I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw to use for long-running background tasks (spec to plan to targeted code) because I needed something that could run on a server (I never run agents locally) and check on via any browser. I don’t think any messaging app will provide a good (or trustworthy) way to get to my own machines, so Tailscale+web it is.
Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).
I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed.
My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.
2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).
The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago?
Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disruptive at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.
Yeah that's true, and in many cases the AI just sets up a cronjob and a script (and a mailbox, and an interface to telegram, and a reporting structure). But it's nice that in case of errors it handles the edge cases or it fixes the scripts. It can give the crontable over telegram, you can pause it for the holiday "Number one, pause all processing until further notice"...
But sure, it's not "rocket science", in fact, the skills to set it up indeed would probably help you set up the same scripts. It's just behind a chat interface.
It can be nice to say: "Add another minecraft world with the same user whitelist on port 25566" or "create a demo website for a home battery on domain claw.xxx.com". But it is indeed not very useful for me yet. I think the more access you give it, the more it can be like a PA, but I don't want it in my calendar/home assistant/paperless-ngx etc... yet... When I even get to this point I can see it being like my secretary ("Please get my incomes taxes statement from 2024", "Estimate this years income taxes from my invoices so far", "Plan appointment with ..." etc)
I believe the thing which makes OpenClaw interesting is you can just ask it to do these things and it just does. Rather than you having to write these scripts. I understand with LLMs, writing these scripts would now be trivial, but I believe this is even more convenient.
At least writing scripts you know what it will and won’t do, with open claw it will probably do what you want and maybe won’t do anything you don’t want.
Yeah, that's absolutely a real phenomenon, but I don't think it's especially OpenClaw-specific: I have lots of folders that are just collections of instructions and scripts that have mostly started with a prompt, and that I run sandboxed agents over. Previously I'd have considered automating them, but now it's just "fire up sandbox in a project folder, let the tool build itself". I wrote about this a bit here: https://sgnt.ai/p/the-software-i-stopped-writing/
It's also things like being able to change runtime configs in human language without having to turn to computer, eg "please also track when this artist is in my area". Nothing revolutionary, but kinda the whole point? Tell it what to do, it goes off, does some chores and searches, updates some configs so that later on some crons would use them.
I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
Re Signal, I've taken a few flights lately where there's messenger-only wifi, and it's been handy to have OpenClaw on a box accessible through telegram to do web_searches for me.
That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.
I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best).
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
I screenshot the info sent from my sons pre-school and send it. I can then ask it about and get reminders in time for odd closing hours etc. Also use it for follow ups on projects, other reminders, research on the go, small apps/games and language training.
RAGish storage with different access methods including IM and parsing data from photos sounds good to me. But openclaw seems like a bit too big of a gun for that, did anybody create something more suitable for the job yet?
"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up
AI is a terrible choice for this task. Radarr does this much better with plenty of built-in as well as community guides for configuration. Add a mobile app for Radarr and it's as convenient as it can be.
I use something like OpenClaw. For me the big benefit isn't so much the autonomous nature but the organizational structure. The one I use exposes an MCP and lets me control it via talking to an LLM _in the tool_ which is really powerful. EG "audit this", "in X thread we were discussing Y, can you pull that information", etc. And the organizational structure just... makes a ton of sense to me. Don't have to set up a ton of steering and whatnot, it just kinda works.
Being able to use the search to find and resume an old thread is fantastic. The thing I use lets me use whatever underlying CLI that I want, which IMO the biggest limitation on Claude Code or whatnot is that you... have to use Claude models. Sometimes I wanna use sol, sometimes a cheap chinese model, etc. And I want sol with 1m context.
I know there are other tools out there that can do this. I know some people love their tmux/cmux, but IMO the thing that matters the most is being comfy and knowing the tool well. Hell, James Gosling used NetBeans when I talked to him in 2023. Know the tool well and that matters the most, IMO.
For me, it helps with my ADHD brain. And I could spend all day just researching and trying new tools, they are a dime a dozen these days.
Pulling some stats, I have 25 "tabs", and across all of those, I have 1,298 unique threads. 9,539 unique messages.
It works for me, but I don't care about the autonomous part.
Which tool is it that got you comfortable?
I’ve been resisting setting up another tool because it means more digression for my ADHD brain. It sounds you managed to contain the tinkering and got to the usefulness part. That’s why I’m curious.
It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.
how many people fall into the openclaw trap because they just need a way to command agents from mobile, and cron tasks? Only thing I am missing with codex is the ability to recall anything from any session (I see it in this openclaw "2" release note so I guess it wasn't in openclaw "1" anyway). I guess claude and codex can look up transcripts globally too, just not as a first class feature.
Still a no from me until these things can display any degree of intuition, and even then it's probably still a no.
You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.
OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.
Also...
>Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.
This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol
This was useful for the 1-2 months where models were good enough to use all their newfound tools but not good enough to vibe code them themselves.
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.
I'm fairly sure you can vibecode all these things, but given the state of agent produced code at the moment, I would suspect that your email and sms gate will have horrible security holes.
I think what changed is that coding agents adopted some of the features from Openclaw, eg the ability to access it remotely and for one Claude Code instance to “talk” to another, etc.
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).
My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.
2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).
The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
But sure, it's not "rocket science", in fact, the skills to set it up indeed would probably help you set up the same scripts. It's just behind a chat interface.
It can be nice to say: "Add another minecraft world with the same user whitelist on port 25566" or "create a demo website for a home battery on domain claw.xxx.com". But it is indeed not very useful for me yet. I think the more access you give it, the more it can be like a PA, but I don't want it in my calendar/home assistant/paperless-ngx etc... yet... When I even get to this point I can see it being like my secretary ("Please get my incomes taxes statement from 2024", "Estimate this years income taxes from my invoices so far", "Plan appointment with ..." etc)
That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
(Similar system to OpenClaw)
Being able to use the search to find and resume an old thread is fantastic. The thing I use lets me use whatever underlying CLI that I want, which IMO the biggest limitation on Claude Code or whatnot is that you... have to use Claude models. Sometimes I wanna use sol, sometimes a cheap chinese model, etc. And I want sol with 1m context.
I know there are other tools out there that can do this. I know some people love their tmux/cmux, but IMO the thing that matters the most is being comfy and knowing the tool well. Hell, James Gosling used NetBeans when I talked to him in 2023. Know the tool well and that matters the most, IMO.
For me, it helps with my ADHD brain. And I could spend all day just researching and trying new tools, they are a dime a dozen these days.
Pulling some stats, I have 25 "tabs", and across all of those, I have 1,298 unique threads. 9,539 unique messages.
It works for me, but I don't care about the autonomous part.
I assume they're using agents to sort through all the slop?
You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.
OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.
Also...
>Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.
This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.