Comment by jarboot

I spun up an Debian stable ec2 vm (using an agent + aws cli + aws-vault of course) to host openclaw, giving it full root access, and I talk to it on discord.

It's a little slow sometimes, but it's the first time I've felt like I have an independent agent that can handle things kind of.

The only two things I did were 1. Ask it to create a Monero address so I could send it money, and have it notify me whenever money is sent to that address. It spun up its own monerod daemon which was really heavy and it ran out of space. So I had to get it to use the Monero wallet instead, but had to manually intervene to shut down the monerod daemon and kill the process and restart openclaw. In the end it worked and still works. 2. I simply asked it "@ me the the silver price every day around 8am ET" and it just figured out how to do it and schedule it. To my understanding it has its own cron functionality using a json file. 3. Write and host some python scripts I can ping externally to send me a notification

I've had it done other misc stuff, but ChatGPT is almost always better for queries, and coding agents + Zed is much better for coding. But with a cheap enough vm and using openrouter plus glm 4.7 or flash, it can do some quirky fun stuff. I see the advantage as mainly having control of a system where it can have long term state (like files, processes, etc) and manage context itself. It is more like glue and it's full mastery and control of a Linux system gives it a lot of flexibility.

Think of it more as agent+os which you aren't getting with raw Claude or ChatGPT.

I've done nothing that interesting with it, it's absolutely a security nightmare, but it's really fun!