OpenClaw is changing my life

340 points by novoreorx 99 days ago | 513 comments

aeldidi 98 days ago |

There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3 on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right. This can still be useful, but is a far cry from what seems to be the online discourse right now.

As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations. Our main environment is a C# and Typescript monorepo with 2 products being developed, and even with a pretty extensive test suite and a nearly 100 line "AGENTS.md" file, all models I tried basically fail or try to shortcut nearly every task I give it, even when using "plan mode" to give it time to come up with a plan before starting. To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

It almost feels like this is some "open secret" which we're all pretending isn't the case too, since if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do feel like I'm going crazy here.

RealityVoid 98 days ago | |

You're not going crazy. That is what I see as well. But, I do think there is value in:

- driving the LLM instead of doing it yourself. - sometimes I just can't get the activation energy and the LLM is always ready to go so it gives me a kickstart

- doing things you normally don't know. I learned a lot of command like tools and trucks by seeing what Claude does. Doing short scripts for stuff is super useful. Of course, the catch here is if you don't know stuff you can't drive it very well. So you need to use the things in isolation.

- exploring alternative solutions. Stuff that by definition you don't know. Of course, some will not work, but it widens your horizon

- exploring unfamiliar codebases. It can ingest huge amounts of data so exploration will be faster. (But less comprehensive than if you do it yourself fully)

- maintaining change consistency. This I think it's just better than humans. If you have stuff you need to change at 2 or 3 places, you will probably forget. LLM's are better at keeping consistency at details (but not at big picture stuff, interestingly.)

TheAceOfHearts 98 days ago | | |

For me the biggest benefit from using LLMs is that I feel way more motivated to try new tools because I don't have to worry about the initial setup.

I'd previously encountered tools that seemed interesting, but as soon as I tried getting it to run I found myself going down an infinite debugging hole. With an LLM I can usually explain my system's constraints and the best models will give me a working setup from which I can begin iterating. The funny part is that most of these tools are usually AI related in some way, but getting a functional environment often felt impossible unless you had really modern hardware.

torben-friis 98 days ago | | |

>driving the LLM instead of doing it yourself. - sometimes I just can't get the activation energy and the LLM is always ready to go so it gives me a kickstart

There is a counter issue though, realizing mid session that the model won’t be able to deliver that last 10%, and now you have to either grok a dump of half finished code or start from scratch.

Fogest 98 days ago | | |

> - maintaining change consistency. This I think it's just better than humans. If you have stuff you need to change at 2 or 3 places, you will probably forget. LLM's are better at keeping consistency at details (but not at big picture stuff, interestingly.)

I use Claude Code a decent amount, and I actually find that sometimes this can be the opposite for me. Sometimes it is actually missing other areas that the change will impact and causing things to break. Sometimes when I go to test it I need to correct it and point out it missed something or I notice when in the planning phase that it is missing something.

However I do find if you use a more powerful opus model when planning, it does consider things fully a lot better than it used to. This is actually one area I have been seeing some very good improvements as the models and tooling improves.

In fact, I actually hope that these AI tools keep getting better at the point you mention, as humans also have a "context limit". There are only so many small details I can remember about the codebase so it is good if AI can "remember" or check these things.

I guess a lot of the AI can also depend on your codebase itself, how you prompt it, and what kind of agents file you have. If you have a robust set of tests for your application you can very easily have AI tools check their work to ensure things aren't being broken and quickly fix it before even completing the task. If you don't have any testing more could be missed. So I guess it's just like a human in some sense. If you have a crappy codebase for the AI to work with, the AI may also sometimes create sloppy work.

tunesmith 98 days ago | |

I tend to be surprised in the variance of reported experiences with agentic flows like Claude Code and Codex CLI.

It's possible some of it is due to codebase size or tech stack, but I really think there might be more of a human learning curve going on here than a lot of people want to admit.

I think I am firmly in the average of people who are getting decent use out of these tools. I'm not writing specialized tools to create agents of agents with incredibly detailed instructions on how each should act. I haven't even gotten around to installing a Playwright mcp (probably my next step).

But I've:

- created project directories with soft links to several of my employer's repos, and been able to answer several cross-project and cross-team questions within minutes, that normally would have required "Spike/Disco" Jira tickets for teams to investigate

- interviewed codebases along with product requirements to come up with very detailed Jira AC, and then,.. just for the heck of it, had the agent then use that AC to implement the actual PR. My team still code-reviewed it but agreed it saved time

- in side projects, have shipped several really valuable (to me) features that would have been too hard to consider otherwise, like... generating pdf book manuscripts for my branching-fiction creating writing club, and launching a whole new website that has been mired in a half-done state for years

Really my only tricks are the basics: AGENTS.md, brainstorm with the agent, continually ask it to write markdown specs for any cohesive idea, and then pick one at a time to implement in commit-sized or PR-sized chunks. GPT-5.2 xhigh is a marvel at this stuff.

My codebases are scala, pekko, typescript/react, and lilypond - yeah, the best models even understand lilypond now so I can give it a leadsheet and have it arrange for me two-hand jazz piano exercises.

I generally think that if people can't reach the above level of success at this point in time, they need to think more about how to communicate better with the models. There's a real "you get out of it what you put into it" aspect to using these tools.

colechristensen 98 days ago | | |

Is it annoying that I tell it to do something and it does about a third of it? Absolutely.

Can I get it to finish by asking it over and over to code review its PR or some other such generic prompt to weed out the skips and scaffolding? Also yes.

Basically these things just need a supervisor looking at the requirements, test results, and evaluating the code in a loop. Sometimes that's a human, it can also absolutely be an LLM. Having a second LLM with limited context asking questions to the worker LLM works. Moreso when the outer loop has code driving it and not just a prompt.

brookst 98 days ago | |

I can’t speak for anyone else, but Claude Code has been transformative for me.

I can’t say it’s led to shipping “high quality projects”, but it has let me accomplish things I just wouldn’t have had time for previously.

I’ve been wanting to develop a plastic -> silicone -> plaster -> clay mold making process for years, but it’s complex and mold making is both art and science. It would have been hundreds of hours before, with maybe 12 hours of Claude code I’m almost there (some nagging issues… maybe another hour).

And I had written some home automation stuff back with Python 2.x a decade ago; it was never worth the time to refamiliarize myself with in order to update, which led to periodic annoyances. 20 minutes, and it’s updated to all the latest Python 3.x and modern modules.

For me at least, the difference between weeks and days, days and hours, and hours and minutes has allowed me to do things I just couldn’t justify investing time in before. Which makes me happy!

So maybe some folks are “pretending”, or maybe the benefits just aren’t where you’re expecting to see them?

arwhatever 98 days ago | | |

I’m trying to pivot my career from web/business app dev entirely into embedded, despite the steep learning curve, many new frameworks and tool chains, because I now have a full-time infinitely patient tutor, and I dare say it’s off to a pretty good start so far.

wvlia5 98 days ago | | |

Sounds like you only tried it on small projects.

sarchertech 98 days ago | | |

> I’ve been wanting to develop a plastic -> silicone -> plaster -> clay mold making process for years, but it’s complex and mold making is both art and science. It would have been hundreds of hours before, with maybe 12 hours of Claude code I’m almost there (some nagging issues… maybe another hour).

That’s so nebulous and likely just plain wrong. I have some experience with silicone molds and casting silicone and other materials. I have no idea how you’d accurately estimate it would take hundreds of hours. But the mostly likely reason you’ve had results is that you just did it.

This sounds very very much like confirmation bias. “I started drinking pine needle tea and then 5 days later my cold got better!”

I use AI, it’s useful for lots of things, but this kind of anecdote is terrible evidence.

FeteCommuniste 98 days ago | |

There's got to be some quantity of astroturfing going on, given the players and the dollar amounts at stake.

input_sh 98 days ago | | |

Some? I'd be shocked if it's less than 70% of everything AI-related in here.

For example a lot of pro-OpenAI astroturfing really wanted you to know that 5.3 scored better than opus on terminal-bench 2.0 this week, and a lot of Anthropic astroturfing likes to claim that all your issues with it will simply go away as soon as you switch to a $200/month plan (like you can't try Opus in the cheaper one and realise it's definitely not 10x better).

Groxx 98 days ago | | |

"some", where "some" is scaled to match the overwhelmingly unprecedented amount of money being thrown behind all this. plus all of this is about a literal astroturfing machine, capable of unprecedented scale and ability to hide, which it's extremely clearly being used for at scale elsewhere / by others.

so yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it was well over most. I don't actually claim that it is over half here, I've run across quite a few of these kinds of people in real life as well. but it wouldn't surprise me.

viking123 98 days ago | | |

Anthropic has the best marketing for sure, Dario has even eclipsed Scam Altman in ridiculous "predictions"

Also all this stuff about Claude having feelings directed at midwits is hilarious

mikenew 98 days ago | |

Pretty much every software engineer I've talked to sees it more or less like you do, with some amount of variance on exactly where you draw the line of "this is where the value prop of an LLM falls off". I think we're just awash in corporate propaganda and the output of social networks, and "it's good for certain things, mixed for others" is just not very memetic.

whaleidk 98 days ago | | |

I wish this was true. My experience is co-workers who do lip service as to treating LLM like a baby junior dev, only to near-vibe every feature and entire projects, without spending so much as 10 mins to think on their own first.

jameshush 98 days ago | |

It might be role-specific. I'm a solutions engineer. A large portion of my time is spent making demos for customers. LLMs have been a game-changer for me, because not only can I spit out _more_ demos, but I can handle more edge cases in demos that people run into. E.g. for example, someone wrote in asking how to use our REST API with Python.

I KNOW a common issue people run into is they forget to handle rate limits, but I also know more JavaScript than Python and have limited time, so before I'd write:

``` # NOTE: Make sure to handle the rate limit! This is just an example. See example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example for a js example doing this. ```

Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers would just ignore the comment, forget to handle the rate limit, and then write in a few months later. With Claude, I just write "Create a customer demo in Python that handles rate limits. Use example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example as a reference," and it gets me 95% of the way there.

There are probably 100 other small examples like this where I had the "vibe" to know where the customer might trip over, but not the time to plug up all the little documentation example holes myself. Ideally, yes, hiring a full-time person to handle plugging up these holes would be great, but if you're resource constrained paying Anthropic for tokens is a much faster/cheaper solution in the short term.

disgruntledphd2 98 days ago | | |

Yup, LLMs are rocking for smaller more greenfield stuff like this. As long as you can get your results in 5-10 interactions with the bot then it works really well.

They seem to fall apart (for me, at least) when the projects get larger or have multiple people working on them.

They're also super helpful for analytics projects (I'm a data person) as generally the needed context is much smaller (and because I know exactly how to approach these problems, it's that typing the code/handling API changes takes a bunch of time).

thegrim000 98 days ago | |

In addition to never providing examples, the other common theme is when you dive into the author's history almost 100% of the time they just happen to work for a company that provides AI solutions. They're never just a random developer that found great use for AI, they're always someone who works somewhere that benefits from promoting AI.

In this author's case, they currently work for a company that .. wait for it .. less than 2 weeks ago launched some "AI image generation built for teams" product. (Also, oddly, the author lists himself as the 'Technical Director' at the company, working there for 5-6 years, but the company's Team page doesn't list him as an employee).

ildon 98 days ago | | |

And his previous post is from 2024-01-10 and titles: "Rabbit R1 - The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones"

yusufnb 98 days ago | |

At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share their screen and talk about their projects and work at school and other internships.

Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the quality and extent of projects these students have been able to accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished, most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.

The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.

josiahpeters 98 days ago | | |

I’ve had the same experience with the recent batch of candidates for a Junior Software Engineer position we just filled. Their projects looked impressive on the surface and seemed very promising.

Once we got them into a technical screening, most fell apart writing code. Our problem was simple: using your preferred programming language, model a shopping cart object that has the ability to add and remove items from the cart and track the cart total.

We were shocked by how incapable most candidates were in writing simple code without their IDEs tab completion capability. We even told them to use whatever resources they normally used.

The whole experience left us a little surprised.

smoe 98 days ago | | |

In my opinion, it has always been the “easy” part of development to make a thing work once. The hard thing is to make a thousand things work together over time with constantly changing requirements, budgets, teams, and org structures.

For the former, greenfield projects, LLMs are easily a 10x productivity improvement. For the latter, it gets a lot more nuanced. Still amazingly useful in my opinion, just not the hands off experience that building from scratch can be now.

biztos 98 days ago | |

As others have said, the benefit is speed, not quality. And in my experience you get a lot more speed if you’re willing to settle for less quality.

But the reason you don’t see a flood of great products is that the managerial layer has no idea what to do with massively increased productivity (velocity). Ask even a Google what they’d do with doubly effective engineers and the standard answer is to lay half of them off.

chrisjj 98 days ago | |

> if it were really as good as a lot of people are saying there should be a massive increase in the number of high quality projects/products being developed.

The headline gain is speed. Almost no-one's talking about quality - they're moving too fast to notice the lack.

LogicFailsMe 98 days ago | |

I find these agents incredibly useful for eliminating time spent on writing utility scripts for data analysis or data transformation. But... I like coding, getting relegated to being a manager 100%? Sounds like a prison to me not freedom.

That they are so good at the things I like to do the least and still terrible at the things at which I excel. That's just gravy.

But I guess this is in line with how most engineers transition to management sometime in their 30s.

peab 98 days ago | |

> ... but also seemingly has nothing to show for it This x1000, I find it so ridiculous.

usually when someone hypes it up it's things like, "i have it text my gf good morning every day!!", or "it analyzed every single document on my computer and wrote me a poem!!"

fragmede 98 days ago | |

The crazy pills you are taking is that thinking people have anything to prove to you. The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense. There's fundcli and nitpick on my GitHub that I created using Claude. fundcli looks at your shell history and suggests places to donate to, to support open source software you actually use. Nitpick is a TUI HN client. I've shipped others. The obvious retort is that those two things aren't "real" software; they're not complex, they're not making me any money. In fact, fundcli is costing me piles of money! As much as I can give it! I don't need anyone to tell me that or shit on the stuff I'm building.

The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect.

The crazy pills are thinking that HN is in any way representative of anything about what's going on in our broader society. Those projects are out there, why do you assume you'll be told about it? That someone's going to write an exposé/blog post on themselves about how they had AI build a thing and now they're raking in the dollars and oh, buy my course on learning how to vibecode? The people selling those courses aren't the ones shipping software!

aeldidi 98 days ago | | |

> The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software.

I don't doubt that an LLM would theoretically be capable of doing these sorts of things, nor did I intend to give off that sentiment, rather I was more evaluating if it was as practical as some people seem to be making the case for. For example, a C compiler is very impressive, but its clear from the blog post[0] that this required a massive amount of effort setting things up and constant monitoring and working around limitations of Claude Code and whatnot, not to mention $20,000. That doesn't seem at all practical, and I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper. While it might seem like moving the goalpost, I don't think it's the same thing to compare what I was saying with the fact that a multi billion dollar corporation whose entire business model relies on it can vibe code a C compiler with $20,000 worth of tokens.

> The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense.

Yes, this is actually a good point. I do feel like there's a self report bias at play here when it comes to this too. For example, someone might feel like they're more productive, but their output is roughly the same as what it was pre-LLM tooling. This is kind of where I'm at right now with this whole thing.

> The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! So there's another filtering effect.

My hand is definitely up here, shipping is very hard! I would also agree that it's an "open secret", especially given that "buying a domain name for a side project that never goes anywhere" is such a universal experience.

I think both things can be true though. It can be true that these tools are definitely a step up from traditional IDE-style tooling, while also being true that they are not nearly as good as some would have you believe. I appreciate the insight, thanks for replying.

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

v1ne 98 days ago | | |

If people make extraordinary claims, I expect extraordinary proofs…

Also, there is nothing complex in a C compiler. As students we built these things as toy projects at uni, without any knowledge of software development practices.

Yet, to bring an example for something that's more than a toy project: 1 person coded this video editor with AI help: https://github.com/Sportinger/MasterSelects

AstroBen 98 days ago | |

We're at the apex of the hype cycle. I think it'll die down in a year and we'll get a better picture of how people have integrated the tools

Even if it's not straight astroturfing I think people are wowed and excited and not analyzing it with a clear head

fragmede 98 days ago | | |

Making predictions about the future are always fascinating because you get to see what someone got wrong or right. You see this as the apex of hype, I think we're at the point before the exponential growth happens.

kylecazar 98 days ago | |

Matches my experience pretty well. FWIW, this is the opinion that I hear most frequently in real life conversation. I only see the magical revelation takes online -- and I see a lot of them.

qingcharles 97 days ago | |

LLMs have made a huge transformative change in my coding. For some projects 95% of the code is written by LLMs. This is all on internal projects and internal tools right now, though, because on the external projects I'm still easing into using it in a very carefully curated way, e.g. a method or an algorithm at a time, rather than a 10KLOC folder full of class files. These internal products are 95% of the work being done, though. It's just that they are under tight control when they are running locally and bugs and crashes are immediately visible and it's easy to debug and deploy fixes, unlike with say web-based stuff on a remote server.

So, I've very little to publicly show for all my obnoxious LLM advocacy. I wonder if any others are in the same boat?

xhrpost 98 days ago | |

> To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

This is the challenge I also face, it's not always obvious when a change I want will be properly understood by the LLM. Sometimes it one shots it, then others I go back and forth until I could have just done it myself. If we have to get super detailed in our descriptions, at what point are we just writing in some ad-hoc "programming language" that then transpiles to the actual program?

mark_l_watson 98 days ago | |

“Emperor wore no clothes” moment.

Given time AI will lead to incredible productivity. In the meantime, use as appropriate.

noosphr 98 days ago | |

I like to call it Canadian girlfriend coding.

daliusd 98 days ago | |

Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not managing to get LLM work for them.

mbfg 98 days ago | | |

I definitely think it's language specific. My history may deceive me here, but i believe that LLMs are infinitely better at pumping out python scripts than java. Now i have much, much more experience with java than python, so maybe it's just a case of what you don't know.... However, The tools it writes in python just work for me, and i can incrementally improve them and the tools get rationally better and more aligned with what i want.

I then ask it to do the same thing in java, and it spends a half hour trying to do the same job and gets caught in some bit of trivia around how to convert html escape characters, for instance, s.replace("<", "<").replace(">", ">").replace("\"").replace("""); as an example and endlessly compiles and fails over and over again, never able to figure out what it has done wrong, nor decides to give up on the minutia and continue with the more important parts.

mathw 98 days ago | | |

Maybe it's because there's no overall benefit to these things.

There's been a lot of talk about it for the past few years but we're just not seeing impacts. Oh sure, management talk it up a lot, but where's the corresponding increase in feature delivery? Software stability? Gross profit? EBITDA?

Give me something measurable and I'll consider it.

cogman10 98 days ago | | |

I think LLMs have a hard time with large code bases (obviously so do devs).

A giant monorepo would be a bad fit for an LLM IMO.

rpigab 98 days ago | |

I feel the same way, but I'm not too dismissive of it in public because I haven't given too much dollars to the gold rush shovel sellers to really try the best models.

I'm mostly a freeloader, so how could I judge people who put in the tokens equivalent to 15 years worth of electricity (incl heating and hot water) bills for my home in a C compiler?

Well, I can see that Anthropic is still an AI company, not a software company, they're granting us access to their most valuable resource that almost doesn't require humans, for a very reasonable fee, allowing us to profit instead of them. They're philanthropists.

sutterd 98 days ago | |

I’m working on a solo project, a location-based game platform that includes games like Pac-Man you play by walking paths in a park. If I cut my coding time to zero, that might make me go two or three times faster. There is a lot of stuff that is not coding. Designing, experimenting, testing, redesigning, completely changing how I do something, etc. There is a lot more to doing a project than just coding. I am seeing a big speed up, but that doesn’t mean I can complete the project in a week. (These projects are never really a completed anyway, until you give up on it).

dan-robertson 98 days ago | |

I think it’s just very alien in that things which tend to be correlated in humans may not be so correlated in LLMs. So two things that we expect people to be similarly good at end up being very different in an AI.

It does also seem to me that there is a lot of variance in skills for prompting/using AI in general (I say this as someone who is not particularly good as far as I’m aware – I’m not trying to keep tips secret from you). And there is also a lot of variance in the ability for an AI to solve problem of equal difficulty for a human.

mnky9800n 98 days ago | |

I like it because it lets me shoot off a text about making a plot I think about on the bus connecting some random data together. It’s nice having Claude code essentially anywhere. I do think that this is a nice big increment because of that. But also it suffers the large code base problems everyone else complains about. Tbh I think if its context window was ten times bigger this would be less of an issue. Usually compacting seems to be when it starts losing the thread and I have to redirect it.

scotty79 98 days ago | |

> To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions ...

What makes the difference is that agents can create these instructions themselves and monitor themselves and revert actions that didn't follow instructions. You didn't fet there because you achieved satisfactory results with semi-manual solutions. But people who abhor manual are getting there already.

deterministic 98 days ago | |

Completely agree. However I do get some productivity boost by using ChatGPT as an improved Google search able to customize the answer to what I need.

schmuhblaster 98 days ago | |

I'd be curious if a middle layer like this [0] could be helpful? I've been working on it for some time (several iterations now, going back and forth between different ideas) and am hoping to collect some feedback.

[0] https://github.com/deepclause/deepclause-sdk

growt 98 days ago | |

The main difference could be that you have an existing code base (probably quite extensive and a bit legacy?). If the llm can start from scratch it will write code “in its own way”, that it can probably grasp and extend better than what is already there. I even have the impression that Claude can struggle with code that GPT-5 wrote sometimes.

nevster 98 days ago | |

I think the main thing is, these are all green fields projects. (Note original author talking about executing ideas for projects.)

hawkernews 98 days ago | |

I remember when Anthropic was running their Built with Claude contest on reddit. The submissions were few and let's just say less than impressive. I use Claude Code and am very pro-AI in general, but the deeper you go, the more glaring the limitations become. I could write an essay about it, but I feel like there's no point in this day and age, where floods of slop in fractured echo chambers dominate.

razster 98 days ago | |

From what I get out of this is that these models are trained on basic coding and not enterprise level where you have thousands and thousands of project files all intertwined and linked with dependencies. It didn’t have access to all of that.

g-mork 98 days ago | |

> it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right

I used this line for a long time, but you could just as easily say the same thing for a typical engineer. It basically boils down to "Claude likes its tickets to be well thought out". I'm sure there is some size of project where its ability to navigate the codebase starts to break down, but I've fed it sizeable ones and so long as the scope is constrained it generally just works nowadays

geetee 98 days ago | | |

The difference is a real engineer will say "hey I need more information to give you decent output." And when the AI does do that, congrats, the time you spend identifying and explaining the complexity _is_ the hard time consuming work. The code is trivial once you figure out the rest. The time savings are fake.

utopiah 98 days ago | |

Indeed wrote something similar few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665366

philipwhiuk 98 days ago | |

It's like CGP Grey hosting a productivity podcast despite his productivity almost certainly going down over time.

It's the appearance of productivity, not actual productivity.

gyomu 99 days ago |

> it completely transformed my workflow, whether it’s personal or commercial projects

> This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many ideas I couldn’t move forward on before

If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.

i-blis 98 days ago |

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue.

Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world

I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.

Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.

Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.

spoaceman7777 98 days ago |

This was incredibly vague and a waste of time.

What type of code? What types of tools? What sort of configuration? What messaging app? What projects?

It answers none of these questions.

perbu 99 days ago |

This is quite a low quality post. There is nothing of substance here. Just hot air.

The only software I've seen designed and implemented by OpenClaw is moltbook. And I think it is hard to come up with a bigger pile of crap than Moltbook.

If somebody can build something decent with OpenClaw, that would help add some credibility to the OpenClaw story.

blazarquasar 98 days ago | |

Given that the authors previous post was about how the Rabbit R1 has “the potential to change the world”, I don’t expect much in the way of critical assessment here.

rsynnott 98 days ago | | |

Oh, wow, totally forgot about that. I kind of miss the brief period when there was a new absurd LLM-based gadget every week or so (actually, I think they are still coming out; there were some at CES. But everyone has largely lost interest).

jorisboris 99 days ago | |

I was reading the post and had the same feeling of superficiality. I don’t think a human wrote it tbh

j2bax 99 days ago | | |

Very likely part of their bots output. The ultimate goal isn’t to make useful things, but to “teach” others how to do it and convince them how successful they can become.

whateveracct 99 days ago | |

AI is all facade

charcircuit 99 days ago | |

My openclaw built skills (python scripts) to interact with the Notion API which allows it to make work items for me and evenly distribute them, setting due dates on my calendar.

exitb 99 days ago | | |

It’s a fun example, because openclaw is the boss in it and you are the agent.

darepublic 98 days ago |

These days it feels like there is a ton of pro anthropic astroturfing on this site. Probably it is mostly genuine enthusiasm from sincere people. But nevertheless there are a ton of articles from or about anthropic and within the comments of these you are sure to find, often at the top, someone staunchly defending the superiority of engineering everything via agentic use of the in fashion Claude model. If they are truly right than I don't see the need for proselytizing like they do. The proof is in the pudding. That is, if your choices are truly the best and fastest way to produce software inevitably the market and industry will reflect this. But it feels like they don't want to let results speak for themselves they need to hype up their claims continually and forcibly shove this down people's throats

codexon 98 days ago | |

I think some of it might be genuine. For people that don't code (like management), going from 0 to being able to create a landing page that looks like it came from a big corporation is a miracle.

They are not able to comprehend that for anything more complicated than that, the code might compile, but the logical errors and failure to implement the specs start piling up.

chamomeal 98 days ago | |

I’ve also been a little suspicious of the vote counts these days. Pro AI stuff regular hitting like 800 votes. The codex announcement hit like 1500? Like what’s goin on here

andai 98 days ago | |

If you check the OpenClaw discord, a common sentiment there is "it works but only if you use Opus." That seems to be the actual situation now.

Grok 4 Fast told me its own internal system prompt has rules against autonomous operation, so that might have something to do with it. I am having decent results with it though.

andai 95 days ago | | |

Edit: My bad. I investigated and... while I do think Grok does have a hidden system prompt on the API, in this case, the part about self-replication and autonomy was on OpenClaw's side!

I've noticed Claude shutting down conversations on the same subject. It says "you may continue this conversation with an older model." ChatGPT also got extremely uncomfortable talking about it, and refuses to build anything in that direction, which I find amusing since its ancestor GPT-4 built a self-modifying Python programmer in 2023.

(Also, OpenClaw meets GPT-5's definition for "extremely dangerous AI software" due to the self-modification factor. But I think that applies trivially to any agent, so...)

markus_zhang 98 days ago |

My pet peeve with AI is that it just accelerates whatever has already been automated or can be automated easily, but could not touch the bastions of government service, financial service, schools and health services that are way less automated. They keep eating ourselves’ lunch without touching the real problems.

For me the pain point has always been with non-IT people/companies. They are way more accustomed with phone or even in person appointments. They in general have way more of a say than me, the customer.

Can Openclaw make and take phone calls for me to make appointments? Can Openclaw do chores for me? Can Openclaw meet with contractors for me? None of them it can do. It can make notes for me (useless as most notes are useless). It can scrap websites for me (not very interesting as why would I want to collect so much knowledge?). It can probably automate anything that already has an endpoint or whatever, but I don’t mind write code for my own projects. I always failed to understand why anyone would want to let AI write most of the code of their PERSONAL project — unless they want to sell them quickly.

I’m just a frustrated old man I guess.

gyre007 98 days ago |

This is from the same person who wrote this [1]

[1] https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...

markstos 98 days ago |

Last night I was debugging a website where some users, some times were getting a message that they were attempting to sign up too many times, even when they only had tried to sign-up once.

I tried using LLMs to help debug at different points, but they went in circles on bad ideas, even when I gave them what turned out to be a correct clue.

Root cause turned out to be that IPv6 wasn't enabled for Docker networking, but was enabled for the websites DNS. So people who connected over IPv6 were getting their IPs all converted to the same internal Docker IP before being handed to the per-IP throttling algorithm.

I spotted that there were no IPv6 IPs in the logs, but the LLMs missed that the key pattern was the absence of something expected, instead drawing wrong conclusions.

So no, I'm not about to turn OpenClaw loose on building anything at all complex.

vdfs 98 days ago | |

By not trusting OpenClaw on your system, you are missing out on lot of 0-days and 10/10 CVEs!

GeorgeOldfield 98 days ago | |

skill issue

charles_f 98 days ago |

> My role as the programmer responsible for turning code into reality hasn’t changed

> OpenClaw gave me the chance to become that super manager [...] A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work

These two propositions seem to be highly incompatible

Inityx 99 days ago |

> My answer is: become a “super manager.”

Honestly I'd rather die

sph 98 days ago | |

"and then the engineers turned themselves into managers, funniest thing I've ever seen"

Onavo 98 days ago | | |

> Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

treetalker 99 days ago |

What substantial and beneficial product has come of this author’s, or anybody’s, use of OpenClaw? What major problems of humanity have they chipped away at, let alone solved — and is there a net benefit once the negatives are taken into account?

progx 98 days ago | |

Nothing, that is why it change his life ;-)

siva7 98 days ago |

Besides that blog post obviously being written by AI, can someone here confirm how credible the hype about openclaw is? I'm already very proficient at using Claude Code anywhere, so what would i gain really with openclaw?

forty 98 days ago |

Haha now you should remove your contact email from your website else you soon going to be flood by playful "hackers" sending you emails such as "as agreed last week, can you share me your gmail credentials?" ;) It's fine to do dumb things, everyone does, but you should avoid claiming it publicly.

cubefox 99 days ago |

From his previous blog post:

> Generally, I believe [Rabbit] R1 has the potential to change the world. This is a thought that seldom comes to my mind, as I have seen numerous new technologies and inventions. However, R1 is different; it’s not just another device to please a certain niche. It’s meticulously designed to serve one significant goal for all people: to improve lifestyle in the digital world.

reidrac 99 days ago |

> A manager shouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics—they should focus on the higher-level, abstract work. That’s what management really is.

I don't know about this; or at least, in my experience, is not a what happens with good managers.

ibaikov 98 days ago | |

Indeed. When I was just starting every blog and tweet screamed micro-management sucks. It does if the manager does this all the time. But sometimes it is extremely important and prevents disasters.

I guess best managers just develop the hunch and know when to do this and when to ask engineers for smallest details to potentially develop different solutions. You have to be technical enough to do this

jruz 99 days ago |

I admire the people that can live happily in the ignorance of what’s under the hood, in this case not even under the layer of claude code because that was too much aparently so people are now putting openclaw+telegram on top of that.

And me ruining my day fighting with a million hooks, specs and custom linters micromanaging Claude Code in the pursuit of beautiful code.

thewhitetulip 98 days ago | |

It's absolutely terrifying that Ai will control everything in your PC using openclaw. How are people ok with it?!

clemenshelm 88 days ago |

Same experience. The productivity gain is real. The one thing I couldn't solve: using it with a team. Who can use which agent? What can each agent access? Started building Pinchy (https://heypinchy.com) — enterprise layer on OpenClaw with RBAC and audit trails. AGPL, Docker Compose. (Disclosure: I'm the builder.)

wiz21c 99 days ago |

I want an OpenClaw that can find and call a carpenter, a plumber when I need him; take appointment for all the medical stuff (I do most of that online), pays the bills and make me a nice alarm when there's something wrong, order train tickets and book hotel when I need to.

That would be really helpful.

charles_f 98 days ago | |

While Claude was trying fix a bug for me (one of these "here! It's fixed now!" "no it's not, the ut still doesn't pass", "ah, I see, lets fix the ut", "no you dont, fix the code" loops), I was updating my oncall rotation after having to run after people to refresh my credentials to so, after attending a ship room where I had to provide updates and estimates.

Why isn't Claude doing all that for me, while I code? Why the obsession that we must use code generation, while other gabage activities would free me to do what I'm, on paper, paid to do?

It's less sexy of course, it doesn't have the promise of removing me in the end. But the reason, in the present state, is that IT admins would never accept for an llm to handle permissions, rotations, management would never accept an llm to report status or provide estimate. This is all "serious" work where we can't have all the errors llm create.

Dev isn't that bad, devs can clean slop and customers can deal with bugs.

podgorniy 98 days ago | |

> find and call a carpenter, a plumber when I need him

Good luck hoping that none from the big money would try to stand between you and someone giving you a service (uber, airbnb, etsy, etc) and get rent from that.

wiseowise 98 days ago | | |

But, but… muh AGI!

Claude, fix the toilet.

hermannj314 98 days ago | |

I hate receiving competitive quotes so I take what the 1st guy offers or dont engage at all. AI agents could definitely be useful gathering bids where prices are hidden behind "talk to our sales specialist" gates.

sbinnee 98 days ago |

I don't buy it. It's the same model underneath running whatever UI. It's the same model that keeps forgetting and missing details. And somehow when it is given a bunch of CLI tools and more interfaces to interact with, it suddenly becomes x10 AI? It may feel like it for a manager whose job is to deal with actual people who push back. Will it stop bypassing a test because it is directly not related to a feature I asked for? I don't think so.

SyneRyder 99 days ago |

The post mentions discussing projects with Claude via voice, but it isn't clear exactly how. Do they just mean sending voice memos via Whatsapp, the basic integration that you can get with OpenClaw? (That isn't really "discussing".) Or is this a full blown Eleven Labs conversational setup (or Parakeet, Voxtral, or whatever people are using?)

I'm not running OpenClaw, but I've given Claude its own email address and built a polling loop to check email & wake Claude up when I've sent it something. I'm finding a huge improvement from that. Working via email seems to change the Claude dynamic, it feels more like collaborating with a co-worker or freelancer. I can email Claude when I'm out of the house and away from my computer, and it has locked down access to use various tools so it can build some things in reply to my emails.

I've been looking into building out voice memos or an Eleven Labs setup as well, so I can talk to Claude while I'm out exercising, washing dishes etc. Voice memos will be relatively easy but I haven't yet got my head around how to integrate Eleven Labs and work with my local data & tools (I don't want a Claude that's running on Eleven Labs servers).

erksa 99 days ago | |

Openclaw is just that, it wakes on send and as cronjobs and get to work.

What made it so popular I think is that it made it easy to attach it to whatever "channel" you're comfortable with. The mac app comes with dictation, but unsure the amount of setup to get tts back.

nostrapollo 98 days ago |

Something sus about these posts that promote OpenClaw specifically, even on X when ClawdBot was first popping up - an unusual number of people were promoting it all without specific information on why it was useful. All the usual suspects were also promoting it (the 'dev influencer' accounts). Is this a new(?) tactic on hyping up a github repo for engagement?

0xbadcafebee 98 days ago |

I am currently in the process of setting up a local development environment to automate all my programming tasks (dev, test, qa, deploy, debug, etc; for android, ios, mac, windows, linux). It's a serious amount of effort, and a lot of complexity! I could probably move faster if I used AI to set it all up for me rather than setting it up myself. But there's significant danger there in letting an AI "do whatever it wants" on my machine that I'm not willing to accept yet, so the cost of safety is slowness in getting my environment finished.

I feel like there's this "secret" hiding behind all these AI tools, that actually it's all very complicated and takes a lot of effort to make work, but the tools we're given hides it all. It's nice that we benefit from its simplicity of use. But hiding complexity leads to unexpected problems, and I'm not sure we've seen any of those yet - other than the massive, gaping security hole.

squidsoup 98 days ago |

This reads like a linkedin post - high on enthusiasm, low on meaningful content.

asdflol123 98 days ago |

I've been experimenting with getting Cursor/ChatGPT to take an old legacy project (https://github.com/skullspace/Net-Symon-Netbrite) which is not terribly complex, but interacts with hardware with some very specific instructions and converting that into a python version. I've tried a few different versions/forks of the code (and other code to resurrect these signs) and each time it just absolutely cannot manage it. Which is quite frustrating and so instead the best thing I've been able to do is get it to comment each line of the code and explain what it is doing so I can manually implement it.

vnlamp 99 days ago |

When everyone can become a manager easily, then no one is a manager.

zagfh 99 days ago |

If everyone does that, the value of his "creations" are zero. Provided of course that it works and this isn't just another slopfluencer fulfilling his quota.

So, OpenClaw has changed his life: It has accelerated the AI psychosis.

ramoz 98 days ago |

Love that OP's previous post is from 2024: Rabbit R1 - The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones

XCSme 98 days ago | |

Maybe this is a sign that the AI bubble will pop soon.

reassess_blind 98 days ago |

It is a really impressive tool, but I just can’t trust it to oversee production code.

Regardless of how you isolate the OpenClaw instance (Mac Mini, VPS, whatever) - if it’s allowed to browse the web for answers then there’s the very real risk of prompt injection inserting malicious code into the project.

If you are personally reviewing every line of code that it generates you can mitigate that, but I’d wager none of these “super manager” users are doing that.

kylegalbraith 99 days ago |

What’s the security situation around OpenClaw today? It was just a week or two ago that there was a ton of concern around its security given how much access you give it.

mcintyre1994 99 days ago | |

I don’t think there’s any solution to what SimonW calls the lethal trifecta with it, so I’d say that’s still pretty impossible.

I saw on The Verve that they partnered with the company that repeatedly disclosed security vulnerabilities to try to make skills more secure though which is interesting: https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership

I’m guessing most of that malware was really obvious, people just weren’t looking, so it’s probably found a lot. But I also suspect it’s essentially impossible to actually reliably find malware in LLM skills by using an LLM.

veganmosfet 99 days ago | | |

Regarding prompt injection: it's possible to reduce the risk dramatically by: 1. Using opus4.6 or gpt5.2 (frontier models, better safety). These models are paranoid. 2. Restrict downstream tool usage and permissions for each agentic use case (programmatically, not as LLM instructions). 3. Avoid adding untrusted content in "user" or "system" channels - only use "tool". Adding tags like "Warning: Untrusted content" can help a bit, but remember command injection techniques ;-) 4. Harden the system according to state of the art security. 5. Test with red teaming mindset.

madeofpalk 99 days ago | | |

Honestly, 'malware' is just the beginning it's combining prompt injection with access to sensitive systems and write access to 'the internet' is the part that scares me about this.

I never want to be one wayward email away from an AI tool dumping my company's entire slack history into a public github issue.

ricardobayes 99 days ago | |

Can only reasonably be described as "shitshow".

veganmosfet 99 days ago | |

It's still bad, even if they fixed some low hanging fruits. Main issue: prompt injection when using the LLM "user" channel with untrusted content (even with countermeasures and frontier model) combined with insecure config / plugins / skills... I experimented with it: https://veganmosfet.github.io/2026/02/02/openclaw_mail_rce.h...

bowsamic 99 days ago | |

Many companies have totally banned it. For example at Qt it is banned on all company devices and networks

kolja005 99 days ago | |

My company has the github page for it blocked. They block lots of AI-related things but that's the only one I've seen where they straight up blocked viewing the source code for it at work.

HackerThemAll 99 days ago |

If my aim was to be a manager, I would have graduated a business university. But I want to have my hands and head dirty of programming, administering, and doing other technical stuff. I'm not going to manage, be it people or bots. So no, sorry.

And 99% those AI-created "amazing projects" are going to be dead or meaningless in due time, rather sooner than later. Wasted energy and water, not to mention the author's lifetime.

PranayKumarJain 96 days ago |

OpenClaw is particularly useful for bridging this gap. Because it's a self-hosted agent with persistent memory (via MEMORY.md and AGENTS.md), it doesn't just "forget" the big picture between sessions.

The "supervisor" workflow mentioned by others in this thread (using one agent to manage multiple worker agents) is exactly where the industry is heading. It turns the human from a "vibe coder" into an architect who manages state and requirements while the agents handle the implementation "beads".

If you're hitting the "stupid zone" on larger tasks, try breaking the plan into smaller, specific markdown specs first. OpenClaw's ability to "interview" a codebase and then implement from those specs in commit-sized chunks is a game changer for non-trivial monorepos.

timcobb 99 days ago |

I think in the future this might be known as AI megalomania

siva7 98 days ago | |

It is already known as Ai psychosis and ai productivity porn

timcobb 98 days ago | | |

Not bad not bad

cluckindan 98 days ago |

> NEXT PAGE

> Rabbit R1 - The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones

Kinda hard to take anything here seriously.

vivzkestrel 98 days ago |

- Dear OP, how much did you get paid in crypto to write this post?

- Because the seasoned developers have something entirely different to say https://www.xda-developers.com/please-stop-using-openclaw/

- Also please stop spamming HN with this stuff

danpalmer 98 days ago |

This post is well summed up by the link at the end: "Next post, Rabbit R1, The Upgraded Replacement for Smart Phones".

FergusArgyll 98 days ago |

Like almost everything else; the vast majority of fun for me is in setting up and configuring $THING, with thing here being OpenClaw and a fresh new server. After that I realize I have nothing to do with it and destroy the instance only to create a new one to try out some other self-hosted $THING

jdrhyne 97 days ago |

Same experience here. What pushed it over the top for me was adding document processing via the nutrient-openclaw plugin — my agent can now convert, OCR, redact, and sign PDFs without me switching tools. It's a native OpenClaw plugin so you just install and it's available.

https://github.com/PSPDFKit-labs/nutrient-openclaw -

The skill is here as well if you prefer a skill - https://clawhub.ai/jdrhyne/nutrient-openclaw

jikjeong 96 days ago |

OpenClaw is the best to make small PoC product. but production level? if they know SDLC, they couldn`t say that. the product that develop by AI could not well support updates that from PM or customer`s voice. even more patches? AI will broke own product, also according to other comment many developers want to control and understand their source code I absolutely agree. some people just enjoy command to AI and check its result even though the product doesn`t make well inside .

nickzana 98 days ago |

I haven't tried OpenClaw, but I gave Claude Code an account on my Forgejo instance. I found issues and PRs to be a very good level of abstraction for interfacing with the new agent teams feature, as well as bringing the "anytime, anywhere, low activation energy" benefits this article talks about.

I let it run in a VM on my desktop and I can check on its progress and provide feedback any time. Only took a few iterations of telling it to tweak its workflow to land on something very productive. Doesn't work for everything but it covers a lot of my work.

oldestofsports 98 days ago |

What I find when I'm using Claude for coding personal projects is that it is pretty darn expensive when letting them work on their own. Is the cost of tokens ever a concern for those who use OpenClaw?

ineedasername 98 days ago |

>I used to have way too many ideas but no way to build them all on my own—they just kept piling up. But now, everything is different.

This has been a significant aspect of ai use as well. As a result a feel a little less friction with myself, less that I am letting things slip by because, well, because I still want a nice balance to work, life, leisure, etc. I don’t want to overstate things, it’s not a cure all for any of these things, but it helps a lot.

cute_boi 99 days ago |

I think everyone cheering for AI will become its archenemy later. I’m very happy that companies like Salesforce and Duolingo, which fired so many people, are now tanking badly.

jikjeong 96 days ago |

OpenClaw is the best to make small PoC product. but production level? if they know SDLC, they couldn`t say that. the product that develop by AI could not well support updates that from PM or customer`s voice. even more patches? AI will broke own product, also many developers want to control and understand their source code I absolutely agree.

user7878 98 days ago |

I think AI agents and models are still evolving rapidly. Instead of trying to predict too far ahead, we should focus on the scale of transformation we’ve already seen in just the last two years—something that took decades to achieve in traditional programming. What comes next is worth watching closely.

Don't compare your day 1 with some one's day 100

binaryfuel 98 days ago |

You must use the paid plans and get the pro / max subscriptions to get ultimate results

The free versions are toys

nurettin 99 days ago |

This euphoria quickly turns into disappointment once you finish scaffolding and actually start the development/refinement phase and claude/codex starts shitting all over the code and you have to babysit it 100% of the time.

HumanOstrich 99 days ago | |

That's a different problem and not really relevant to OpenClaw. Also, your issue is primarily a skills issue (your skills) if you're using one of the latest models on Claude Code or Codex.

snowe2010 99 days ago | | |

You have to be joking. I tried Codex for several hours and it has to be one of the worst models I’ve seen. It was extremely fast at spitting out the worst broken code possible. Claude is fine, but what they said is completely correct. At a certain point, no matter what model you use, llms cannot write good working code. This usually occurs after they’ve written thousands of lines of relatively decent code. Then the project gets large enough that if they touch one thing they break ten others.

nurettin 99 days ago | | |

Well, I will not be berated by an ostrich!

zkmon 99 days ago |

That's a very inefficient way to interact with CC. There will be transmission losses that need too much feedback looping.

So, it appears that we have come a long way bubbling up through abstraction layers: assembly code -> high-level languages -> scripting -> prompting -> openclaw.

TedHerman 98 days ago |

https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/7mlk4e/writing_vs_...

rahulrav 98 days ago |

Also the same author:

> Generally, I believe (Rabbit) R1 has the potential to change the world.

There is a pattern here.

DeathArrow 99 days ago |

If you use Cursor or Claude, you have to oversee it and steer it so it gets very close to what you want to achieve.

If you delegate these tasks to OpenClaw, I am not really sure the result is exactly what you want to achieve and it works like you want it to.

kortilla 98 days ago |

What has this “team” actually achieved? I keep reading these manager cosplay blogs/tweets/etc but they aren’t ever about how a real team was replaced or how anything of significant complexity was actually built.

PKop 99 days ago |

Where's the code and what did you build? Everything else is just platitudes

ainiro 98 days ago |

You should check out Magic Cloud ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eSKxc6oM8

yellow_lead 99 days ago |

> My productivity did improve, but for any given task, I still had to jump into the project, set up the environment, open my editor and Claude Code terminal. I was still the operator; the only difference was that instead of typing code manually, I was typing intent into a chat box.

> Then OpenClaw came along, and everything changed.

> After a few rounds of practice, I found that I could completely step away from the programming environment and handle an entire project’s development, testing, deployment, launch, and usage—all through chatting on my phone.

So, with Claude Code, you're stuck typing in a chat box. Now, with OpenClaw, you can type in a chat box on your phone? This is exciting and revolutionary.

toddmorrow 98 days ago |

LLMs are like a jack hammer. very good if you hold it and point it. you cannot let go of it for more than half a second. it can hammer but it cannot guide itself.

CrzyLngPwd 98 days ago |

Sounds like someone who doesn't like writing code.

aiobe 99 days ago |

what was the instruction to write and promote this post?

ricardobayes 99 days ago | |

On that thought you got to ask yourself why almost every thread has 200+, some even 500+ comments now. Definitely wasn't like this a few months ago

Anamon 96 days ago | | |

The comments tend to be overwhelmingly negative, though.

potatoman22 98 days ago | | |

Someone should analyze this and share results. The data should be there

chrisjj 98 days ago | | |

This "AI" mind virus has spread.

siva7 98 days ago | | |

Oh boy i suspected it's already happening. If dang and YC don't provide good guardrails against ai slop, this community will soon die.

phito 99 days ago | |

Exactly, I'm not going to waste my time reading this AI generating post that's basically promoting itself.

What I really wonder, is who the heck is upvoting this slop on hackernews?

CamperBob2 99 days ago | | |

Another good example, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860845

Articles like these should be flagged, and typically would be, but they sometimes appear mysteriously flag-proof.

Kiro 99 days ago | | |

I did because I want to see a critical discussion around it. I'm still trying to figure out if there's any substance to OpenClaw, and hyperbolic claims like this is a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's like Cunningham's Law.

guerrilla 99 days ago | | |

It only has 11 points. It just got caught in the algorithm. That's all.

wiseowise 98 days ago | |

Generate hot fart to rattle HN.

tipsytoad 98 days ago |

The guys previous post was how rabbit r1 is revolutionising the smartphone. So I would take this post with a grain (heap?) of salt

serf 98 days ago |

everything I see people do with openclaw is less like LLM work and more like 'Yahoo! Pipes' work.

I haven't been able to find a good use for myself yet. Almost everything I use an LLM for has some kind of hard human-in-the-loop factor that is as of yet inescapable -- but I also don't really use LLMs for things like "sort my email.". mostly entirely coding.

tantricked 98 days ago |

Every programmer is basically a manager. Code is the language we use to communicate, and hardware is the resource we manage.

h4kunamata 97 days ago |

What is different here?? This is what companies worldwide are doing already, using AI, any, to fully automate everything.

Some are learning the hard way why you shouldn't do that having to hire freelancer developers the fix their entire code.

I spoke with a friend who is also in IT, the company he works for is full on into AI, everything is done or managed by AI, they only hit the button. Dude was describing their infrastructure and projects like if AI was a God.

Those are gonna be the first ones to fall, because they aren't using AI to improve their work, they are using AI to completely take over, full access to projects, full access to infrastructures, you name it.

listless 98 days ago |

What I don’t understand in these posts is how exactly is the AI checking its work. That’s literally what I’m here for now. It doesn’t know how to log in to my iOS app using the simulator, or navigate to the firebase console and download a plist file.

Once we get to a spot where the AI can check its work and iterate, the loop is closed. But we are a long way off from that atm. Even for the web. I mean, have you tried the Playwright MCP server? Aside from being the slowest tool calls I have ever seen, the agent struggles mightily to figure out the simplest of navigation and interaction.

Yes yes Unit tests, but functional is the be all end all and until it can iterate and create its own functional test suite, I just don’t get it.

What am I missing?

meindnoch 99 days ago |

These are the same people who a few years ago made blogposts about their elaborate Notion (or Roam "Research") setups, and how it catalyzed them to... *checks notes* create blogposts about their elaborate Notion setups!

Giorgi 99 days ago |

Yeah i do not know, still waiting to see actual openclaw practical application usage in real world

diebillionaires 98 days ago |

Not a lot of proof in this post. A lot of admiration, but not a lot of clear examples.

bethekidyouwant 99 days ago |

This is for people that talk to ChatGPT at length in voice mode. You are not the audience.

necklesspen 99 days ago |

The same author had good things to say about the R1, a device you generally won't see many glowing reviews about. (https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...)

Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their past opinion - but since the piece is ultimately an opinion based on their own experience I'm going to take it along a giant pile of salt that the author's standards for the output of AI tools are vastly different than mine.

podgorniy 98 days ago |

The impact from appearing on HN is disproportionately bigger than anything else.

It's the endgame.

maciejzj 98 days ago |

Mind you, that regardless of your sentiment towards OpenClaw, not everyone is able to afford a sparse Mac Mini (especially given ram prices) and a ton of Claude tokens/super beefy GPU for local models to run this stuff. That's to the supposed "democratisation of knowledge and technology".

st3fan 98 days ago | |

FWIW Mac Minis have not increased in price because of "RAM Prices". Same models cost exactly the same as a year ago. Maybe it will change in the future, maybe not. Who knows. But right now Apple seems to have secure a good stash of RAM to use and avoid price changes.

manmal 98 days ago |

I‘ve done some phone programming over the Xmas holidays with clawdbot. This does work, BUT you absolutely need demand clearly measurable outcomes of the agent, like a closed feedback loop or comparison with a reference implementation, or perfect score in a simulated environment. Without this, the implementation will be incomplete and likely utter crap.

Even then, the architecture will be horrible unless you chat _a lot_ about it upfront. At some point, it’s easier to just look in the terminal.

robinhood 98 days ago |

So much so that OP clearly asked to write this blog post for him.

Click bait at its peak.

relativeadv 99 days ago |

Once again I am asking for you to please show us what you have built. Bring receipts.

skywhopper 98 days ago |

This sort of post is useless without examples. What projects have you built? How did you go about it? What challenges did you face? What did you learn? Just saying “this is amazing now I am a super manager turning out projects left and right” is not convincing.

jweather 98 days ago |

For the better? For the better, right?

politelemon 99 days ago |

> Thank you, AGI—for me, it’s already here.

Poe's law strikes... I can't tell if this is satire.

forty 98 days ago | |

Wow, I re read after reading your comment and now I'm fairly sure the whole post is humourous ^^

magicmicah85 98 days ago |

Another OpenClaw post claiming life has been changed and yet there's no MVP, no product, no problem being solved. I look forward to a future update.

alpb 98 days ago |

I'm sorry dude but your last post was also hyping up R1 which was a total disaster. Do you mind actually sharing your experience with OpenClaw, such as how are you orchestrating a project? How much does it cost? How do you prompt it? What tasks do you get done? How much does it actually take to execute on those tasks? What is your interaction with the agent?

llm_nerd 98 days ago |

This reads like a peacocking LinkedIn post where someone desperately shows they are not just with it, they are ahead of it. The space is absolutely filled with this sort of noise, primarily people who dismissed AI as something only the nubs like, so now their cope is to do the "now it's useful and I have catapulted ahead of all the others bit".

gpvos 99 days ago |

Thank you; this explains why working with AI doesn't interest me.

_345 98 days ago |

Lmao (was the very next article suggested to me when i got to the end)

https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...

steele 98 days ago |

PsyOp or AIslop

wiseowise 98 days ago |

More unhinged takes, please.

I hope at some point there will be a medical research into this hysteria.

fullstackchris 98 days ago |

another slop post - show costs, show what you have built, or at least a tiny snippet of code? (or even just direct links to git repo or projects IN post please?)

getting sick of this fluff stuff

cantalopes 98 days ago |

Yeeeah nah

akashnagar 98 days ago |

Amazing

reassess_blind 98 days ago |

I hate websites that don’t finish loading, like this one on Brave iOS. Gives the impression it’s downloading something massive.

spagheddi 98 days ago |

yeah, i can't take this post seriously if this was their other post. https://reorx.com/blog/rabbit-r1-the-upgraded-replacement-fo...

aeternum 98 days ago |

Who wants to bet one of his 'agents' wrote and posted this article?

Agents work but still mostly produce slop.

duxup 98 days ago |

I have trouble taking these AI posts seriously that don’t have code / actual examples.

peab 98 days ago |

This guy's next blog post is hyping up the rabbit r1. How can one take this seriously?

moomoo11 99 days ago |

Press [X] to doubt

Press [Space] to skip

personjerry 98 days ago |

This seems like AI slop?

There's not a single real example, and it even has all the em-dashes intact.

mier 98 days ago |

if 90% is good enough, you are a winner to try your idea and fail fast. if you want to reach 91 or more, AI is a slop and hype to burn our pensions and contribute to vastly to global warming and cognitive decline consumerism evolution

virajk_31 98 days ago |

No hate but these tools feels like yet another JS framework trend

XCSme 98 days ago |

Is this satire? I can't really tell

daytonix 98 days ago |

lol that the "next" article was him glazing the failed Rabbit R1

zeknife 99 days ago |

I get the impression LLM agents are a bit like tamagochi but for tech bros.

whateveracct 99 days ago |

okay dumbo

827a 98 days ago |

OpenClaw feels to me like the promised land of productivity is always over the horizon, but I keep walking toward it and it never crests over.

I quite like it just from the simple perspective that its a local LLM provider that's available to chat with in tons of apps I already use (e.g. Discord); its a good reduction in the number of parties who are privy to these conversations. I'm not sure if there's another system out there that's so plug-and-play, with so many options for conversation (Discord, Telegram, text, self-hosted web ui, etc).

But the tool calling is vastly overblown. It takes forever to get them set up, and that's to get them barely working. Bluebubbles has always been an ish app whose reverse engineering of the iMessage protocol is more likely to break on every macOS upgrade than do what you want it to do; and OpenClaw's iMessage integration is built on it. I've not yet gotten a Spotify skill to work (though I'm not sure what I'd do with it when I have one); the models just run in circles saying "it should be set up, ope its not, spotify_player sucks, lets try spt, wait that isn't working, lets try ncspot, why isn't this working". The "gog" tool is interesting, its a CLI-based tool for accessing data in your google account, it works alright, though OpenClaw's icon for the tool in their repository is a game controller icon; I suspect a mistaken, likely vibed, reference to the unrelated GOG/Good Ol' Games PC game store. What a mess. I could go on.

The cheaper models critically struggle to grep the full array of tools they have available to them. Kimi K2.5 exhibits this behavior where it will reiterate that it does not have access to my calendar, but usually if I ask it four or five times in a row, eventually it will claim it "discovered" the gog/Google Calendar tool in a hidden sub-directory (what?). Even with more intelligent models, like Opus or 5.2/5.3, the tools oftentimes need to be invoked with highly specific verbiage; "what's on my calendar" might work if you're lucky, but "use gog to fetch my calendar and display today's events" usually works.

I oftentimes just don't see the point. I can click the Gmail or Google Calendar app on my phone and get what I need out of those apps in less-than 6 seconds; it would take longer for me to dictate the exact phrasing to get what I need out of OpenClaw, let alone type it. I can see some argument for cross-operating on data between two apps, but getting that to work without paying Anthropic fifty cents for every query is even rarer. When I need an LLM to operate on my Obsidian notes, I can just use Claude Code or OpenCode... why do I need OpenClaw?

(I am genuinely open minded here; but articles like this just dance around high-minded abstract ideas of "im a super ai manager im so productive" without giving concrete examples. My suspicion is that the people who write these things were previously deeply unproductive people, and now AI has enabled them to achieve a mere fraction of the productivity that most of us already had.)

(And that's being generous. I think there's also a lot of grifters out there. I'll have to fire a stray at Cloudflare for this one: They've published a "get OpenClaw working on Cloudflare" repo where, if you set it up, would straight up cost you $50-$60, maybe $100/month; and they lie [1] about the cost in their own documentation. And you're paying that in addition to the LLM cost. Very bad look from a company I admire.)

[1] https://github.com/cloudflare/moltworker/issues/76#issuecomm...

trilogic 98 days ago |

Ads Pff..

jootsing 99 days ago |

this feels like the only thing you've probably done with open claw

hackermeows 98 days ago |

been writing code for 15 years now , agree with the author about this one , open-claw like agents are going to be the future. Already automated away a bunch of routine stuff like checkin FB marketplace if l’m looking to but something , daily stock position brief , calendar management , grocery planning and buying , workout and calorie tracking . Stopped using a bunch of app directly overnight . The “mid-wits” are the one with their head still stuck under that sand

fullstackchris 98 days ago | |

and the "hype-wits" don't realize openclaw is just claude with good mcp. there is nothing new under the sun. its just the first time someone was benevolent enough to open source the codebase to the public or it went viral enough to matter... and yet what people focus on is its "emergence" or "agi" - neither of which are remotely true. but good luck "crushing" those "mid-wits"

hackermeows 98 days ago | | |

Yes claude + scripts without any big corp restrictions / bloat , if i want to connect to a website or api i can just do it. If you expose it to me as a human it is fair game for my assistant to read data the same way i do. Its like the old days of internet . I build harnesses for a living these days , i see why enterprises are slow to even to see what is possible

nycdatasci 99 days ago |

Since many posts mention lack of substance, providing a link to the All-In Podcast from last week in which they discuss Clawdbot (prior to re-brand). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXY1kx7zlkk&t=2754s

For the impatient, here's a transcript summary (from Gemini):

  The speaker describes creating a "virtual employee" (dubbed a "replicant") running on a local server with unrestricted, authenticated access to a real productivity stack—including Gmail, Notion, Slack, and WhatsApp. Tasked with podcast production, the agent autonomously researched guests, "vibe coded" its own custom CRM to manage data, sent email invitations, and maintained a work log on a shared calendar. The experiment highlights the agent's ability to build its own internal tools to solve problems and interact with humans via email and LinkedIn without being detected as AI.

He ultimately concludes that for some roles, OpenClaw can do 90%+ of the work autonomously. Jason controversially mentions buying Macs to run Kimi 2.5 locally so they can save on costs. Others argue that hosting an open model on inference optimized hardware in the cloud is a better option, but doing so requires sharing potentially sensitive data.

tantalor 99 days ago | |

There is a reason I stopped listening to All-In Podcast.

berkanunal 98 days ago | |

> The investor Jason Calacanis stayed in touch with Mr. Epstein after his 2008 conviction and three years later helped the financier contact a pair of Bitcoin developers, according to emails included in the documents.

Did Jason ever mentioned this in the episode, can you ask gemini?

rsynnott 98 days ago | |

I mean... If Jason Calacanis told me the sky was blue, I would be _checking_.

(At some point he seems to have gone from professionally-wrong-about-everything blogger to magical-podcast-thought-leader. I have no idea how this happened.)