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

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), or something simple you could make yourself.

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 fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)

> 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.

> 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'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.

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.

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.

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'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.

I'll give you my very personal take on the OpenClaw surge and how I find it extremely useful.

I'm currently in founder mode and building two projects in Mexico. Finding the right real estate is in the critical path for success of the project. It's really hard to find quality real estate agents or brokers here and not because they don't exist. We have thousands they just never follow up with you or give you any updates. So, I'm using OpenClaw as my real estate agent that uses WhatsApp as a communications channel and manages the entire pipeline of first contact to scheduling a visit.

Right now, I feed it images of postings that I see on the street and OpenClaw handles everything else.

It really depends on where your personal or professional bottlenecks are and if you're running a business this project is absolutely amazing.

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

> 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).

the main difference between openclaw and the traditional approach to promoting LLMs is that it can run asynchronously and prompt you, the human, when something happens

I built clawr.ing so my agent can call me on the phone for urgent things like emails I’m waiting for or issues in production for any of my products

openclaw while cool just allowed a larger tranche of technophiles who didn't necessarily have all the skills/understanding or time to do a bunch of things that have been readily available for like over 1.5 years. There is value in that, but there is huge surge in the number of people who are even able to take advantage of the novelty. Reminds me of when hugging face came out with transformers and all of a sudden you no longer needed to wrestle with anaconda and order of installation for all the deps.

Everyone is using OpenClaw for personal productivity, but you're right. Not much value, as you can get that from existing products.

The market will eventually realize the business case for an OpenClaw-like product, and I'm waiting to ride its coattails!

https://github.com/rush86999/atom

I'm a skeptic myself and a long-time developer. But I do have to admit there's a nugget of truth in the Claws.

I installed picoclaw on a whim (or nano? can't remember).

In maybe 15 minutes I had it make a "get weather for this specific area using the met.no API" skill and "check the train tables at these two stops for this specific line" skill.

Then I could just say "I go to the office every Monday on a train that leaves at 8, notify me if the weather is bad or there are delays in the train schedules"

And it just worked.

The "make a skill" bit was optional, it could've figured out both on its own, but I've been doing this for a while and figured out it's a lot more (token) efficient to have it specifically know how to do the things I want it to do.

---

Now lets take this loop and think about the system and what it could do.

Even if I wasn't a programmer and just went with "tell me when the train line I use for my commute is late" the system itself could see that "hmm, this looks like a thing I'll be doing often" and create a script/skill/plugin to do that via an official API (or WebMCP in the future).

You can't do that with Zapier or N8N.

There are many cool ways a pure LLM-powered system like that can be optimised, and more importantly, can be taught to self-optimise. By default I think the systems use the "main" model to read the HEARTBEAT.md file, which is stupid expensive. That could be done with a local model small enough to run on a modern phone.

And if that small local model says "yep, there's something to do", then it can either give the full task to a LLM or if it's smart enough it can spread specific tasks to small or medium local models first.

tl;dr OpenClaw is what Siri should've been after that epic fail of a Apple Keynote.

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.

my friend just created a bot with OpenClaw to go through Linkedin messaging possible hiring companies. He had 6 interviews scheduled the first day. that's the only use case I heard so far that was compelling. Im not a dev, but pretty sure you could do that with other tools too.

when the internet started you were sending "funny" messages on ICQ, sharing mp3s with your friends, browsing weird websites on geocities, maybe ordered a book on amazon that you could have gotten down the street much faster.

all the things I do with openclaw are in that ballpark of usefulness/importance.

> But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product,

reminds me of those "zune already does everything ipod does" posts.

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.

Normal people use speakers to listen to music. "Audiophiles" use music to listen to their speakers.

This applies to *clawphiles just as accurately.

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.

I agree in part with the hype train thesis, but what I hear is that open claw is better at solving problems and people love the interaction pattern - that may not be any new invention but it is what will mean we go from having Claude Desktop use mainly by engineers to something used by many. This will not be the final iteration of it, but it seems to be the direction of this to come

It’s really not rocket science.

Like other people have said people are having fun with their computers; that’s why it’s popular. That’s also why a bunch of people on forums throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t understand it. Why don’t they see that there shouldn’t be any fun whatsoever?” is not really a deterrent at all.

It’s also why it doesn’t matter that the categories of tasks they are doing can also be done with a whole set of tools that are no fun to use.

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

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

Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet.

I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM.

1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics — and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens.

1b. It also sends this to my TRMNL e-ink display.

1c. It can also add and edit calendar invites, so if I want to move my yoga I can just tell it to move it to whenever the next yoga class is at (it knows what studio I go to and figures it out)

2. It has a skill I built that acts as a second brain for knowledge. I can send it Fitness Youtubes, parenting/health research papers, podcasts — and it organizes, summarizes and saves it in a logical file structure. Then in the future I can access these. It's like bookmarks on steroids. I love it for 1-2hour YouTube videos where I want summaries. It also pulls out any books any artifacts mentions and generates me a rolling reading list. https://plc.vc/npw

3. It has its own email address — and read access to my personal email — so friends can email it to schedule things like evening video game sessions. Similarly, if I get an urgent looking email it'll provide it in #1. I don't check my personal email aside from via OpenClaw.

4. It has read/write access to my GitHub, and each project repo I have has a well defined Claude structure, so it can make changes, commit the branches to Fly.IO and send me domains to test things. I love it for esoteric tweaks to my blog.

5. It has access to my Apple Reminders so I can message it things like "remind me to buy more muffins" and it has context to know to add those muffins to my Costco grocery list not Trader Joes.

6. It runs a headless browser, so when my hyper local weather service (Bouldercast) sends a summary that has more detail behind a login, it can open the email, click the link, login with my credentials, summarize the forecast, and send it to me.

7. It drafts blog posts for what it did for me each week. It's fun! https://plc.vc/d5t

I am a previous Zapier power user. I have used their LLMs, databases and Zaps extensively for the past decade. I understand the scorn towards AI, and I understand that if you look at this list you might think that it's either trivial tasks and/or things that could be done with Zapier, but I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup.

Similarly, I love that I can on the fly improve this assistant — last night I told it "I want to extend our Knowledge skill so that you can subscribe to RSS feeds and summarize articles in my knowledge base and also deliver interesting content in my daily summaries. Update the knowledge skill and our tasks to do all this."

It one shotted that, simply asking me to provide the first RSS feed I wanted to subscribe to.

It's genuinely like having a human assistant that happens to be an expert coder/technologist on call 247 that works at the near speed of light.

It disappoints me that technologists are so skeptical of this technology rather than exploring what it is and why it might be different to what exists today. It's fun! thats the takeaway: it's FUN.

And yet they didn't do that!

Really makes you think about what makes products good

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

> 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), or something simple you could make yourself.

What are you talking about? In openclaw you literally type out basic English instructions to an agent. This isn’t painstakingly setting up chron jobs and writing scripts.

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.