Comment by piker
8 hours ago
Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interest in letting an AI into my comms and see no value there whatsoever. Probably negative.
I find some value as kinda a better alexa.
I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.
I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"
I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.
It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa
It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
I have a hard time imagining how much better Alexa would have to be for me to spend $180/month on it...
Just to clarify to people focusing on the $180/month price tag.
OpenClaw is not a CC-only product. You can configure it to use any API endpoint.
Paying $180/month to Anthropic is a personal choice, not a requirement to use OpenClaw.
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I mean, I'm getting $180/mo worth of fun out of playing with it and figuring out what it can do that it's worth it.
Like, no one bats an eye at all the people paying $100/mo for Hulu + Live TV, or paying $350/mo for virtual pixels in candy crush / pokemon go / whatever, and I'm having at least that much fun in playing with openclaw.
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I do see how a very busy businessman or a venture capitalist would gladly pay 180$/month to offload chores and mundane work from his schedule. That comes down to 6$/month, which probably matches his monthly coffee budget.
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> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits
In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children.
It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.
I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).
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> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that
What a horrible situation.
We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.
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Wow. I'd expect that from Singapore or UAE but finding it happen in a fairly developed Western country is a surprise.
Surely that’s subsidized?
A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.
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Machines don't get tired, don't have to sleep, don't face principal-agent problems and can accumulate Skill.md instructions for decades without getting replaced. I definitely see the potential of something like OpenClaw for those who can afford it.
You're paying the au pair partly in accommodation, food, bills and a visa. The visa isn't coming out of your bank account, but it's definitely part of the incentive, so you could see it as a government subsidy.
For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.
How is that remotely possible without committing enormous violations of labor law?
Framed this way - then “replacing” this kind of human exploitation is definitely a good for humanity. If someone doing a job is practically a slave, then replacing them with an electron to token converter is a good thing.
The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation. We want robots mining the minerals we use for our phones, not children. We should strive to free all of humanity from dangerous labour and the need for such jobs to exist.
If Elon Musk wants Optimus robots to help colonize Mars shouldn’t he be trying to create robots that can mine cobalt or similar minerals from dangerous mines and such?
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I doubt this is true in .nl. 180 a month is low for a live-in au-pair.
> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that.
And you see nothing wrong with that?
I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
Then allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.
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It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.
Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.
180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
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Am I right to be a little concerned by the phrase "it'll go straight to the pirate bay"?
Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
Seems like the only people using pirate bay in 2026 are "privacy obsessed" rich middle-aged guys.
I think they do it mostly to feel young and edgy.
> Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
There's at least a couple of dozen instances right now, somewhere, getting very close to designing boutique chemical weapons.
180$/month to queue playlists does not “seem okay” at all. We must be living in different worlds.
> I can message it "Play my X playlist"
People do this? Or is it some sort of joke way above my head?
In what bizarre world is it easier to ask a massive LLM to play a playlist rather than ... literally hitting the play key on it?
You're spendin 180 a month on tokens and still refusing to buy media like Titanic?
If you've figured out how to pirate Anthropic's models and enough GPUs to run it for less than my API costs, I'm all ears
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> "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay
You could build up a legitimate collection for much less than $180/mo.
Using OpenClaw for that is nuts. Claude or GPT could just one shot an app for you that does all that and uses 0 tokens once you've built it.
I have the almost same thing using a network connected raspberry-pi and no AI.
Regarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
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Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work.
This is cheap replacement for ordinary people.
It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.
Yes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages.
OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason.
Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.
Side rant: A disproportionate amount of AI assistant marketing involves scenarios that look middle class, but actually require customers wealthy enough risk money on errors. Like buying the wrong thing, or even buying the right thing at the wrong price.
I am ordinary people. I have adhd. I have been dying for assistance in scheduling and planning. Am not employed enough to afford hiring a human yet. Am hopeful these will reach maturity for me to he able to host one on my own device. Or find a private provider with good security model and careful data handling.
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Going to the shop and buying groceries is not hard work. But I don't do that since delivery became available. I'm lazy and delivery is free. Same for ordinary people needs. It's not a big deal to manage my life, but if I can avoid doing that for free, that's probably what I'll do. For $200? Not sure. For $20? Absolutely. So the question is already about price.
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I'm not sure how solvable it is. It only takes one screw up to ruin the reputation, and a screw up is basically guaranteed.
The tech has existed for a while but nobody sane wants to be the one who takes responsibility for shipping a version of this thing that's supposed to be actually solid.
Issues I saw with OpenClaw:
- reliability (mostly due to context mgmt), esp. memory, consistency. Probably solvable eventually
- costs, partly solvable with context mgmt, but the way people were using it was "run in the background and do work for me constantly" so it's basically maxing out your Claude sub (or paying hundreds a day), the economics don't work
- you basically had to use Claude to get decent results, hence the costs (this is better now and will improve with time)
- the "my AI agent runs in a sandboxed docker container but I gave it my Gmail password" situation... (The solution is don't do that, lol)
See also simonw's "lethal trifecta":
>private data, untrusted content, and external communication
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/
The trifecta (prompt injection) is sorta-kinda solved by the latest models from what I understood. (But maybe Pliny the liberator has a different opinion!)
Disclosure: I wrote the linked post.
The "gave it my Gmail password" problem has a better answer than "don't do that." Security kicks itself out of the room when it only says no. Reserve the no for the worst days. The rest of the time, ship a better way.
That's why I built the platform to make credential leaks hard. It takes more than a single prompt. The credential vault is encrypted. Typed secret wrappers prevent accidental logging and serialization. Per-channel process isolation means a compromise in one adapter does not hand an attacker live sessions in the others.
"Don't do that" fails even for users trying their hardest. Good engineering makes mistakes hard and the right answer easy. Architecture carries the weight so the user does not have to.
On the trifecta being "sorta-kinda solved" by newer models, no. Model mitigations are a layer, not a substitute. Prompt injection has the shape of a confused-deputy problem and the answer to confused deputies has always been capabilities and isolation, not asking the already confused deputy to try harder.
You want the injection to fail EVEN when the model does not catch it.
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$180 a month is huge for "ordinary people".
So I guess that leaves the in-between people who don't care about spending $180 every month but don't have any personal staff yet or even access to concierge services.
My 2 cents is that so far LLMs have had a bad track record in replacing people in jobs where simple software logic and flowcharts wouldn't do the job.
Its not going to be big. There is no obvious use for them unlike email or the Iphone.
Those human assistants can be held accountable.
I deleted your calendar, I'm sorry.
The problem is that if you're wealthy enough to hire someone to do your errands, those errands likely aren't very mundane - the exception is a socialite giving their friend a low-effort job, but executive assistants are paid well because their jobs are cognitively demanding.
OTOH a lower-middle-class Joe like me really does have a lot of mundane social/professional errands, which existing software has handled just fine for decades. I suppose on the margins AI might free up 5 minutes here or there around calendar invites / etc, but at the cost of rolling snake eyes and wasting 30 minutes cleaning up mistakes. Even if it never made mistakes, I just don't see the "personal assistant" use case really taking off. And it's not how people use LLMs recreationally.
Really not trying to say that LLM personal assistants are "useless" for most people. But I don't think they'll be "big," for the same reason that Siri and Alexa were overhyped. It's not from lack of capability; the vision is more ho-hum than tech folks seem to realize.
Siri is quite bad though. Personally, I would get a lot of value out of a more accurate Siri that could function as a device/personal assistant. Right now, if I prompt Siri to “search calendar app for flights scheduled this month”, it just straight up fails. That should be a relatively simple contextual search; just asking it to pull existing data. Siri/Apple Intelligence is overhyped because it can’t even perform basic functions effectively, or takes more time than just doing the same function manually.
> which existing software has handled just fine for decades
Existing software is what dumped most of those errands on you in the first place.
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Yep, I’m seeing real value. I use them for tasks that an assistant might have done in the past. It’s much cheaper than hiring a human, and setup is much faster than finding a good assistant. I’m honestly considering giving it access to accounts with payment information so it can book flights and hotels for me.
You can ask it questions like “what classes does my gym offer between 6-8pm today” and just get a good answer instead of wasting time finding their schedule. You can tell it to check your favorite band’s website everyday to see if they announce any shows in your city. You can tell it to read your emails and automatically add important information to your calendar.
This isn’t the space where I get the most value from AI, but it’s nice to have a hyper connected agent that can quickly take care of more smaller and more personal tasks.
No offense but all of those are near zero value except entertainment to the orchestrator. That’s without understanding the failure rate and modes. It’s telling that you haven’t yet given it your credit card.
I see the appeal, but I also see the risks.
If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.
The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.
That's all great, until it isn't.
Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.
Just limit the tooling. There's no reason for the AI to be able to delete emails for example.
I built a fastmail CLI tool for my *claw and it can only read mails, that's it. I might give it the ability to archive and label later on, with a separate log of actions so I can undo any operation it did easily.
It's pretty decent at going "hey, there's a sale on $thing at $store", for mails, but that's about it.
I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.
I was an original Thunderbird pre-1.0 (from 2003) user and prior to that, Netscape Mail, and am quite certain it has had bayesian spam filtering all this time, at least since the late ‘90s. That was a headline feature in the early days. My first email account used POP3 through a shared web host for my own domain in that era.
Edit: Yes it’s still there https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-sp...
I can't recall the name, but I vaguely remember a Bayesian spam filter for arbitrary POP3 accounts in the 2000s that had a local web frontend, and how excited I was at its effectiveness.
I believe that the shift from "my one computer" to multiple clients (computer + phone + webmail) probably has something to do with it. Even with IMAP sharing state, you still don't have a great way to see and control the filtering, except by moving things in/out of spam folders.
> letting an AI into my comms
Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool.
Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails.
Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.
My issues aren’t really with privacy so much as what the failure modes look like, and, more fundamentally, with becoming a passenger to my own life.
The problem for me is not the LLM reading it. The problem is the company behind it can most likely recover the sessions. That is a problem since they could share it with whomever they want. Even if they are fully incorruptable it's also not uncommon that they simply get hacked and all this data ends up on the open market.
There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.
Yes, I can see the (potential) value in working with agents in software development. The “claw” movement I understood to suggest value in less constrained access to my inbox, personal messages, calendar etc like some sort of PA. It’s hard to quantify how much damage a bad PA can do to someone’s personal and professional life, so if my understand is correct, this seems like a dead end.
I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here because it seems to be on topic.
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IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.
They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.
However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.
There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.
We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.
We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.
We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.
In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.
I hope this helps.
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This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant.
It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything.
I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.
> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks?
Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.
I thought emails from github already did that?
I think the more useful part is the parts that checks a ticket, fixes a bug, then opens the PR automatically. Whether you get an email or a phone text or call from a voice agent is ... somewhat secondary, im.
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Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.
It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage.
I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol
Claude Code does now have integration with Telegram, Discord, and iMessage as of a few weeks ago:
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels
I haven't used OpenClaw since then ...
Newb technies love it.
It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.
Mostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.
I ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value.
Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and on a VPS with only access to a local directory in the VPS with a dozen active projects on GitHub. I don't give it access to my GitHub credentials, but allow it to work in whatever branch is checked out.
This setup is fabulously productive. I use it about every other day to perform some meaningful task for me. It is inexpensive also. A task might take 20 minutes and cost $0.25 in GLP-5.1 API costs.
So TLDR: out of the box, I use Hermes at least one hour a week and find it to be a wonderful tool.
I talk to a lot of business people that are interested in automating very basic things in their inbox, on their Google drive, in CRMs, etc. The reason is not that they want to be cool and hip but because they are forced to spend lots of their precious time doing very dull and repetitive things. Promising to take some of that pain away is a really easy sell. Hence all the hype around OpenClaw.
If you look around in the business world, there is an absurdly large number of people still doing all sorts of things manually that they probably shouldn't. And its costing them money. Even before AI that was true. But now it's increasingly becoming obvious to these people that there are solutions out there that might work. There's a fair amount of FOMO on that front with more clued in people that have heard of other people allegedly being a bit smarter than them.
From a practical experience point of view, most people probably don't have the hands-on experience to make a good judgment just yet. "I tried Chat GPT once and it hallucinated" doesn't really count as valid experience at this point and many non-technical people are still at that level. There generally are a lot of headless chickens making absurd claims (either way) about what these systems can and cannot do making sweeping statements about how possible or impossible things are.
If you take the time and sit down to automate a few things you'll find that: 1) the tools aren't great right now 2) there are lots of basic plumbing issues that get in the way 3) fixing those plumbing issues is not rocket science and something anyone with basic CLI or scripting skills can solve easily 4) you can actually outsource most of that stuff to coding agents. 5) if you figure some of the basics out, you can actually make OpenClaw or similar systems do things that are valuable. 6) Most people that aren't programmers won't get very far given the current state of tools. 7) this might change rapidly as better tools become available. 8) people generally lack the imagination to see how even basic solutions could work for them with these systems.
I have an OpenClaw up and running for our company. It is doing some basic things that are useful for us. After solving some basic plumbing issues, it's now a lot easier to make it do new things. It's not quite doing everything just yet (lots more plumbing issues to solve) and we have our healthy hesitations about letting it loose on our inboxes. But it's not useless or without value. Every plumbing issue we solve unlocks a few more use cases. There's a bit of a gold rush right now of course. And "picks and shovels" people like myself are probably going to do a brisk business.
You can wait it out or tap into the action now. That's your choice. But try making it an informed choice. And no better experience than the first-hand type.
Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.
We had better agent infrastructures (namely JADE) back in the day. I worked with them, and now these things look like flimsy 50¢ plastic toys to me, too.
no, it's only for scammers
I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.
Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.
No.
But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af.
Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.