Comment by ramathornn

6 days ago

Congrats to Peter!

Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?

I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?

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ramathornn

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cactus2093  6 days ago

It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.

Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.

So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.

phamilton  6 days ago

As an experiment, I set it up with a z.ai $3/month subscription and told it to do a tedious technical task. I said to stay busy and that I expect no more than 30 minutes of inactivity, ever.

The task is to decompile Wave Race 64 and integrate with libultraship and eventually produce a runnable native port of the game. (Same approach as the Zelda OoT port Ship of Harkinian).

It set up a timer ever 30 minutes to check in on itself and see if it gave up. It reviews progress every 4 hours and revisits prioritization. I hadn't checked on it in days and when I looked today it was still going, a few functions at a time.

It set up those times itself and creates new ones as needed.

It's not any one particular thing that is novel, but it's just more independent because of all the little bits.

  • hobofan  5 days ago

    So, you don't know if it has produced anything valuable yet?

    • beaker52  5 days ago

      It's the same story with these people running 12 parallel agents that automatically implement issues managed in Linear by an AI product team that has conducted automated market and user research.

      Instead of making things, people are making things that appear busy making things. And as you point out, "but to what end?" is a really important question, often unanswered.

      "It's the future, you're going to be left behind", is a common cry. The trouble is, I'm not sure I've seen anything compelling come back from that direction yet, so I'm not sure I've really been left behind at all. I'm quite happy standing where I am.

      And the moment I do see something compelling come from that direction, I'll be sure to catch up, using the energy I haven't spent beating down the brush. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on the other directions too.

      1 reply →

    • decidu0us9034  5 days ago

      Yeah I'm not sure I understand what the goal here is. Ship of Harkinian is a rewrite not just a decompilation. As a human reverse engineer I've gotten a lot of false positives.This seems like one of those areas where hallucinations could be really insidious and hard to identify, especially for a non-expert. I've found MCP to be helpful with a lot of drudgery, but I think you would have to review the llm output, do extensive debugging/dynamic analysis, triage all potential false positives, before attempting to embark on a rewrite based on decompiled assembly... I think OoT took a team of experts collectively thousands of person-hours to fully document, it seems a bit too hopeful to want that and a rewrite just from being pushy to an agent...

      1 reply →

    • phamilton  4 days ago

      Not yet. But what's the actual goal here? It's not to have a native Wave Race 64. It's to improve my intuition around what sort of tasks can be worked on 24/7 without supervision.

      I have a hypothesis that I can verify the result against the original ROM. With that as the goal, I believe the agent can continue to grind on the problem until it passes that verification. I've seen it in that of other areas, but this is something larger and more tedious and I wanted to see how far it could go.

  • hirako2000  5 days ago

    $3 z.ai subscription? Sounds like it already burned $3k

    I find those toys in perfect alignment with what LLM provider thrive for. Widespread token consumption explosion to demonstrate investors: see, we told you we were right to invest, let's open other giga factories.

    • phamilton  4 days ago

      It's using about 100M input tokens a day on glm 4.7 (glm 5 isn't available on my plan). It's sticking pretty close to the throttling limits that reset every 5 hours.

      100M input tokens is $40 and anywhere from 2-6 kWh.

      Certainly excessive for my $3/month.

jdgoesmarching  6 days ago

Not being tied to Anthropic’s models and ecosystems, having more control over the agent, interacting with it from you messaging app of choice.

aydyn  6 days ago

There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.

They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.

I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.

  • wiseowise  5 days ago

    > Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is it’s sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.

    > They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.

    Jesus Christ, the borderline idiotic are now downgraded to deranged. US government needs to redirect stargate’s 500B to mental institutions asap.

  • esafak  6 days ago

    Imagine putting it in a robot with arms and legs, and letting it loose in your house, or your neighborhood. Oh, the possibilities!