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Comment by solomonb

2 hours ago

The churn in this space puts javascript to shame. As an example, its only been a few months and AFAICT no one is even talking about openclaw anymore.

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solomonb

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hankbond  2 hours ago

I agree but how many developers did you know making heavy use of it? It always seemed like it was a poorly thought out experiment that gained a lot of traction and hype from the non-technical crowd. I don't say that to be elitist, I just think that non-technical users need a much more consistent and constrained product because they can't really fix and upstream things themselves (even with the use of agents). For all the hype it got, not a single person from my circle installed it to even check it out.

I do agree that the current pace of abandonware creation is wild. I think a lot of projects are generated top down from an idea, and not bottom up through usage. If you have a new experimental project, and you don't have recent commits, I assume you are not using it and thus it has no value.

I think agentic use is mostly only valuable as author extension (help you search, rubber duck, generate code but needs very heavy review). Over time with enough usage of a process I do think some of them can turn into author automation but not from simply writing down an idea. It takes lots and lots of executions, iterations, generalizations, specifications, basically lots of work to get any decently hands-off intelligent automation through agents.

y1n0  1 hour ago

Did that get bought by openai? Lost its rogue cool factor.

  • Multiplayer  1 hour ago

    Did not get bought by OpenAI. Creator was hired by OpenAI and they sponsor the project with tokens. OpenClaw is a non-profit now.

    The problem is really that the promise was so big but the management and implementation was so painful, coupled with non-stop updates, coupled with far too big of an implementation surface.

    A classic "lets solve 15 problems at once" situation, but none of them really well.