Could this be a bit of a Dropbox moment?

What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies, even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech.

Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in the future, people's assistants will offer to "solidify" frequently used workflows into software that minimizes or eliminates the LLM's role. For existing Claude Code users, its like "please just skip to that step! its cheaper and more secure and more reliable". But to many people who are interested in automation, perhaps that seems out of reach as a first step.

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anticorporate 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's actually the best hypothesis I've heard to date.

My immediate reaction to anything someone says they're using OpenClaw for is "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing, which would be better in every possible way."

My approach to automation projects is just about the polar opposite of something like OpenClaw. How can I take this messy real-world thing and turn it into structured data? How can I build an API for the thing that doesn't have one? How can I define rules and configuration in a way that I can understand more about how something is working instead of less? How can I build a dashboard or other interface so I can see exactly the information I want to see instead of having to read a bunch of text?

It wasn't really until people started building things with coding assistants that I even saw the value in LLMs, because I realized they could speed up the rate at which I can build tools for my team to get things OUT of chat and INTO structured data with clean interfaces and deterministic behavior.

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BeetleB 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing

As a no-longer-Claw-user, hard disagree. The convenience is being able to ask it to do something while I'm grocery shopping and have it automatically test it etc. Sure, I can set up Claude Code or some other tool similarly, but the majority of us aren't going to take the time to set it up to do what OpenClaw does out of the box.

I had OpenClaw do a lot of stuff for me in the 2-3 weeks I used it than I have with pi/Claude since I stopped using it.

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girvo 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Genuine question, why did you stop using it!

Edit: ah, scrolled down where you answered, thanks

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jimbokun 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Such as?

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BeetleB 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Lots of simple one offs. Stuff like "Here's the URL for a forum thread that has 10 pages of messages. Go through all of them and tell me if information X is in there." Or "Here is the site to after school activities. Check it once a day and notify me if there is anything that begins in March."

Also, got it to give me the weather information I always want - I've not found a weather app that does it and would always have to go to a site and click, click, click.

I can add TODOs to my todo list that's sitting on my home PC (I don't have todos on the cloud or phone).

All of these can be vibe coded, but each one would take more effort than just telling OpenClaw to do it.

	▲	anticorporate 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		These are actually really great examples, because I've done several similar things with a more code-based deterministic approach, still utilizing an LLM. I also have a number of sites that I query regularly with LLMs, but I use a combination of RSS and crawlers to pull the info into a RAG and query that, and have found the built-in agent loops in my LLM to be sufficient for one-offs. I also hate most weather apps, so I have a weather section on my Home Assistant dashboard that pulls exactly what I want from the sources I want that my LLM helped me configure. I also have my main todo list hosted on a computer at home, but since all of my machines including my phone are on the same virtual wireguard network, I use my editor of choice to read and write todos on any device I use as if it were a local file, and again, it's something my local LLM has access to for context. I don't think either approach is wrong, but I much prefer being able to have something to debug if it doesn't behave the way I expect it to. And maybe part of the reason I'm skeptical of the hype is that a lot of the parts of this setup aren't novel to me: I had crawlers and RSS readers and a weather dashboard and private access to a well-organized filesystem across devices before LLMs were a thing - the only difference now is that I'm asking a machine to help me configure it instead of relying on a mix of documentation, example code, and obscure Reddit posts.

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jimbokun 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a good description of the role of software engineer in the age of LLMs.

Most people still don’t think this way and need a software person to know enough about these things to describe them to the LLM.

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SunshineTheCat 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, Dropbox had a defined use case and solved a particular problem.

I was a fan of Dropbox when it game out because of that fact.

OpenClaw does not serve a particular problem. When/if it does, I will happily use it.

But no, the two couldn't be more different. You'll notice, yet again, in your very message you failed to mention one specific use case of OpenClaw.

If you asked me the same about dropbox when it first came out, I would've said, duh it helps me keep my files synced between devices.

There is no such thing with OpenClaw.

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Jtarii 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It gives me a pleasant interface to talk to my desktop from my phone. I can just send my computer a discord message and have it execute some arbitrarily complex task for me.

	▲	dplgk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The question is what wonderful task do you need to trigger while you're at the grocery store?