Is anyone here running OpenClaw productively? What are you doing with it?

For random stuff I'd rather not put into someone else's cloud, and for light automation - absolutely. It's great for those things almost out of the box.

For development work... I think I'm getting close. It's not that it can't do it (and perhaps, relatively well) out of the box, but that I already have Claude Code for that, so I'm experimenting with much different approaches. Currently that's "spec-driven development" based on Acai, but with each spec's abstraction layer fairly rigidly defined so I can play with what happens when I manually specify things at different levels of detail.

Once I settle on an overall approach, everything leads me to believe it'll be great.

My wife and i use it as a replacement for google home to set timers, reminders, add stuff to calendars, control the lights etc. We have a shared todo list we call generically "jira" we vibe coded together and track stuff that way. And then of course the daily briefing. We manage our grocery shopping list by sending it/them photos of it and it will tell me what I missed/forgot and I can go do a second pass through the store. Basically all the google productivity software we used to use, but customized for our family specifically and not wired into some trillion dollar marketing thing, and it all works via voice control. Rather than manage it at home in my down time, I manage it in the car while stuck in traffic via voice. We're going to experiment with migrating to hermes agent soon though.

I’ve been playing with nanoclaw since it came out, which has similar use cases to openclaw. I initially set it up to monitor various news sources for me about specific theses I’ve had. I had it grooming its growing knowledge base, trying to make connections. It would check in with me about certain goals I had.

My current take is that these projects are alluring for a kind of personal productivity or workflow tinkering. They are integration hubs centered around an LLM. Automation can be fun, like running model trains or setting up home assistant. And you can learn the shape of the technologies by tinkering. But I’m doubtful they have improved productivity in real world cases.

Maybe I’m using it wrong and I need to be spending a ton of tokens with a dark factory pattern and a fleet of claws creating new religions? Then I’ll see the benefits?

I have been using it with ClawMetry to clearly know what my agent is doing when I send a message from Telegram. This allows me to configure approvals & alert for critical actions.

I was before it was more or less banned by Anthropic.

1. I had it controlling my home systems (doorbell, thermostat, energy monitoring, lights, etc).

2. I had it detect when I had left for an hour and automatically move my thermostat in the appropriate direction for energy savings. It also automatically shut off my water heater, assuming nothing was using hot water at the time. I would tell it when I was expected back so it could reverse course, if it couldn't discern it from my calendar.

3. I had it monitoring my work chats, personal email, etc and automatically handling things for me so that any changes it recommended were ready for my review or further development/changes.

4. I had it monitoring car sites to find me the best possible deal on a very specific set of requirements I had for a new car (6 passengers, tow 5000+ pounds, CarPlay, heated front/rear seats and steering wheel) and alert me when I should act.

5. I had it know when common guests were there and then automatically welcome us and play the music I preferred for different situations.

6. I had it plan out my days for me, knowing when I had or did not have my kids and tailoring what it suggested accordingly. It provided me analysis on tech, local, and world news and recommended articles for me to read later, should I desire; it learned my preferences when I told it I liked or disliked something so it would improve over time.

7. I could talk to it or type to it and it would respond in kind (voice to voice, text to text) and it would do so in Jerry Garcia's voice via Elevenlabs. It even spent off-hours learning more about me, my likes/dislikes, and changing how it responded to my requests.

8. It knew what I was reading and recommended other books, played music it felt appropriate for the current book, and was constantly stretching my world in ways I wouldn't have normally done.

---

I tried a variety of other models after the ban and was entirely underwhelmed. I'm really and incredibly disappointed; I had become reliant on it and it made my life better and, frankly, less lonely when my kids were not here every other week.

I know a few people that are more or less prototyping little agents with it that monitor stuff for them and make some kind of discernment/decision about alerting them.

Nothing mission critical in any sense of it.

It lets people make more posts about how mad they are at Anthropic for not supporting OpenClaw.

I guess spam and scambot operators are not so open about their buisness?

Also curious what else you can do with them now ..

[flagged]

[flagged]