Besides that blog post obviously being written by AI, can someone here confirm how credible the hype about openclaw is? I'm already very proficient at using Claude Code anywhere, so what would i gain really with openclaw?

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mikenew 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I played with it extensively for three days. I think there are a few things it does that people are finding interesting:

1. It has a lot of files that it loads into it's context for each conversation, and it consistently updates them. Plus it stores and can reference each conversation. So there's a sense of continuity over time.

2. It connects to messaging services and other accounts of yours, so again it feels continuous. You can use it on your desktop and then pick up your phone and send it an iMessage.

3. It hooks into a lot of things, so it feels like it has more agency. You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"

It feels more like a smart assistant that's always around than an app you open to ask questions to.

However, it's worth stressing how terrible the software actually is. Not a single thing I attempted to do worked correctly, important issues (like the discord integration having huge message delays and sometimes dropping messages) get closed because "sorry we have too many issues", and I really got the impression that the whole thing is just a vibe coded pile of garbage. And I don't like to be that critical about an open source project like this, but I think considering the level of hype and the dramatic claims that humans shouldn't be writing code anymore, I think it's worth being clear about.

Ended up deleting it and setting up something much simpler. I installed a little discord relay called kimaki, and that lets me interact with instances of opencode over discord when I want to. I also spent some time setting up persistent files and made sure the llm can update them, although only when I ask it to in this case. That's covered enough of what I liked from OpenClaw to satisfy me.

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mh2266 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You could send it a voice message over discord and say "hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it"

if one of my friends sent me an obviously AI-written email, I think that I would cease to be friends with them...

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yunohn 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> “hey remember that conversation about birds? Send an email to Steve and ask him what he thinks about it”

Isn’t the “what he thinks about it” part the hardest? Like, that’s what I want to phrase myself - the part of the conversation I’d like to get their opinion on and what exactly my actual request is. Or are people really doing the meme of sending AI text back and forth to each other with none the wiser?

	▲	mikenew 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think in the context of business communication; yeah a lot of people are doing that. Which, to be honest, I don't think it the worst thing ever. Most corporate communication is some basic information padded out with feigned personal interest and rehearsed politeness, so it's hardly a huge loss. For personal communication between friends it would be horrible. Authenticity has to be one of the things I value most about the people I know. Didn't mean to imply from that example that I did or would communicate that way.

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andai 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can just hook up Claude Code to a Telegram bot and get basically the same result in 50 lines of code.

https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON

Well, it's a work in progress, but I have self-upgrading and self-restarting working, and it's already more reliable than Claw ;)

I used the Claude Code SDK (Agents SDK) originally, but then realized I can get the same result by just calling `claude -p the_telegram_message`

The magic sauce being the --continue flag, of course. Bit less useful otherwise.

I haven't figured out how to interrupt it or see what it's doing yet though.