Comment by atonse

11 hours ago

Clawdbot is interesting but I finally feel like those people who look at people like me raving about Claude code when it barely works for them.

I have no doubt clawdBot, when it works, must feel great. But I’ve had the tough time setting it up and found it to be very buggy.

My first couple of conversations? It forgot the context literally seconds later when I responded.

Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s improving by the day so I’m going to set it up on my existing Mac mini because I think it has the capacity to be really fascinating.

I built something similar (well… with a lot of integrations) but for running my company and continue to iterate on it.

I’ve been doing Vim + aider, and now Claude Code. Those tools I understood. I never got into Cursor because I’m too old to give up Vim.

Clawd.bot really annoyed me at first. The setup is super tedious and broken and not fun. That’s mostly because I’m too impatient to tinker like I used to.

However, once you tinker, it’s so-so. I don’t think it’s a lot better than Claude Code or anything, but I think it’s just a focused vector for the same AI model, one focused on being your personal assistant. It’s like Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork. They’re the same thing. But given the low cost of creating custom tools, why not give people something that Clawd.bot that gives them focused guardrails?

Anyway, I could end up abandoning all of this too. And it’s all a kludge around things that should really be an API. But I do like that I can run it on my Mac Mini and have it control my desktop. It’ll be a cold day if I let it message for me; I’d rather it write deterministic code that does that, rather than do it directly.

  • Maybe this is the issue I’m facing. I’m already using Claude, Claude projects, Claude cowork, and Claude code a lot.

    I used Claude projects for an entire proposal. That was one of the best proposals I think I’ve ever written.

    I’ve been using cowork to help organize my downloads folder, which had 1500 files and I just didn’t have the patience to organize them.

    So maybe the differences with Claude bought not as big because I’m able to vibe code my way into things like like integrations and other things that I’ve already been using?

    For the app that I wrote to help manage my business, I exposed everything over MCP so I’m able to do things like timesheets and adding and removing people and purchase orders and all that stuff using MCP. So which is why I’m already kind of feeling the magic with my existing stuff maybe?

    The one thing in ClawdBot’s favor is the scheduled stuff maybe?

  • What's up with aider? Did it get abandoned?

    What models do you have driving now?

    I've stepped away for a while and I haven't tried claude code yet

    • Aider isn't abandoned, but it feels like it's basically in maintenance mode at this point. Updates over the last year were limited to small improvements and fixes. There are some forks aimed at making it more "agentic" (more like Claude Code, etc). I haven't tried them personally.

I cloned the clawdbot repo back when it was named warelay or clawdis, can't remember, but it was much less dense then. Mainly cloned it for the in-the-box Whatsapp implementation. Since then I've built it into a pretty awesome agent for my home and family, who all have their own privileged access which allows it access to different skills and a mixture of shared and personal information. I have no interest in reconciling the Frankenstein I've built with newer mainline features, but the custom nature of my build is one of the things I find so fun and helpful about it. It's become so much more "mine" by just asking it to build out xyz feature for itself, and now it can do a bunch of weird things that revolve around its persistent access to the information I provide it and my ability to interface with it through a regular messaging app.

What model did you use?

At work tasks that Sonnet 4 and 4.5 failed miserably, Opus 4.5 can basically one shot them. I imagine it will be the same here.

  • I see opus for everything in general cuz I’m a Max user but I’ll double check.