Still a no from me until these things can display any degree of intuition, and even then it's probably still a no.
You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.
OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.
Also...
>Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.
This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol
I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed.
My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.
2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).
The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago?
Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disrupting at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.
I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best).
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
I screenshot the info sent from my sons pre-school and send it. I can then ask it about and get reminders in time for odd closing hours etc. Also use it for follow ups on projects, other reminders, research on the go, small apps/games and language training.
RAGish storage with different access methods including IM and parsing data from photos sounds good to me. But openclaw seems like a bit too big of a gun for that, did anybody create more suitable for the job yet?
edit: I would prefer prefer local model and storage (but it is not required) so perhaps that is an argument for the openclaw actually
"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up
It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.
This was useful for the 1-2 months where models were good enough to use all their newfound tools but not good enough to vibe code them themselves.
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.
I'm fairly sure you can vibecode all these things, but given the state of agent produced code at the moment, I would suspect that your email and sms gate will have horrible security holes.
I think what changed is that coding agents adopted some of the features from Openclaw, eg the ability to access it remotely and for one Claude Code instance to “talk” to another, etc.
Still a no from me until these things can display any degree of intuition, and even then it's probably still a no.
You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.
OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.
Also...
>Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.
This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol
I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?
It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed.
My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.
2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).
The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago? Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disrupting at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.
I wouldn't trust it with a credit card, or really any sort of non-reversable decision making. Most of what I do outside of work either requires physical interaction, or is something I do for fun. For now, I assume that is what people use this stuff for. Fun.
I don't use OpenClaw, but rather Hermes. I have a set schedule that kicks off Hermes to scan my home network for anything out of sorts, and generate a summary that it sends to me via SimpleX. For this, Hermes uses tools such as nmap, etc (it decided which tools were best).
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
I screenshot the info sent from my sons pre-school and send it. I can then ask it about and get reminders in time for odd closing hours etc. Also use it for follow ups on projects, other reminders, research on the go, small apps/games and language training.
(Similar system to OpenClaw)
RAGish storage with different access methods including IM and parsing data from photos sounds good to me. But openclaw seems like a bit too big of a gun for that, did anybody create more suitable for the job yet?
edit: I would prefer prefer local model and storage (but it is not required) so perhaps that is an argument for the openclaw actually
Its basically what self hosting is for IT guys, except people who don't 'get' technology
"hey computer, i want to watch a movie on my jellyfin server tonight, get it done" and openclaw autonomously finds the torrent, downloads it, moves it to the NAS, and you sit down at the end of the day with everhything set up
the rr suite seems much better for that
You’re still responsible for the copyright infringement I’m afraid
It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.
Obligatory question: who is still using OpenClaw? It's been a minor meme about how much discussion about OpenClaw fell of a cliff after March; the Google Trends graph is funny: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=OpenClaw&date=today%201-...
Most people I know use hermes now
All the people you know, or claw users?
Hermes' Github has 12K open issues and 25K pull requests.
I assume they're using agents to sort through all the slop?
I remember when everyone was ordering Mac Minis. "How many mac minis you got" down at the local pub. Funny times.
LMFAO, all of Wyoming apparently still using OpenClaw. What's up with that?
Hard to keep track of a project that keeps renaming…
This was useful for the 1-2 months where models were good enough to use all their newfound tools but not good enough to vibe code them themselves.
Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.
I'm fairly sure you can vibecode all these things, but given the state of agent produced code at the moment, I would suspect that your email and sms gate will have horrible security holes.
I think what changed is that coding agents adopted some of the features from Openclaw, eg the ability to access it remotely and for one Claude Code instance to “talk” to another, etc.
OpenClaw trend was like Pokémon Go from 2016. A bunch of mindless people followed a trend just because it was a trend.
And, perhaps in both cases, because they had fun with it?