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.

> 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...

> “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?