> Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade)

Two decades! It will be 20 this April.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS)

Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.

But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.

Patterns i keep seeing:

Once you get the dopamine hit of having an ai assistant do something in the real world it becomes an hammer you want to use on everything

Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them

Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your liking. Personally it's the most fun I've had using a computer in a long time.

IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.

> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.

I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.

I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.

It's not you being a curmudgeon.

I've heard it described as the first time many non-programmers have been able to make computers "do things" without it being defined by someone else (app interface, developer, etc). It's a hugely empowering development from that perspective.

The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.

Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible.

Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.

You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.

> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade),

I don't want to learn N different SaaS products (nor worry about them changing their TOS, going away, etc).

To be blunt, if OpenClaw were reliable, secure and affordable, lots of SaaS products would simply die. Why spend the time learning all of them when I can just tell the assistant what I want?

> or something simple you could make yourself.

That is OpenClaw at a higher abstraction! Instead of me sitting typing, or babysitting Claude Code, I can just tell OpenClaw what I want and it makes it for me.

(When it works, that is).

It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.

The old dudes had something they called the "Eternal September" like when ISPs began providing free internet access and discussion culture declined after forever. I starred this thread here as the start of the "Eternal March" when the open internet died forever.

> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)

I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect.

> For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.

> But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!

By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it.

That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.

I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc...

I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change.

If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well.

And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....

I agree with the majority of your comment. I haven't yet found a use case to justify running this myself. I did find one use case that impressed me though. There's an OpenClaw agent that's actively answering questions on the #help channel of their Discord server[1]. So I asked it a question as I was getting started. It answered in < 2 mins with a detailed explanation of my issue, how to fix it, and asked relevant questions to guide me. The answer was better than I received from Claude or Gemini. I'm still not sure if I personally need OpenClaw, but the Krill bot offers pretty great support. I would be curious to know what it costs them to provide this.

[1] https://discord.com/invite/clawd

How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator?

I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.

I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

It's the novelty of the technology. You can easily be amazed at the apparent magic of AI. I think this is what most people are using AI for so far. There's lots of "they were so eager to do that they never asked if they should" energy out there. It's also most of what AI can do, so hopefully the amazement wears off soon.

What I find crazy is the sheer amount of access and trust involved in these LLMs. Every time I think about something I might like to do with it, I think about the amount of damage the LLM could do, e.x. even with read only access to my email combined with Internet access, and nope out. It's wild to me anyone trusts these things unsupervised.

This comment could be on its way to http://hackernews.love/

These people with 58 mac mini's have made several competitive products in production right... right?

I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working.

For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if....

These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving

The other thing is the

The life change they are referring to is unemployment and $40,000 worth of Macs.

A lot of it certainly looks like a solution in search of a problem.

When the AI companies run out of money, I predict tokens will stop being dirt cheap and such setups will become extremely expensive (even for regular software engineering to some extent). Then it's become clear how over-engineered most things we do with AI are

You're right that you probably don't need a notification to make coffee, but people are using it to create automations in Home Assistant so that it actually makes coffee for them.

What’s cool with Openclaw is that you only have tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it using the tools it have access to.

It's been utterly bizarre to witness. I've used n8n for years and told everyone who would listen to give it a try, well before LLMs. Same for huginn the open source project.

I just don't get all the hyper either. I think it's because people just create automation workflows by typing them out rather than being in the trenches.

And yet they didn't do that!

Really makes you think about what makes products good

The only useful use cases I've heard about are all about automating using horrible websites with horrible interfaces.

Eg. tell it to book a flight ticket for X without dealing with "modern UX" and 1GB websites

Long running (multi hour) automated tasks with a simple prompt. It’s really simple and addictive.

I dunno I gave mine root in a vps and am having it do security research, it's pretty sweet.

this reads like “I don’t know why people are using instant messengers when you can just do SMS”

Nice Dropbox comment you made there.

It's basically the same as The New York Times Best Seller list

That's really cool.

But wouldn't have been quicker and simpler to add ".bun/" to the pattern of authorized paths the same way it presumably works for ".npm/"?

Apologies if I missed it while skimming your blog post.

But could you estimate the token cost of this? Or were you able to comfortably do this with a subscription plan?

> Who are these people?

For example, someone working in safety and alignment at Meta: https://nitter.net/FakePsyho/status/2025857836014538818

MacOS supports multiple users - I would absolutely sandbox any agent like this and only slowly give it permissions (and never to anything that's critical without compensating controls).

> I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.

You're joking right?

Anthropic giving away Claude if you get 5000 stars doesn't help either

”ruvnet / wifi-densepose” is currently at the top in the moment. Apparently, its a non functional AI slop. Someone tried installing it ago only to find out the full thing was vibe coded and the entire repo is probably just a front to look good on the their resume.

Fwiw, Claude and Codex are very very good at SQL and have actually taught me some new tricks. No reason to use mongodb or firebase in 2026: https://postgresisenough.dev

No, Openai employees are banned by Anthropic from using Claude.

Nobody has the _time_, that's for goddamned sure. The business model sounds very similar to that of Philip Morris International.

I got the full value of my Claude Pro subscription in the first couple few hours of having taking the leap. Hit the message limit and had to edit for reset, but I was already a happy customer given the progress I made on a project that I was trying to recover (couldn't quite figure what was needed to get it ready for real world usable, but Claude Code figured it and it was a good collab getting it there).

Phase one of the self-replicating machine (/s or not I don't know anymore).

Because the damage it causes is not intentional, but instead due to total incompetence.

Great game.

Not with that attitude it can't!

__ but everyone knows about facebook though __

React popularity is also a phenomenon closely tied to popularity of the fb

There is none. It's just a way for coders to feel or be able to say they "work with AI" imo. Same with doing light wrapper coding to do agents stuff. The real AI work is on actual math and ML with the internet scale data, but only four big companies does that and this is the closest regular coders can get.

I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.

It's useful for clearing out Mac inventory before the launch this week.

I don't doubt that there are people using it for legitimate stuff, but I'd wager the vast majority just set it up for the hype and to feel in the "in crowd".

I set it up, and had it do a few things, then decided its too risky after seeing some of the drastic failures it had caused some people.

Sure I understand you can sandbox it and all, but even then I couldn't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to do myself just nor justify the cost to run it.

Wannabe Tony Stark love these gadgets, and there are a lot of them out there. Just look at what tech content is trending on youtube &co these days, we got gangrened by influencers like most other hobbies/lucrative industries

It's useful for producing content about how you're using it.

Here are some of the things I did with it while running locally: - Ask it to perform a scan of your local network and give you advice on output - Tell it to login to various computers and re-boot them (I have a few servers I host and setup openclaw to have a user on them) - Replace web search by asking openclaw

It's neat but the token use is pretty inefficient and security of course is a mess but it's been fun to play with.

I am messing with NanoClaw now and it's pretty much the same but only support Claude (uses code to do everything)

There is a thread from February with more credible use cases from real users. As someone said, it does what everyone expected Siri to do by now.

Separating fools from their money and data

You give it your etrade login and retire early.

Didn't they employ astro-turfing, too

I have a friend who's fond of saying, "GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has."

They are now for this project... should be hidden.

they just need better captchas.

Yes the cynical tropes are getting tired by now, even though I personally agree with most of them.

But suspicions on the legitimacy of the stars seems reasonable, wouldn't you agree? Look at the rate of stars, look at the comments/issues/prs on the repo. It feels safe to assume that most of them are from bots and not organic humans who went out to star a cool project.

A comment on OpenClaw about how useful it is with absolutely no concrete examples?

That's a surprise.

Why should people find an automated, buggy, risky slopworm for script kiddies that relies on an external slop provider who also gets all your data interesting?

This is the lowest, most boring form of programming.

The whole repo must be absolutely swarming with agents, just look at the sheer rate of issues and pull requests. There was 6 new PRs in the last 10 minutes at the time of writing. It's not much of a stretch to assume the stars are also inorganic.

Geniune online user sentiment has died out a long time ago. If you're still basing any opinion or decision on what other "people" voted or commented online, you're easy prey for the algorithmic manipulation machine.

I opened Openclaw on github and was shocked it was already starred. Somehow i did it and can't even remember why or when even though i have a very low opinion of this app.

IIRC openclaw will star the project automatically on setup

They probably used a claw to increase the ranking.

Yeah, the Claws are starring the repo, obviously.

Agents will dominate the internet and open source code in a few years.

Many other projects would have gamed the star-count if it was possible to do at scale without GitHub removing them for fraud as they often do.

By design, with llm agents and all, surely not