Comment by SunshineTheCat
5 days ago
I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it.
Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time.
I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.
Could this be a bit of a Dropbox moment?
What it adds is making this kind of thing easy for normies, even if it's neither the best way to do things nor very difficult for hobbyists to do using existing tech.
Maybe it's the wrong approach, maybe what people really want is more deterministic software that they use agents to help write. But this kind of thing can maybe serve as a prototyping phase for that. Perhaps in the future, people's assistants will offer to "solidify" frequently used workflows into software that minimizes or eliminates the LLM's role. For existing Claude Code users, its like "please just skip to that step! its cheaper and more secure and more reliable". But to many people who are interested in automation, perhaps that seems out of reach as a first step.
That's actually the best hypothesis I've heard to date.
My immediate reaction to anything someone says they're using OpenClaw for is "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing, which would be better in every possible way."
My approach to automation projects is just about the polar opposite of something like OpenClaw. How can I take this messy real-world thing and turn it into structured data? How can I build an API for the thing that doesn't have one? How can I define rules and configuration in a way that I can understand more about how something is working instead of less? How can I build a dashboard or other interface so I can see exactly the information I want to see instead of having to read a bunch of text?
It wasn't really until people started building things with coding assistants that I even saw the value in LLMs, because I realized they could speed up the rate at which I can build tools for my team to get things OUT of chat and INTO structured data with clean interfaces and deterministic behavior.
> "That's great, but it would have taken the same amount of effort to ask your LLM to write a script to do the same thing
As a no-longer-Claw-user, hard disagree. The convenience is being able to ask it to do something while I'm grocery shopping and have it automatically test it etc. Sure, I can set up Claude Code or some other tool similarly, but the majority of us aren't going to take the time to set it up to do what OpenClaw does out of the box.
I had OpenClaw do a lot of stuff for me in the 2-3 weeks I used it than I have with pi/Claude since I stopped using it.
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This is a good description of the role of software engineer in the age of LLMs.
Most people still don’t think this way and need a software person to know enough about these things to describe them to the LLM.
No, Dropbox had a defined use case and solved a particular problem.
I was a fan of Dropbox when it game out because of that fact.
OpenClaw does not serve a particular problem. When/if it does, I will happily use it.
But no, the two couldn't be more different. You'll notice, yet again, in your very message you failed to mention one specific use case of OpenClaw.
If you asked me the same about dropbox when it first came out, I would've said, duh it helps me keep my files synced between devices.
There is no such thing with OpenClaw.
It gives me a pleasant interface to talk to my desktop from my phone. I can just send my computer a discord message and have it execute some arbitrarily complex task for me.
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Are these people crypto enthusiasts by any chance?
They were, and then blockchain, and then NFT.
Fair question. The niche I keep running into is jobs that cross a few apps (Gmail, Calendar, GitHub, a DB) and need to run on a schedule. Any one tool handles a piece, but stitching them together end to end is the chore. Built atmita.com for that. Cloud hosted, managed OAuth, jobs described in plain English. Not based on OpenClaw, built from scratch.
> I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is
People? Or bots.
We're using OpenClaw to do a massive number of fixes and improvements to our ERP.
It takes Jira tickets, resolves them, and creates a GitHub PR, which is then reviewed by another AI agent. It can even analyse screenshots with MS Paint-style arrows.
So far it's been an amazing tool - I am very impressed.
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Folks just pretending to be “influencers” and trying to cash in on the next big thing.
I see a lot of the same. I do know a couple people who do use it and I asked their take and it was kind of "meh".
I'm letting it mature a little before dipping my toe in. I've seem some horror stories, like it deleting repos, system files, and whatnot.
That's pretty much where I'm at with it.
I think once I see someone post a use case that I could actually see saving me some serious time, I'll take the plunge. Until then, I'll just let people continue to say how great (or terrible) it is.