I genuinely don't understand OpenClaw

It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?

Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?

▲ threecheese an hour ago | parent | next [-]

First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.

Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.

Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.

That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.

▲ lucrbvi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.

But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version

	▲	joe_mamba 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>but people using it are mostly non-technicals Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called. If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.

▲ bmurphy1976 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You forgot the part where you give it unfiltered access to everything.

(Not that I endorse that. I find peoope doing such wildly irresponsible.)

▲ criddell 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here you are giving away billion dollar ideas.

	▲	kaizenb 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ツ

▲ jacobra2 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IMO OpenClaw's innovation is in

1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now

2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties

	▲	gavinray 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		`> accessibility to non-technical folks.` When I read the setup docs, it required configuring a bunch of API keys in setting files though?

▲ tavavex an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?