Comment by mjsweet
5 days ago
I’m a professional maintenance gardener and I have used NanoClaw running on my Mac to do the following:
Schedule jobs on my job management tool (I vibed it) using a custom MCP. I’ll ask it questions like “what jobs are on today” etc. start the job, complete the job etc.
It will watch Gmail using a MCP for work orders from local real estate agents, where it will schedule quote visits.
After the quote visit I add the photos to telegram (the channel I happen to use) where I then ask it to analyse the photos.
Claude in NanoClaw does a good job of figuring out what needs to be done, but it doesn’t always get it quite right, so I use intake-api which is a “session inbox” [1] that generates a form and uploads it to Cloudflare along with the images and puts a link to the form in the chat so I can make adjustments to the annotated images of the property. After I’m happy, I click submit.
I’ll then go back to the telegram channel and let it know I have submitted the form. Claude will then pull the JSON payload back down into the session and integrate it into the quote.
It will ask me questions about what the job will cost etc, and anything else it thinks it needs to know.
It will then generate a full PDF proposal using Latex between 14 and 32 pages long depending on how many photos were taken.
There are sections with terms and conditions as well as a bit of sales guff etc. as well as quite a nice cover page with their contact details and mine etc.
When I’m happy I’ll ask it to create a draft email in Gmail with the attached pdf proposal.
I’ll review it quickly and then send it.
I also have the Xero MCP setup so I can ask it to create invoices and contacts etc.
I do all of this when getting in and out of my truck.
It’s freed up my home life to spend more time with my children and my Mrs.
There is alot of scope for small business owners who need these sorts of agentic assistant tasks and with my Agentic CRM I’m see a glimpse of the future for guys like me I think.
Intake API:
I think it's great that you were able to build all of that! It sounds very useful. I'd recommend asking Claude Code to evaluate your entire setup and try to identify areas where a script running on a schedule could replace parts of this framework. You could probably get 90% of it from simple repeatable scripts which would let you save more tokens for things that actually need LLM "intelligence". But if you're happy with the ROI then it seems to be working quite well for you!
I actually have a /loop running scheduled tasks like syncing customer data from routeboard (my job scheduler) and a flat file (MD and JSON) agentic CRM I have created that keeps tabs on the status of all the jobs, invoicing etc. This happens at 2am every day.
The great things about NanoClaw is that its actually Claude running in an Apple Container on my Mac. I gave up on OpenClaw fairly quickly because it seems like the biggest security regression ever created in the history of human kind.
I have a Max 5x plan and it'm very happy to pay the money TBH, considering that proposals take only 20 minutes to build, and my conversion rate is quite high.
When I send them for the first time to a new real estate agent they love them because it's easier for them to "sell" my service to their client.
Just be careful. By all accounts I don't believe that the subscription plans cover 3rd party harness support. You may be at risk of all of this being shut down. That's one of the reasons I haven't explored other harnesses. The main one being, I can accomplish everything they can from within CC with some extra steps I know how to do compliant with a CC Max Plan Terms of Service.
3 replies →
You're exactly the small-business-owner use case most OpenClaw/NanoClaw tutorials skip over. Built something close at atmita.com, cloud-hosted so there's no Mac running the whole time, and it can hit Gmail, Telegram, Xero, or any API with managed OAuth rather than wiring up each MCP yourself. Not based on OpenClaw, built from scratch. Won't generate 32-page Latex proposals out of the box though, that's a serious setup you've got.
Keep going with this hey? I think that as an old power user and an AI hawk I have managed to cobble together all the bits and bobs to make it work for me. But the next major move is an agentic computer that does all this stuff out of the box and really lowers the bar of entry for business owners... which looks like what you are doing. I would love to just chat with my agentic box all day long with my AirPods Pro... that would be amazing.
Did you transition from dev to gardener? If so, I’d be curious about your story.
I was in IT for 30 years when I transitioned two years ago to gardening. It's the best decision I have made for my mental, physical and spiritual health. I had been accused of being a programmer for many years and even convinced myself a few times. Funnily enough, it's been the last year that I have been able to actually build things with Claude that I would never have tackled a few years ago. For so many years I had all sorts of loose ends with clients... all the hard stuff that was difficult to deliver and I was constantly stressed out and depressed. But as of today I can honestly say, with all the personal projects I have going for my own business and a few web dev jobs for friends, I have absolutely no loose ends hanging over my head. What a time to be alive.
Congrats on making the change! That sounds like a much better situation for all around.
how did you prompt it to continue in the loop indefinitely without needing supervision? do you have to check in on it?
I think I just used the /loop command to initialise it - ask it to do what you want. More docs here:
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks
Great use-case!