I’m out of the loop clearly on what clawdbot/moltbot offers (haven’t used it)- I’d love a first hand explanation from users for why you think it has 70k stars. I’ve never seen a repo explode that much.

Apparently it's like Claude Code but for everything.

One can imagine the prompt injection horrors possible with this.

It was a pain to set up, since I wanted it to use my oauth instead of api tokens. I think it is popular because many people don't know about claude code and it allows for integrations with telegram and whatsapp. Mac mini's let it run continuously -- although why not use a $5/m hetzner?

It wasn't really supported, but I finally got it to use gemini voice.

Internet is random sometimes.

I think a major factor in the hype is that it's especially useful to the kind of people with a megaphone: bloggers, freelance journalists, people with big social media accounts, youtubers, etc. A lot of project management and IFTTT-like automation type software gets discussed out of proportion to how niche it is for the same reason. Just something to keep in mind, I don't think it's some crypto conspiracy just a mismatch between the experiences of freelance writers vs everyone else.

While the popular thing when discussing the appeal of Clawdbot is to mention the lack of guardrails, personally I don't think that's very differentiating, every coding agent program has a command line flag to turn off the guardrails already and everyone knows that turning off the guardrails makes the agents extremely capable.

Based on using it lightly for a couple of days on a spare PC, the actual nice thing about Clawdbot is that every agent you create is automatically set up with a workspace containing plain text files for personalization, memories, a skills folder, and whatever folders you or the agents want to add. Everything being a plain text/markdown file makes managing multiple types of agents much more intuitive than other programs I've used which are mainly designed around having a "regular" agent which has all your configured system prompts and skills, and then hyperspecialized "task" agents which are meant to have a smaller system prompt, no persistent anything, and more JSON-heavy configuration. Your setup is easy to grok (in the original sense) and changing the model backend is just one command rather than porting everything to a different CLI tool.

Still, it does very much feel like using a vibe coded application and I suspect that for me, the advantages are going to be too small to put up with running a server that feels duct taped together. But I can definitely see the appeal for people who want to create tons of automations. It comes with a very good structure for multiple types of jobs (regular cron jobs, "heartbeat" jobs for delivering reminders and email summaries while having the context of your main assistant thread, and "lobster" jobs that have a framework for approval workflows), all with the capability to create and use persistent memories, and the flexibility to describe what you need and watch the agent build the perfect automation for it is something I don't think any similar local or cloud-based assistant can do without a lot of heavier customization.

Tried it out last night. It combines dozens of tools together in a way that is likely to be a favourite platform for astroturfers/scammers.

The ease of use is a big step toward the Dead Internet.

That said, the software is truly impressive to this layperson.

Since there is a market for 5staring or 1staring reviews on review websites, there is probably a market to not-quite-human staring of github projects.