I wrote my own OpenClaw one weekend and I am running it as my assistant through Matrix with DeepSeek v4 Flash (and Qwen). It probably costs me about 2 dollars a month and is even more useful than ChatGPT would be due to me having full control on what tools it has access to.

I can do things like take a photo of a doctor's note among add the appointment to my calendar, send a PDF to my archive tagged, OCR'd etc, search info from internet, look data from Google Maps.

I can even integrate this to home assistant and talk to my agent with my open source Alexa-like system.

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arjie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Haha! Love to hear it. That's exactly what I have too: a claw-like[0] system which I originally used Sonnet for and now use my DeepSeek v4 Flash with.

In my case, I was foolish enough to run it all on my hardware which is pretty damned fast but has a duty cycle of 5% and runs idle most of the time. It's definitely better done via API.

Tell me more about the Alexa-like system! I have mine at home on a custom OpenWakeWord model trained on the word 'Aurora'. And I, too, have it hooked up to Home Assistant. I have a bunch of Eufy E21 baby cameras mounted on the walls[1] so it has vision through the house. The vision model uses GPT-5.5 on the subscription because I haven't yet set up a Qwen or Gemma multimodal that can see.

With Frigate on my home server I can even watch for events like my daughter waking up! And at night the agent sends out the vacuum if we've cleared the floor of baby toys. I feel this close to the dream of sci-fi AI. Because I auto-forward a bunch of my email to it etc. it knows about what's going on with me.

My wife will sometimes ask the agent information about me etc. and it's way easier to get a fast response rather than waiting for me to see the message etc.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538158

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo...

2: https://imgur.com/a/tP12lfj

	▲	Gigachad 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Privacy is the main benefit of running it yourself. Sending all of your personal info to random providers on openrouter would worry me. I don't mind it for code but if it's connected to my calendar and personal data, I want it running on my machine. I can't wait until good enough models can run on affordable hardware.

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mayank an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Oddly enough, I did the exact same thing this past weekend, for a couple hundred usd in Fable overage.

It was truly remarkably easy to build and package it exactly to my whims, in my case as a single docker container with a process reaper that runs llama, my Go code, tts, chat harness, browser in xvfb, and even a mailer daemon. With Gemma, it even runs on a RPi 5.

What’s absolutely wild to me is that over a couple hours, I could probably have it import parts of Home Assistant for my devices directly, and do other wacky stuff in what is essentially software for one.