I’m sure there are other ways of doing what I’m doing, but openclaw was the first “package it up and have it make sense” project that captured my imagination enough to begin playing with AI beyond simple copy/paste stuff from chatGPT.

One example from last night: I have openclaw running on a mostly sandboxed NUC on my lab/IoT network at home.

While at dinner someone mentioned I should change my holiday light WLED pattern to St Patrick’s day vs Valentine’s Day.

I just told openclaw (via a chat channel) the wled controller hostname, and to propose some appropriately themes for the holiday, investigate the API, and go ahead and implement the chosen theme plus set it as the active sundown profile.

I came back home to my lights displaying a well chosen pattern I’d never have come up with outside hours of tinkering, and everything configured appropriately.

Went from a chore/task that would have taken me a couple hours of a weekend or evening to something that took 5 minutes or less.

All it was doing was calling out to Codex for this, but it acting as a gateway/mediator/relay for both the access channel part plus tooling/skills/access is the “killer app” part for me.

I also worked with it to come up with a promox VE API skill and it’s now repeatable able to spin up VMS with my normalized defaults including brand new cloud init images of Linux flavors I’ve never configured on that hypervisor before. A chore I hate doing so now I can iterate in my lab much faster. Also is very helpful spinning up dev environments of various software to mess with on those vms after creation.

I haven’t really had it be very useful as a typical “personal assistant” both due to lack of time investment and running against its (lack of) security model for giving it access to comms - but as a “junior sysadmin” it’s becoming quite capable.

I don't have one going but I do get the appeal. One example might be that it is prompted behind the scenes every time an email comes in and it sorts it, unsubscribes from spam, other tedious stuff you have to do now that is annoying but necessary. Well that is something running in the background, not necessarily continuously in the sense that it's going every second, but could be invoked at any point in time on an incoming email. That particular use case wouldn't sit well with me with today's LLMs, but if we got to a point where I could trust one to handle this task without screwing up then I'd be on board.

> Isn't it just waiting for input from different sources and responding to it?

Well, yes. "Just" that. Only that this is at a high level a good description of how all humans do anything, so, you know.

It's not just waiting for input, it has a heartbeat.md prompt that runs every X minutes. That gives it a feeling that it's always on and thinking.

Monitoring, content generation, analysis, retroactive interference, activity emulation

The key idea is not running constantly, but being always on, and being able to react to external events, not just your chat input. So you can set a claw up to do something every time you get a call.