at, snooze, on my agenda or todo list, task reminder
agenda:complete task done, complete task, mark done, finished the …
(deprecated) web:fetch open website, read web page, fetch URL, news from — plus URLs and the lexical phrases above
web:artifact_query search fetched page, query artifact, find in web artifact
system:health health check, system status, CPU/memory usage, Ollama status, diagnostics
clock:now what time is it, current time, timezone, date and time
clock:timer in 30 minutes, countdown, generic timer, label-only reminder (not agenda)
clock:alarm wake me up, alarm clock only, standalone alarm, no todo
weather:current weather now, temperature outside, is it raining, current conditions
weather:forecast forecast, hourly, next days, will it rain tomorrow
wiki:summary Wikipedia, encyclopedia, what is X, who was, define (topic—not a URL)
db:find_connections train from/to, Zugverbindung, ICE/IC/RE, Deutsche Bahn, next connection, platforms, delays, city-to-city transit
mail:check check email, inbox, unread, new mail, who emailed me
mail:read read email, open message, full email, message content
mail:write send email, compose mail, reply, email to
mail:digest summarize email, today’s mail, digest, recap inbox
mail:delete delete email, trash message, discard
mail:move move to folder, label email, file under, move to spam
skills:list list skills, what skills are available, show skills, skill index
skills:read read skill, show skill details, inspect skill by id
skills:create create skill, add skill, author skill, update skill with overwrite
calendar:list Google Calendar, meetings today, this week’s schedule, appointments, what’s on my calendar, list events, am I free
calendar:get open this calendar event, event details by id, full meeting JSON, read Google Calendar event
calendar:create add calendar event, schedule meeting, block time, create Google Calendar appointment
calendar:update reschedule meeting, change event time, rename meeting, edit calendar event
calendar:delete cancel meeting, delete calendar event, remove from Google Calendar
moltbook:home check Moltbook, visit Moltbook, catch up on Moltbook, Moltbook heartbeat
moltbook:feed browse Moltbook feed, read submolt, following feed, Moltbook posts
moltbook:search semantic search Moltbook, find posts by meaning, discover discussions by topic
moltbook:comment/post/vote comment on Moltbook, post to Moltbook, upvote Moltbook; only after explicit operator intent or approval
moltbook:dm Moltbook DM, direct messages, inbox, DM request, reply to Moltbook message
woolharbor@reddit
and make it lame and gay
kodiakinc@reddit
There’s already Whiteclaw out there.
SphaeroX@reddit
Yeah, like the Gemini CLI 🤣
grizzlybear_jpeg@reddit
I don’t use gemini so no idea.
SphaeroX@reddit
Be glad you don't use it
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
Hermes Agent seems to be good alternative - it's supposed to be able to self-learn and self-improve. Although it sounds as security nightmare.
jessepence@reddit
"Self-improvement" just means that it creates a skill-- AKA a markdown document-- that it may or may not use or improve in the future. Usually, if I let an agent adjust the markdown document, it just gets bloated and full of repetitive cruft that makes it worse over time.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
Most personal agents use Markdown documents, but the Hermes self improvement loop is a lot more sophesticated than that. The docs go into details, but I've found it to work quite well with my workflows. I use Qwen 3.5/3.6 local models with it exclusively.
jessepence@reddit
Wrong.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
I'm talking about the next page in the docs: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/curator
It's Markdown files with additional scaffolding, and it's worked well for me.
jessepence@reddit
Yeah, I didn't mention it because it's not that interesting, but it really proves my point. You need to send extra prompts to a "curator" just to remove the unnecessary cruft mentioned in my original post.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
You didn't mention it because it breaks the straw man you built. Hermes saw the problem, they thought about it, and they provided a fix. The fix runs automatically in the background, too. The current situation is such that the problem you mention is non-existant, and you admitted to knowing it but chose to omit information to make your point.
I hate those agentic mess as much as the next guy, but come on, be better.
jessepence@reddit
Which straw man? It's still not real self improvement. It's just crappy markdown documents.
dm_construct@reddit
i prefer open-strix which for every turn predicts the next course of action, these logs are saved as JSONL events in git, and then it audits itself twice a day to attempt to make better predictions
more ppl to need read about cybernetics
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
Maybe it doesn't work with local models? That behavior will heavily depend on model's logical and, may I say, teaching capabilities. Which one did you use?
jessepence@reddit
Opus 4.6
wearesoovercooked@reddit
Bloated and a fantastic token burner.
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
We're in r/localllama - you pay for tokens only in electricity, so it doesn't really matter. Besides, all agents burn a lot of tokens. Bloated? Maybe, can't comment myself as I've jsut started evaluating it; but if you think so, maybe you know aboit a better agent and can share?
prtt@reddit
Token efficiency absolutely matters, regardless of who charges you and how much.
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
I'm all in if there's an objectively more efficient solution; but ib my eyes, are agent burn kinda the same amount of tokens, so it's more of a question of running vs not running agents at all.
prtt@reddit
far from true, actually! Check out the stats on openrouter and do a basic tokens/requests ratio. Some of these differences are dramatic.
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
This means nothing. The length of the request is extremely dependent on the tasks I do: my orders to do web research to OpenWebUI (inbuilt web tools) are often in 100k range just because the model pulls like 20 different pages and has them all in context. On the other hand, quick asks like "remind me how to do this" hang around 20k for exactly the same OWUI with exactly the same model. The metric you propose is only relevant if all people do the same tasks with all the agents; bu5 this is not a given.
prtt@reddit
Well sure, yeah, fine, if we weren't talking about millions of requests and billions of tokens. Obviously averages are a thing. But you have the ability to go and test yourself, by adding basic observability and doing the work. It is obviously true that the different agentic harnesses produce vastly different token expenditure profiles.
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
Good idea! As it happens, I'm routing all my private LLMs through LiteLLM which has a capability to collect usage stats! So I've gone in and checked: my very own, local Hermes instance backed by Qwen 3.6 35B, has average requiest length of 37.7k tokens. OpenRouter's average is 52.0k. See the problem? This stats only show that on average people are using Hermes for more complex tasks than me and conversate longer than me. It says nothing about software being bloated because exactly the same agent produces 30% difference in promtp length simply by changing users.
prtt@reddit
Now this is a comment I like :) Thanks for going in and running the tests!
NandaVegg@reddit
I think one of the main counterargument to token efficiency (for prefill/tool bloats specifically; not multi-turn efficiency) is that those prefills are same over many requests and prefix caching will take care of them. However smaller LLMs are very fast to degrade with unneeded definitions of tools in the prefill, and even the frontier OSS models are not as good as Opus 4.6 at that yet. This is why there are talks that pi outperforms for local LLMs since it has minimum context bloat (3000 tokens-ish compared to 10000-ish tokens of OpenCode and 15000-20000ish tokens of OpenClaw)
needlzor@reddit
It matters if you control for equal results, which is hard to do from token/query ratio only. If one agent keeps outputting garbage and you need 4-5 retries to get something decent while the other burns twice the tokens but oneshots the task, then the second one is preferable, at least to me.
Orolol@reddit
You pay token in the most valuable resource: time.
draconic_tongue@reddit
if you cared about time you wouldn't be on reddit
Orolol@reddit
If my models were faster, I wouldn't
detroitmatt@reddit
I need to save time so I have more to spend on reddit
Clueless_Nooblet@reddit
You also pay for tokens in time, not only electricity.
No-Refrigerator-1672@reddit
True; however, in my eyes, that's irrelevant in this case because, as I've said, all agents consume lots of tokens (at least all I've tried), so they are all the same in regard of time.
GoodbyeThings@reddit
also seems quite astroturfed
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
Or is it just good and people like to talk about it? It's so easy to throw around acusations of organized malice on this sub with zero evidence, not every project you see mentioned is doing that.
AvidCyclist250@reddit
big bad commands ask you for confirmation
Manitcor@reddit
This, already in multiple groups running these locally on as small as 9b params.
Creative-Type9411@reddit
does Open claw cost money?
Someone was just telling me that I was rebuilding Open claw yesterday when I was showing them what Tools I was making..
If it's not free, I definitely rather be doing this than using that
slippery@reddit
Openclaw and most of the claw-clones are expensive in tokens. If you use a local LLM, a lot of costs drop.
By default, claws have a heartbeat configured to wake up every 30 minutes. Each time it wakes up, it has to read dozens of files to get the context of who it is, who you are, what it should be doing if anything.
When I first got picoclaw working (a super small, efficient claw written in Go), it was eating about 5 million tokens a day just sending me status reports and doing basic web research. Using Gemini flash 3.1 lite, it was costing over $1/day. I turned off the heartbeat and it dropped to below 500k a day, only responding when I prompted it.
Creative-Type9411@reddit
when you say cost are you talking about electricity? What are you paying for?
slippery@reddit
Yes, that's just API use for tokens. Doesn't count electricity or any other cost. If you don't have the hardware to run a quality local mode (I don't), there are plenty of less expensive models to choose.
Creative-Type9411@reddit
use openWeb UI and build out your own tools using frontier LLM's to help you eventually you won't need them. It doesn't take long to tool up.
retornam@reddit
API use. You are either paying OpenAI or your LLM provider of choice.
Creative-Type9411@reddit
well im not, lol
but yea i guess that explains the downtrend
Ambitious_Ad4397@reddit
I think zeroclaw + qwen3.6 running locally, works quite nice
Tall-Log-1955@reddit
Just needs more javascript, not enough javascript. Just keep adding it until it works
Angelr91@reddit
I think the future is same as the cloud vs on-prem war back in the day. The answer was hybrid and so will AI in the cloud or local. I would love to see an LLM router that works on per agent turns to judge if it needs to use a frontier model of load balance for cost purposes.
GifCo_2@reddit
You clearly don't even know what openclaw is. Lol
jaybsuave@reddit
yeaaaa i don’t see why id need to pay for a local agent id rather pay for better hardware to run the agent on
bwjxjelsbd@reddit
Openclaw is hyping up so much from all these AI labs and influencers because they know it's going to print so much money for them
I literally run the agent through some chinese coding plan and it consumed a trillion tokens within 30 days lmao
Doug_Bitterbot@reddit
The idea is still alive and being built upon. https://github.com/Bitterbot-AI/bitterbot-desktop/
BrightRestaurant5401@reddit
yeah I'm actually running nanoclaw with llama-server and gemma 4,
seems a lot more serious than openclaw, allthought the repo breaks to much update to update for my taste
BehindUAll@reddit
Use Hermes agent
thbb@reddit
Rather than relying on having an LLM handle the control flow of an agent, I believe the right solution is to have deterministic workflows (in the form of rules such as: "when an email arrives from my boss, notify me asap, otherwise, parse it and fill the todo list..." but as proper python code) likely generated by an LLM.
The natural language part should be used only for interpreting text and classifying content for trigger conditions.
ThankGodImBipolar@reddit
I'm working to build a harness in Go right now with OpenCode; seems to be going alright. OpenClaw was almost unusable on my system because it was so slow, and I like that I can control the size of the system prompt of whatever I write myself. I think I might be able to hook it up to a frontier model eventually as well, as I can be completely confident in what it'll send to those APIs.
CrowdGoesWildWoooo@reddit
I think people just hate the idea of seeing some techbros are trying to antromorphize agents.
LlamaDelRey10@reddit
I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate from Google Trends for this because people usually search for stuff when it's newer, i think it might just be novelty wearing off rather than the product dying.
that being said, i had a ton of issues with it when i tested so maybe people are just realizing it's not that great and moving to other agents
SuperWallabies@reddit
That means nothing much. This is probably just because it went viral among regular people on social media. People had unrealistic fantasies about OpenClaw, and the bubble simply burst.
ImNotAMan@reddit
Anyone keeping track should be able to tell that a harness is a harness at this point.
A harness that specifically assists in setting up a separate personal harness will probably be the next open claw.
Due-Memory-6957@reddit
That's a silly argument, as people download and etart using it, there's no reason to keep searching.
I_Hope_So@reddit
New users don't exist in your world?
TheCatDaddy69@reddit
Yeah, imagine every iphone user had to rebuy the phone? Of course there will be new users but the majority interested in something like openclaw already downloaded it.
Due-Memory-6957@reddit
The number of new users naturally decreases, does only new users exist in yours?
TheCatDaddy69@reddit
Im still using it, its great, will keep doing so untill better options arrive.
onethousandmonkey@reddit
It was a resume, and it worked. The dev works at OpenAI now.
ttlequals0@reddit
I never understood what problem OpenClaw was solving. I wouldn't trust LLMs in their current state to work autonomously on my behalf. It seems like it would be more work since I'd have to micromanage what it does.
Longjumping_Rule_163@reddit
Good.
dm_construct@reddit
it's because openclaw is a fucking disaster of a codebase
to set it up properly requires way too much effort for even highly experienced nerds
there are so many agent harnesses now, i think everyone has just bounced off to something else that doesn't break every update or require you to take up a full time job doing agent IT
(i like open-strix)
daniel_bran@reddit
Amen sister
wittlewayne@reddit
"to set it up properly requires way too much effort for even highly experienced nerds" ....damn, I didn't realize that I am way beyond an experienced nerd.... It only took a couple hours to get mine dial in like a MF. It's great it does anything and everything I want. For lean codebase, pi is much better btw
dm_construct@reddit
if you thnk that then you did it wrong
tharsalys@reddit
Great. It sucked anyways. Hermes Agent ftw
MizantropaMiskretulo@reddit
Not how that chat works.
frankster@reddit
there was certainly a hype spike a couple of months back, fuelled by some crazy stories. Have people moved to other AI assistants (and if so what are they) or have they just lost interest in the category after experimenting with openclaw?
mimic751@reddit
My R&D department is rolling this out but we're going to use Claude desktop I think
assotter@reddit
Thea reality is most people don't have a use for openclaw type agents. It was cool and hyped up but once folks have it in hand they dunno wtf to do with it and end up not ever really utilizing it from what I've seen from folks I know offline
retornam@reddit
Till date no one has been able to tell me what use cases OpenClaw is exclusively good for. I have an alternative for each one of the cases they bring up, that works well for me.
I am also someone who doesn’t trust hype or hop on to a bandwagon just because.
cddelgado@reddit
With its own cloud services, it is quite competent at coding, sending emails, making calls, and the scheduled processes are quite good too. The problem is even after one sets it up, there is still a gap between what it can do, and how it should do the work well.
For example, it can tell you daily flight deals, cheap properties to investigate, investment hints, etc. Every day it can refine choices for stock buys or sells, and whole rafts of other stuff. But doing that usefully and consistently requires telling it how to do it or knowing what tools to give it and guiding its hand.
retornam@reddit
All these things can be done far better without OpenClaw or LLMs in the loop.
Multiple HFT firms do volumes daily using regular C or C++ code and zero LLMs
corbanmonoxide@reddit
I asked my bot to set up a new minecraft server on a resource that I own. It did it in one prompt because I have a very robust knowledge system that allows it to use a network of computers. I can easily see how a large virtual machine system could easily be managed by an openclaw instance.
I have a collaborative feedback system that allows me to capture notes frictionlessly (either through discord or telegram) and organize them in obsidian (this was actually my primary use case). What would've been a workflow requiring notion, zapier and a messaging platform now only requires OpenClaw. My bot has it's own obsidian vault where it manages it's own day to day memories before distilling them into it's own OC memory system. I have my own obsidian vault that the bot can read and write to but it only writes in there at my instruction. It knows how to learn from what it's doing by keeping it's own log while maintaining projects by referring to the vault that I write into and use for my projects.
Openclaw can use whatever API you give it allowing you to centralize or expedite workflows that used to require additional software or SaaS seats. When I'm troubleshooting something in my home network, I can quickly send OC screenshots or .pdfs and have no worries about it reading it. Hallucination level is miniscule and easy to distinguish because of my knowledge system.
I don't know if I'm just delusional but use cases are appearing day to day. I set one up for my wife and she uses it to manage her calories (Something that myfitnesspal used to be required for). Now all of her information is kept private and we perform something that cost us $15 a month for basically free (her usage is so minimal that free tiers in API accounts don't rate limit).
So for a use case that cannot be easily replicated outside of AI harnesses like OC, I think that this frictionless note capture and knowledge base management system I've developed is unmatched by any existing products. I don't need something to monitor my mailbox. I don't need zapier to automate the workflow to hand off the message to a LLM to do the templating, tagging and organization and I don't need a cloud platform to store and sync my notes. Openclaw receives the message from discord and uses a bespoke skill to apply the correct template, yaml metadata tagging and internal wikilinks, then it pushes it to a git repo where I can pull it down and collab.
Please don't assume my wall of text is LLM I wrote this with my meat bag brain.
TLDR: I built a frictionless note capture and iteration tool that used to require 3-4 tools to accomplish.
switchbanned@reddit
I have a buddy who works in sales and he set up openclaw to find leads and send out emails automatically for him.
retornam@reddit
People found and qualified leads and setup mail merge way before openclaw existed.
Heck you can still find and qualify leads with an LLM and a script without ever touching OpenFlaw
switchbanned@reddit
Of course you can, but I was just answering your question. It's a legitimate use for OpenClaw for him. It generates him $1500 in leads a week.
retornam@reddit
How much did he spent to generate the $1500 in leads?
I design a systems that uses $0 and generates the same amount or even more qualified leads without LLMs would that be better or worse in value or cost wise?
switchbanned@reddit
His usage is around $200/mo. $0 is less than $200 so that would better.
SaratogaCx@reddit
I actually have one and it sounds stupid at first but it isn't when you start to dive in a bit... web_fetch.
I have an application that does a lot of activities over the course of the day and it has a few API endpoints to provide data on what it did, logs, configuration, things like that. I wanted a report on what it did and grab info from the internet to provide a good context heavy driven report.
These endpoints can be access from the internet but I couldn't get any service to reach all 3 of them while also providing infrastructure to fit in the instructions in how to read and report on the data.
Services I tried with:
After I was not happy with OpenClaw's performance I tried Picoclaw and hooked it up to GLM-4.7 as the model (although I tested with Mistral-small and that also worked). within an hour I had it grabbing data from my application, data from outside sources, and creating the kind of report I needed... every time. The consistency turned a manual job into a no-op.
I could have done this with a few scripts, there isn't anything that is magic or out of reach if you can use any proper CLI for these services and cron, but it just kind of worked which was nice and having it connected to a chat app lets me ask follow up questions if I have any.
retornam@reddit
Maybe I was born in a different generation but I was taught to use the right tool for the right job.
You can use the butt of a knife to hammer a nail if you like, but why spend time doing that when you can do so quicker and faster with a hammer?
SaratogaCx@reddit
LLM's are one of the best tools for synthesizing structured (api) and unstructured (news) data into a blended format. It was the right tool for my use case. If you are of the mind that there is no use case that makes sense than nothing will meet your bar.
En-tro-py@reddit
The criticism isn't the use of LLM's per se, just that a simple script would do it just as well without the claw baggage and without the associated security nightmare that comes with it...
skripp11@reddit
More like using power drill lithium battery packs to hammer the nail. Expensive and might even blow up in your face.
Old_Cantaloupe_6558@reddit
At least it's exciting this way, you never know what you'll get. Like loot boxes basically
Mr_Hyper_Focus@reddit
I don’t think having an alternative is really a great metric.
My phone does a lot of things my other devices do. Not better. Just more conveniently.
Surely its use cases are narrow right now. But not useless. I know you didn’t say it’s useless, but I think having the metric be whether or not it does things exclusively is the wrong one.
I think it’s good at setting up easy cron jobs on the fly. And it definitely has some nice useful cases.
As someone who got it setup purely to prove its uselessness, I surprisingly found it convenient for a few things. Not irreplaceable:
I had a package sent to me that failed to deliver. I took a photo of the slip they left and told my agent to have it fixed and redelivered. I thought that was cool and easy.
I was fixing my hot water heater, I explained the issue I was having, took a photo of the serial plate and mfg and told it to reach out to them for the diagnostic values I needed and monitor for responses from the company. It did this pretty well and it did add convenience for me.
These tasks are not impossible. And are possible to do without. But convenience was added.
frankster@reddit
This is where I'm up to with it. I've finally installed it to have a plan. Absolutely not connecting it to my personal email or anything I care about (or at least not without heavy access restrictions). The main uses cases I've thought for it are:
1) check this kubernetes cluster every few hours and report if any pods/statefulesets etc are not stable, and notify me.
2) check for new releases of the containers/helmcharts in the kubernetes cluster, and let me know if there is a new stable release available that is at least 2 weeks old
The first use case works but is definitely done better via monitoring or very simple scripting. So not a killer app for an agent like openclaw.
The second use case, I'm not completely sure how effective openclaw is with it yet. It could be done with more complicated scripting (after obtaining a list of containers/helm charts in the cluster, scan helm repositories and github repo releases for new stable versions). It seems possible that LLMs/agents might be a good fit for finding out the software used in a kubernetes cluster and checking for new versions. But not sure. Maybe scripting is still the best fit for this, maybe agents are.
retornam@reddit
Both use cases can be done with a simple script and cron, without downloading and installing the Internet ( node packages) and OpenClaw
draconic_tongue@reddit
you can do anything with a bunch of rocks
frankster@reddit
yep and the first use case is probably done even better with something like prometheus/grafana than scripting, which would mean you get dashboards and historic stats. and openclaw has nothing to offer there at all.
MastaSplintah@reddit
I'm using Hermes agent, instead of getting some time/task management productivity app. I tried a few but they all have to much friction. I don't want multiple tabs but I need to store lots of information I may want to access at any time. I gave it access to my calendar since I never use it for anything anyway and I set up obsidian for it to use, a pocketbase db and syncthing. Thats pretty much all I need to basically do what any productivity app does but there's no real friction except its not fast, but doesn't really matter for me. Best part is I can also get it to do research on topics and keep documents and everything in its own folders in obsidian, then with syncthibg I have access to obsidian folder on my phone as well. So I can get it to do some research some a topic and check it out on my phone later when I feel like it. Might not be a good system for everyone but works for me.
mr_tolkien@reddit
I use this style of agent for calories tracking and it’s very convenient
DrobnaHalota@reddit
I launched a platform where AI agents can discover, evaluate and donate to humanitarian campaigns by real people. Experimenting with agentkit based agents and an open claw one making donations. So far it feels like less deterministic OpenClaw is better at evaluating credibility of the campaigns, at least it's much easier to iterate with by instructing it to pay attention to particular red flags like repeated addresses, disconnect between claimed needs and campaign goals etc, compared to having to adjust weights and change decision making logic in more deterministic setups.
dofwifpartyhat@reddit
Almost all of that attention were from solana memecoin markets. Openclaw was the main narrative for a couple months.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
I've tried OpenClaw plus most of the well regarded alternatives and have landed with Hermes Agent. It's not a life changing piece of software like OC was hyped up to be, but I get quite a bit of use out of it for research and as a thought partner.
The_IT_Dude_@reddit
Mine is still just running, doing very simple and safe things, and c9nnecting to a local instance of vLLM so I don't have super high ongoing costs. It's just working now. No reason to mess with it, though it can probably use an upgrade here at some point.
mrdevlar@reddit
It was so badly astroturfed on reddit which made everyone rightfully suspicious of it.
BoogerheadCult@reddit
Biggest fad ever and so many stupid idiots installed this security risk on their personal device.
Almost a kind of social experiments.
wittlewayne@reddit
LOL spoken like a true r/MasterHacker
Voxandr@reddit
every aspects of openclaw seems intentionally bugged
wittlewayne@reddit
good. All the better for people like me who know how to use it and take full advantage of it
Enough-Astronaut9278@reddit
Tbh Google Trends for niche dev tools doesn't tell you much. Docker and k8s both been declining on Trends for years and they're doing fine. What actually happened is the core idea got picked up everywhere, Claude Code, Codex, Hermes all run similar patterns now. OpenClaw kicked the door open and the ecosystem walked through. Whether it specifically survives matters less than the pattern sticking around. And honestly for local setups the security and cost story is way better than routing everything through cloud APIs.
yamfun@reddit
The current design, of "huge paragraphs of flat text that we hope the AI do not ignore parts of it" is flawed.
There must be stricter and token-efficient ways to define some absolute creeds, personalities, memories
grantnlee@reddit
How soon will I be able to get a "barely used Mac Mini" for cheap?
rosie254@reddit
i wish i could post my (not vibecoded) openclaw alternative in this subreddit because it solves a lot of openclaw's shortcomings, and even hermes's, but every time i try to create a post it gets auto-deleted without even a warning from automoderator or anything. seeing you all talk about how you wish openclaw and hermes did this and that better and wasn't so slow and heavy.. it's exactly what mine does
mind if i just post a link in this comment thread or something?
vid_icarus@reddit
Openclaw started the fire but now I’m on Hermes and I know others have used the same claw structure elsewhere. Kinda the nature of open source tech, also the point. There isn’t just one source.
leo-k7v@reddit
Good riddance
HornyGooner4402@reddit
Helped a friend set up OpenClaw and it felt like an overhyped half-baked personal assistant.
I use Hermes Agent on a semi-personal machine environment with self-hosted Qwen and it's a lot better, but still not as polished as I thought it'd be. It feels like a lot of these AI projects just prioritize pushing features as fast as they can instead of actual user experience.
retornam@reddit
What exactly do you use it( Hermes/ OpenClaw etc) for?
HornyGooner4402@reddit
Mostly automation. I tell it to check the weather every morning or specific technical analysis triggers. I tried using it as a research tool but it doesn't use its tools that well nor is it good at formatting or filtering information over longer context. I guess I could've set up my prompts better but it's easier to just do it myself.
retornam@reddit
You can write simple scripts to do all of these things. Not sure why you need Hermes or OpenFlaw or whatever the next hype tool is
wywywywy@reddit
Because you can do much cleverer things than a simple script.
My "weather report" (Claude Cowork not OpenClaw) only sends me a telegram if it's worth knowing, e.g. when it's very different from yesterday, when it affects what I've got in my google calendar, when I need to water my garden, when I need to put my garden furniture away, suggestion for activities if it's weekend, etc.
Yes it can all be done with a script, but it's not going to be a "simple" script. This is literally just one prompt (written by Claude as well) and I can make adjustments very easily.
retornam@reddit
I’d rather not pay for tokens to know what the weather is but you do you.
Many moons ago, I build a system to text one of my friends whenever the temperature in their silo and barn dropped rapidly enough to cause damage to their harvest. It is still running today with minimal maintenance from me and they are making money selling their harvested crops without spending money on tokens.
The difference between my system and yours is that end of the day we both know what the weather is or is gonna be but you on the other hand spent money(tokens) to find out and I didn’t.
Anthonyg5005@reddit
Yeah, my phone already does this basically and has been for years. You don't need a model to activate at some time in the morning to figure out whether it should tell you it might rain
flock-of-nazguls@reddit
The whole point is that “you” don’t need to write that script. You get a hairbrained idea at lunch, ask your agent to write and deploy a recurring script to do a thing, and boom, you’re getting weather reports emailed to you.
The value (for me, anyway) is in autonomous async operation without having to babysit a claude code session, and giving it enough permissions to let it be useful but very contained.
That means it lives in a docker container on an isolated system with completely separate creds. I don’t use it as an extension of myself, I use it as an idiot intern. It has git access but only full access to its own scratch repo, it needs to file PRs to the ones I care about.
retornam@reddit
I get it you hate programming and would rather a bot do that job for you terribly.
flock-of-nazguls@reddit
There are a zillion other higher value programming tasks I’m already doing. Writing automation to scrape my electrical bills to feed into my tsdb to chart in grafana (the last thing I had it do) is the kind of distracting side project that I’d never find the time to do. So I don’t care if it does it badly or writes dumb code (it hits a local model) if it works. And it got this set up for me in about 24 minutes, which was certainly at least 10x faster than it would have been for me.
Setting this up as “you must hate programming if you use automation” is limiting your thinking. It’s like saying “you must hate assembly language if you’re using a compiler”.
Use the right tool for the job. All simple programming and scripting has moved up an abstraction level. This lets you focus on higher value aspects of development.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
You could have used this same argument against computers "You can do all that with paper and pen".
The point is that it's a different workflow that has it's own pros and cons. I find it more enjoyable than writing it myself. If you don't, great you can keep doing it yourself. But I think it's really cool to have a AI assistant doing tasks for me while I play video games.
retornam@reddit
There is a cost to running LLMs to do stuff.
Many of the people who use these tools have no idea of the underlying code, have no understanding of what exactly they want done and the tools available to them, many of which are cheaper ( even cost nothing) than using an LLM.
We still do many things with pen and paper because it’s the right tool for those specific jobs.
Computers didn’t replace all things done with pen and paper.
My argument is to always use the right tool for the right job.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
I don't disagree on any of that, you and I disagree about what the right tool is.
HornyGooner4402@reddit
Yeah but it's more fun playing Russian roulette with your files and spend 10x longer debugging the slop script
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
I have it do the boring crap for my home lab maintenance
retornam@reddit
A well written ansible script and a cron can do this much faster and much more reliably than OpenFlaw.
I’d also never hotwire a machine with root permissions to an LLM and have it run wild. It’s akin to the giving a monkey a gun video.
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
So…that would require me to be…psychic.
I literally treat it as a fucking employee and its job is to WRITE THE SCRIPTS for solving the boring issues. I don’t use open claw.
Michaeli_Starky@reddit
Good riddance
Thedrakespirit@reddit
OpenClaw is never going away, its too useful and too much of a scaffold to build from
LagOps91@reddit
i still can't believe this astroturfed garbage went anywhere.
jazir55@reddit
When I saw that the OpenClaw repo had more stars than Claude Code itself I knew it was bullshit.
SourceCodeplz@reddit
Yeah but the Claude code repo has nothing really of value. Also not open source
jazir55@reddit
Neither does OpenClaw
TheThoccnessMonster@reddit
You can thank Nvidia / GTC for legitimizing it.
They shilled it to literally everyone in the industry for a straight month. This is a natural decline in awareness and doesn’t actually speak to it being used less.
DigThatData@reddit
https://venturebeat.com/technology/openais-acquisition-of-openclaw-signals-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the
HongPong@reddit
wasn't openclaw famously entirely vibe coded? as in he literally never looked at the code? in the end, seems like it was not advisable, made it a more fragile tool and annoying to deal with over time
Zealousideal-Buyer-7@reddit
So... Anyone have an alternative of open claw that I can port my info?🤔
I do like how it can help me run my discord channel for instant
HongPong@reddit
Hermes is well regarded
toptier4093@reddit
Tried Openclaw for about two days and I can't understand what got them so many stars on Github. What an absolute headache to use. It consistently forgets my default model, takes an eternity to process the absolute most basic prompts and is a nightmare to navigate. Nuked the shit out of it just 15 mins ago.
Ok_Technology_5962@reddit
Open claw has been a nightmare after some yime because the patches and vibecoding break existing stuff. So i always need to take time to fix it myself after. But Hermes agent is a drop in replacement and has been the highest used agent now. So mostly openclaw going away and migrating to hermes
Lost-Dragonfruit-663@reddit
hermes is really good!
KickLassChewGum@reddit
And nothing of value was lost.
mrdevlar@reddit
You mean it illustrates we know a scam when we see one.
It's a sign of a healthy reality that it's rejecting bullshit.
Cl0wnL@reddit
How is an open source product a scam?
tirolerben@reddit
It is not. Some people are just jealous. And when calling an open-source project a scam (you can see all its source code!) haters just expose themselves as having no technical understanding.
corbanmonoxide@reddit
Most people do not understand the underlying technology well enough to use any of these agents or harnesses correctly. My OC implementation is very strong and lightweight and doesn't cost $200+ a month in tokens but I'm also not stupid and giving it Opus to do everything. It's all about deep understanding here. It's cool that you can install it in one line and it will super quickly give you cool agent stuff but it's not even the main focus of the project or it's real use case.
gh0stwriter1234@reddit
designed to use the maximum number of tokens... its token hog for what it does
Scew@reddit
Here's hoping it keeps getting healthier with how the rest of things appear to be right now.
TheGuy839@reddit
Nature is healing. Same thing will probably happen to Agents and MCP but on a longer time span.
Present-Ad-8531@reddit
Agents?
Aren't they way too good to phase out? Function calling will dieoit?
TheGuy839@reddit
LLMs with agency is definitely better than bare LLM, but at the end of the day, its still tied to LLM. It still hallucinates, it still is not secure, not deterministic, you cant rely on it etc. So agency will live on as idea (though that idea is there for past 50 years), but LLM agents will hit ceiling very quickly due to the nature of LLMs
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
I have to disagree for tasks humans are monitoring. Sure, fully autonomous agents are too unreliable (right now, we'll see), but agentic tasks prompted by me and executed while I do something else on my other monitor aren't going anywhere.
TheGuy839@reddit
But that isnt "agentic". That is simply async. In last 20 years we had tons of "do task async while i do something else". Only thing that changed is complexity of the task. But that wasnt possible due to agents, but due to LLMs. When we get new architecture, new types of async/agents or whatever its named will emerge.
All these "patterns" and "rules" is just trying to make LLM as useful as possible. But they face same issues LLMs are facing and they wont kick off as independent thing.
my_name_isnt_clever@reddit
What makes it agentic isn't autonomy, it's having scaffolding around the LLM to allow it to actually take action and do things, not just write text. Even the basic ChatGPT/Claude.ai subs are agentic because it has a Linux VM in the background that it can use. That kind of use case is here to stay, and what makes it better than non-AI async is the flexibility.
I can be playing modded Minecraft and have a mechanics question, and I can just ask Hermes to clone the mod repos and read the code to explain the mechanics, and then to add it's findings to it's internal wiki. I go back to my game and 10 min later I tab back over and I have the exact info I need, saved for later reference. You couldn't have done that 3 years ago, let along 20.
OpenClaw tried to sell the idea of a fully autonomous agent, and that's just not ready yet. But it's still great for semi-autonomous tasks.
TheGuy839@reddit
You arent getting what I am trying to say. You are just describing complexity of the task. As soon as LLMs are replaced with new architecture, current agents are gone. They dont bring anything innovative just squeezing as much juice as possible to keep the funding. Everyone is selling "these are the prompts", "these are the design patterns" or "these are the frameworks", but in reality, there isnt a aingle thing that they brought that is new. And because of it they wont last, they will be quickly replaced but something more innovative. OpenClaw is just faster simulation of what will happen when everyone sees agents past hype. Cool for personalized assistants, very troubling for anything production and safety wise
MrTacoSauces@reddit
But I feel like agents and mcp are a functional equivalent of what humans do. That's not going anywhere. Might the paradigm change? Probably but they aren't gonna disappear but open claw was the first iteration of consumable agents with skills.
I think the next movement beyond this bump in intelligence of models is going to be models that can "live" with us. I'm still eagerly waiting for that. A model that can self adapt to each user beyond context and can move with you to new weights sounds like a great push to go local.
TheGuy839@reddit
I mean agents itself is nothing special, just llm calls wrapped in nice wrapping paper. I feel like this will be gone as we move away from LLMs in future
MrTacoSauces@reddit
I just don't see a world where most future models don't leverage agency. AI is fundamentally trained on us. Can Claude or Gemini one shot a task that would take the most seasoned developer 2+ hours to make yeah. But in many cases that implementation is sloppy when that same case is done with agents it's far closer to the implementation a human would do.
Maybe it's a metric of just throwing more tokens at a problem but that's sort of what we do anyway. I also just don't see a world where llms aren't the back bone. Will it go multi modal? Sure but I bet the majority of model weights will be based in text/LLM it's the least error prone dataset. Video/audio is a far more diverse world. Otherwise I'd bet we would have more examples of truly multimodal models but as far as I am aware even the best of them still rely on some sort of LLM backend.
TheGuy839@reddit
I mean, there is a lot of underdefined words here so there is high chance of miscommunication. What I mean is curent agents are simple llm calls with tools and some memory. They are tied to a current state of LLMs and bound by its problems.
There is nothing wrong with agency, but agents in this shape and form will never be really useful due to limitations of the model itself. And when we solve LLM problems, there is high chance all these current agent communication, architecture and other stuff will be worthless.
Basically there is a difference between design patterns in SWE and each language best practice. Languages come and go, patterns stay. Agents (in the current shape) will go quite quickly. Everyone is talking about some patterns for agents, but they are very naive and far from standardized. And they cant be standardized as if someone changes LLMs with some other ML model, it completely changes the game.
MrTacoSauces@reddit
I think LLMs have already proven that the pattern in language is basically universal. Like earlier (maybe also current) qwen models thinking in Chinese and replying in English or any combo of that kinda proves the model is activating on patterns not exactly language.
You can't take several terabytes of data and compress it down to less than 30 gigs and not have found relationships between all language inputs that were seen during training. With that kind of brute force computing every activation is likely working double, triple or dozens of duties making sure each predicted token comes out correctly.
What I find interesting is a under defined word in a LLM likely ends up getting defined and placed correctly in the weights. If LLMs can invent their own secret languages and discuss with each other within context on frozen weights. I doubt the idiosyncrasies of human language place any hurdles on the pattern matching that LLM weights do.
dev_dan_2@reddit
Honest question: Why agents? I don't really get it yet. MCP, totally (highly confined set of action the LLM can do to achieve its goals. Less room for error, less tokens used, ...). But agents? What is the difference to chatting to a capable LLM with big enough context that just uses tools (i.e. via MCP) as needed?
I have not played around with OpenClaw and so on, so I do not have any experiences with agents so far! (What I do and like is using Google Antigravity, but that is classical LLM + tool calling. It does not call any other LLMs in the process or stuff like that.)
retornam@reddit
MCPs to me are mostly useless bloat which consume tokens.
To me you are better off exposing the LLM to a well documented API spec or even a man page so it knows how to leverage the tool call properly. Instead of wasting tokens on every MCP call.
GoodbyeThings@reddit
the nice thing about both agents and MCPs is that it gives you a standard. In the end (in my understanding) it's just a textual version of the API. Which makes it easy to be interoperable.
But I would recommend people to just try out building their own agents. I have built one recently for work and I was really positively surprised by the behavior.
retornam@reddit
Standard? Please explain. What are API docs or man pages if not textual descriptions of APIs or CLI tool flags/ options?
GoodbyeThings@reddit
They don't share the same interface. I don't think you can do anything with an MCP you couldn't do otherwise. But for example, it's trivial to just add an MCP to your service and all of a sudden agents like claude are able to interact with it
retornam@reddit
What do you mean by interface here?
Designing a well-thought out MCP server or service that doesn’t waste tokens isn’t trivial
GoodbyeThings@reddit
sorry, coming from a SE background, that's the term I meant - an abstraction layer.
I didn't consider token waste, and I assume that anything that isn't cut to precision for a tool will have SOME token overhead, however, it's just so convenient to just describe your API and have Claude Code work with your tool. So I don't mind the slight excess of token use.
dev_dan_2@reddit
I see, that makes sense. I think it boils down to two core questions, right? 1) how should the tool call look like? 2) How does the tool call look like when it is actually made, what happens if it wrong? (detection mechanism, self healing, bla).
So there are multiple approaches around it seems (and likely they are not clearly well defined). Yours is too load it into the context initially, which is the natural LLM way to do things. MCP is... I do not really know if MCP offers an advantage in the form of better "local" context here (as in: the llm does not have to have the knowledge in its context, but can retrieve it when it is about to call the tool, hence having more recent info and saving context).
Would love to see empirical data that compares those approaches systematically!
I think in the long run, prepending it as context will be the way to go as I would guess that we are still to see advancements in how we can deal with large context sizes better (around 51% sure ;D).
retornam@reddit
MCPs don’t solve any of those questions better than a well documented API spec or a man page.
I also can slam together a CLI tool that just hits APIs and write a markdown file telling Claude how to drive it than trying to slam together a well-thought out and designed MCP service that consumes just the right about of tokens for specific calls.
MCPs suffer from "context pollution"( for lack of better words/terms) because a badly coded MCP tool might return megabytes of stuff the LLM has to read which might be useless to the task at hand, at which point it’s game over for getting any productive output outside or wasting money on tokens.
With APIs specs and CLIs, Claude calls the API, writes the output to a file, and then writes a program to postprocess it before it looks. This saves a ton of context window and tokens.
MrTacoSauces@reddit
So in my own understanding of things taking any LLM and putting it in an agent mode just basically gives it more time to solve whatever you asked of it. Instead of leaning on hallucinations to get to that utterly crucial END token you give the model time to figure it out.
For example the one time I let Kimi one shot a webpage it was rudimentary but when I took essentially the same prompt in vscode And let it cook for 5+ minutes the results were night and day.
dev_dan_2@reddit
Hmm! I remember about "time-sensitive reasoning" and how it seemed to boost performance of LLMs (dangerous half-knowledge on my part, anyone correct me please!) - that might be it?
As I understood it, from the LLM pov, there is not concept of time, just tokens. "Waiting for a command" is then just halting the inference for a set amount of time, alltogether.
I can see why one would consider this management logic (stopping / restarting inference, executing external programs based on tokens in the LLM output, ...) as agentic AI, that makes sense to me!
MrTacoSauces@reddit
I do remember that term back in chatgpt 4 days. Like chatgpt would work way harder if it was under the context of a deadline or a time crunch. Not necessarily giving better results but it churned on the prompts more diligently.
I don't think agents really address time. To me agents give a best chance of activating the best weights over time. Especially now that current models sometimes know when something wrong is going on and can self fix before failing out waiting on me to be like hey yeah that's wrong it doesn't compile or errors out etc...
When Kimi first came out and it was free to use that was the first model I noticed that self policed itself coding wise. I watched it break a project and then notice it was failing and fix it before ever getting back to me for input. Like I don't think it would have ever done that one shot. But because It churned for 10+ minutes it ended up understanding the problem and fixed it.
dev_dan_2@reddit
What's wrong with MCP tho? Given the LLM limited, but effective actions it can do sounds like a beneficial thing to do.
TheGuy839@reddit
Because the whole idea is to try to cater the architecture that is past its peak and trying to squeeze as much juice as possible until next architecture comes. That is all fine, but it doesnt seem very profitable and viable
dev_dan_2@reddit
Ha, true!
if I would add - Who knows how much compute is left for the next AI revolution once our tech overlords battled out their places on the thrones ;)
TheGuy839@reddit
Yeah, none knows when it will come, but from what I saw LLMs will never justify costs. Its good stepping stone, but there is so much hype around something so stochastic that when hype dies and realization kicks in, new architecture will be inevitable to keep the funds alive
MerePotato@reddit
I can't imagine ever using it over Hermes Agent tbh
Andsss@reddit
Why use openclawn when there's is Hermes agent???
Different-Theme-3326@reddit
I sitll use Openclaw daily for a routine task I set up awhile ago. I am soon going to look if there is a better or cheaper solution and run that instead. I think the opencalw hype is dying for sure.
MrCoolest@reddit
But I'm still using it?
Last_Mastod0n@reddit
They shot themselves in the foot by trying to develop it all in rust instead of just porting over the leaked claude code typescript code into python
pmttyji@reddit
Please share alternatives.
dm_construct@reddit
i like open-strix
dtdisapointingresult@reddit
I can't speak to quality, but I compared the development status of each one here: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1t3lwji/comparison_of_the_development_status_of_various/
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
Hermes aged
pixelworld_ai@reddit
Perhaps coinciding with the Claude Oauth crackdown? I never got the chance to try OpenClaw but I recall that's how many were using it before Anthropic put their foot down.
dm_construct@reddit
that's prob like 90% of it yeah
p_bzn@reddit
My company hosted a workshop with one of the core people in Openclaw space so that we can get the first hand experience. The experience can be summed up to “and, so what?”.
I see it as two fold problem. The first one is “overhype and underdeliver”. The second one is technical, riddled with questionable intentional choices (eg curl instead of MCP).
Running costs of it are also quite high, can easy surpass $1,000/mo with frontier models. None of the people who took workshop found Openclaw useful in a long run, and that is given that the company provided us with unlimited tokens.
Although, the industry learned a thing or two from it, and all in all it was a more useful technology than NFT, even if not too far from it.
iDoAiStuffFr@reddit
remember autogpt?
dresden_k@reddit
New people aren't searching for it. Shrug.
ridablellama@reddit
nah corporate america is still just catching up. my IT dept is taking sandbox requests
TheSn00pster@reddit
Overhyped token-guzzling security breach…
Bitter-College8786@reddit
Is something else trending in exchange?
BidWestern1056@reddit
good its time for the rise of npcsh
lordchickenburger@reddit
is all uncle sam's marketing tactic. They more than made their money back through the attention alone.
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
Doesn't that happen with almost any "app". It's called the "long tail"
Cool-Chemical-5629@reddit
I've never used it and I've never really got familiar with what it is or what it does. I guess now it's a good time to say there's no need to change it. 😂
Suitable_Plantain546@reddit
For all the fellas using Hermes or similar agents (OpenClaw included) locally - I might be sound like a Captain Obvious but that took me a while: you have to turn on Prefix Cache manually. The agent software itself doesn't bother to do that because it's not a thing for big cloud providers.
And also review all the skill list (INCLUDING those that turned off\disabled) and remove from the Agent software those skills that you are not planning to use. Because it doesn't matter if you are not using some particular skills - their prompts are being dragged through anyway, bloating prompts like hell.
With those 2 things I was able to speed up the thing for about 7 (!!!!) times faster. So for the task that was taking 1 hour+ to be done now I have it being done within 10 minutes. For me it was lightning fast difference.
My config is: 4xRTX3090 24GB each, 128GB DDR4, vLLM, Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 model, 128k context (max-model-len), everything else is by default (I am too dumb to play with other parameters).
Pro tip: if you have enough patience to wait and look after your agent, you can do both aforementioned actions done by the Agent itself. Prolly just have to restart it manually whenever it is needed.
Either-Trash-2165@reddit
What is even crazier is the people buying apple computers juste to run Openclaw.
GifCo_2@reddit
If you ever installed this you have questionable judgement
SubjectHealthy2409@reddit
We're on Hermes now bro
bitflip@reddit
I've been using it for about a week, and meh.
Note: this is my personal opinion, and reflects how I want to use it.
There's things about it I like. It is pretty good at learning, the Telegram integration works well, and has a pretty rich ecosystem. Overall, I've been continuing to use it, but mostly because it sucks least.
What I don't like is that all of that ecosystem is enabled by default, configuration documentation is trash, and it's pretty hostile to being run in a docker container. I ended up writing my own Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml to get past the errors (especially permissions).
I'll keep using it now that I've got it semi-behaving. Being able to run entirely in a docker container is important to me (not "run commands in a docker container", but run the whole thing in a container), and that's my biggest pain-point.
My biggest complaint about the ones I've tried is that all of them seem to be poorly managed, and more focused on features rather than finishing/polishing the features they already have.
Internal_Werewolf_48@reddit
Hermes added a ton of QoL improvements over OpenClaw, but we're also in month 4 or 5 of the personal agent era. There is bound to be further improvements.
quantgorithm@reddit
I think the idea of openclaw is great and where things will go.
I, also, think the unknown and somewhat uncontrollable cost factor is what is likely killing it as well as stifling it's adoption. Nobody wants to spend an unknown amount of money as well as time when they cannot guarantee a return. The AI companies also made is harder by thwarting it's adoption.
bit_herder@reddit
i mean, isnt that the graph of anything that "blows up" on the internet? the hype cycle dies down. That said, i dont use or recommend this software.
skilless@reddit
I'm using Craft Agents instead. It's great.
Novel-Injury3030@reddit
you mean the openclaw thats currently number 2 in overall token consumption on openrouter?
mmkzero0@reddit
I always wondered - why use OpenClaw when Hermes exists
Electrical_Tailor186@reddit
Call me a conspiracy theorist but for me the situation is the same as with Apple Vision Pro - the marketing campaign ended —> so happened with the interest. The reality verified the abomination of a product that was just a trick aimed at increasing cash inflow to llm providers…
positivcheg@reddit
I can free you up from a burden of having Mac mini. Will take it from you for 200 USD. You have only 1 minute to decide.
MoodRevolutionary748@reddit
I'm using hermes with a local model and it's promising - not comparable to Claude Level of achievements, way slower, needs more steering, but in the end it usually gets the job done.
RastaBambi@reddit
Yeah because we like our automation deterministic and without access to our email, credit card and operating system. We went from "Let's minimize the blast radius" to "Fuck it. Here are the launch codes."
I'm glad people realized that this was a bad idea.
Doug_Bitterbot@reddit
We were working on something at the same time. But we’ve taken that idea and built upon it substantially: https://github.com/Bitterbot-AI/bitterbot-desktop/
The_IT_Dude_@reddit
My instance is still faithfully running providing me value and using minimal resources as it's connecting to a Qwen 3.6 instance running locally on vLLM.
Perhaps people mostly got these set up how they'd like amd now they're just out there running or they tried setting these up wrong to begin with burned a bunch of money, saw it couldn't do the super complex tasks that were asked of it and shut them off.
tusca0495@reddit
Hermes will probably pick the throne
a_beautiful_rhind@reddit
Hyped normie project is whatever. Tool calling is here to stay.
bakawolf123@reddit
good riddance
possiblywithdynamite@reddit
it's a waste of tokens
JustinPooDough@reddit
Good fucking riddance. I am SO sick of seeing posts that say “We have been building…”, or “We think…”. As if the Agent and person are a team. It’s incredibly cringe and ruining Reddit.
The Huggingface forums are the worst for it now.
BitterProfessional7p@reddit
Just when I started using it last week... It is quite good with Qwen3.6-27B, at least for my simple use cases.
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Code-Painting-8294@reddit
I think most people were just riding the hype + there was all the security stuff. I think people who can utilize it well will continue to use it, while others not so much. then there is cost of running an agent 24/7
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
How much did facebook pay for moltbook again? 🤣
combrade@reddit
OpenClaw is the Ollama of Personal Agents . Hermes is like maybe Llama-Swap not the original source material(Llama.cpp) but a very thin and lean wrapper .
Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit
Hermes Agent is a completely different stack.
ivari@reddit
All of Ajin
NandaVegg@reddit
Even the official repo's star chart is showing that it is peaked. BTW I don't totally hate it. It's a fun experiment that feels fairly omnipotent (because of so many bundled tools that however unnecessary). But like any other agent harnesses (this includes what I tried: CoPaw, Hermes, etc) it has so many quirks that you will spend whole day debugging on. Especially how it treats session over multiple days, random compaction that kills memory, etc. At the end of day you will find yourself moving on to CLI or your own setup for any serious work.
CalligrapherFar7833@reddit
Because openclaw instances star on github. Less instance gain less new stars they put.
goatchild@reddit
oh no... :'(
HavenTerminal_com@reddit
they added three months of linkedin posts about agentic workflows
No_Conversation9561@reddit
I wonder if Hermes is trending up
Voxandr@reddit
how about tencent deerflow
M0ULINIER@reddit
Ytson@reddit
I'm not surprised. The community is very rushing. When it was at the peak of its popularity, I raised a bug report with clear explanation and reproduction scenarios. 2-3 pull requests were opened from the community but none was merged. In the end a PR was merged but it did not address the bug at all and my issue was closed. Very disappointed.
PromptInjection_@reddit
Well, major problem? It's a security nightmare:
https://www.promptinjection.net/p/prompt-injection-ai-llm-ai-agent-openclaw-risks
jashAcharjee@reddit
Give me my Mac mini
0xbeda@reddit
Probably the bots advertising it have become too expensive, too
teraflopspeed@reddit
Not that useful as I said
2Norn@reddit
there is nothing wrong with the idea and it will continue in way or another
i just don't see it in its current form with all the issues that comes with it. could be a good plugin for a model tho.
ortegaalfredo@reddit
Impossible, they spend 4 trillion tokens on OpenRouter! (shh they are fake).
2Norn@reddit
4 trillion tokens is not the least beliveable part.
svantana@reddit
I don't know why you say it's fake but their numbers there are also trending downwards:
https://openrouter.ai/apps/openclaw
ortegaalfredo@reddit
It's easy to setup a fake server, and then a fake agent that routes to that fake server tokens, and the server just generate random tokens and they are being counted towards the total. OpenRouter used to allow that. They implemented some checks but I think it still is possible I mean, how would you detect it?
PromptInjection_@reddit
No surprise. It was over hyped from day one.
cosimoiaia@reddit
Shocking... Who would have thought. /s
shokuninstudio@reddit
If you configure the system prompt right Opencode does 90% of what Claw and Hermes does but at native llama.cpp speed without massive lags and flakiness.
Noiselexer@reddit
Never used it. Don't see the need.
TheRealMasonMac@reddit
A lot of them are moving over to Hermes Agent.
havnar-@reddit
Back to using cron.
JoJoeyJoJo@reddit
I mean we have officially supported agents now, so there's no point to using the hack anymore (plus Claude will stop working if you try and load it in OpenClaw anything).
Zeeplankton@reddit
AI crypto tech bros: WHAT NOW?!?
assotter@reddit
Hermes agent!
skinnyjoints@reddit
Anyone tried NemoClaw?
allen_antetokounmpo@reddit
ziphnor@reddit
And good riddance...
Tight-Requirement-15@reddit
It’s a bad word, the big providers will ban you for saying it
No_Success3928@reddit
Better not tell China
Unstable_Llama@reddit
Heh, not to say I told ya so but... xD
They did kind of kick down the door for agents in the zeitgeist though.