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!
Quite literally, the previous post on this blog is from 2024 talking about what a revolution the Rabbit R1 is. We all know how that turned out. This is why I give every new trendy developer tool a few months to see if it’s really a good thing or just hype.
Maybe that's why these users go crazy over openclaw, they may need or yearn for such a tool. I don't but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for it though.
> Generally, I believe R1 has the potential to change the world.
oh man this is fantastic
Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.
It's a racket never ends.
Not people, that post is from OpenClaw... 100% ;-)
I’m working on a product related to “sensemaking”. And I’m using this abstract, academic term on purpose to highlight the emotional experience, rather than “analysis” or “understanding”.
It is a constant lure products and tools have to create the feeling of sensemaking. People want (pejorative) tools that show visualizations or summaries, without thinking about the particular visual/summary artifact is useful, actionable or accurate!
Don't forget about Obsidian
Obsidian is local first with basically zero lock-in, and it's heavily community driven. Don't lump it in with Notion.
True, but it does have the cottage industry of influencers selling their vault skeleton and template/plugin packs for unlocking maximum productivity… same as notion. And Evernote, to an extent, before that.
Yeah, after getting burnt out on Evernote I just use basic markdown files for my notes. I never bother with anymore features beyond "write to file" or "grep directory for keywords" because I know I'll personally not benefit from them. The act of writing notes is what is useful to me, retrieving the notes are hardly ever useful.
And how to properly use your Day-Runner before that (c1996). Productivity hacks sell because humans want silver bullets.
Both are great tools though.
They (or their devs) are not at fault that some people honestly believe you can't be as productive or consistent without a "thought garden" or whatever.
But today, the AI is writing the blogposts for them.
"your personal experience is superficial compared to my pessimistic belief. You only wrote a blog post with anecdotal claims whereas I wrote an entire comment with zero attempt at disputing your actual findings"
Don't use quotes to make it seem like someone said something they didn't.
That's quite prevalent here and on Reddit.
Most famously, patio11 makes it a definitive part of his writing style.
I agree it's a terrible use of quotation marks, but it's a widely-used style I've been forced to accept.
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.
Hah, I read that as well and made a big "hmmmmmmmmm" sound...
The last time I talked to someone about OpenClaw and how it is helping them, they told me it tells them what their calendar has for them today or auto-tweets for them (i.e., non-human spam). The first is as simple as checking your calendar, and the second is blatant spam.
Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?
> how it is helping them
This should be the opening for every post about the various "innovations" in the space.
Preferably with a subsequent line about the manual process that was worth putting the extra effort into prior to the shiny new thing.
I really can imagine a better UX then opening my calendar in one-click and manual scanning.
Another frequent theme is "tell me the weather." One again, Google home (alexa or whatever) handles it while I'm still in bed and let's me go longer without staring at a screen.
The spam use-case is probably the best use-case I've seen, as in it truly saves time for an equal or better result, but that means being cool with being a spammer.
This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it was fun nonetheless.
I've been applying for jobs but I don't want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam, I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO LARPing at its finest.
Also a big fan of giving it access to my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I need to read or update.
I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.
Not via OpenClaw, but I automate breakdowns of my analytics and I recently started getting digests of social media conversations relevant to my interests. It's also good for monitoring services and doing first line triage on issues.
> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?
Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product similar to OpenClaw. It can organize your files and directories and works really great (until it doesn't, of course). But don't worry, you surely have a backup and need to test the restore function anyway.
> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance
Well... no. But I do really like it. It's just an always-on Claude you can chat with in Telegram, that tries to keep context, that has access to a ton of stuff, and it can schedule wakeup times for itself.
I think a sizable proportion of people just want to play "large company exec". Their dream is to have an assistant telling them how busy their day is, all the meetings they have, then to go to those meetings and listen to random fluff people tell them while saying "mmh yeah what a wise observation" or "mmh no not enough synergy here, let's pivot and really leave our mark on this market, crunch the numbers again".
I can't come up with any other explanation for why there seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that much to show for it.
They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out of it.
Everybody here probably already has an opinion about the utility of coding agents, and having it manage your calendar isn't terribly inspired, but there is a lot more you can do.
To be specific, for the past year I've been having numerous long conversations about all the books I've read. I talk about what I liked, didn't like, the ideas and and plots I found compelling or lame, talks about the characters, the writing styles of authors, the contemporary social context the authors might have been addressing, etc. Every aspect of the books I can think off. Then I ask it for recommendations, I tell it given my interests and preferences, suggest new books with literary merit.
ChatGPT just knocks this out of the park, amazing suggestions every time, I've never had so much fun reading than in the past year. It's like having the world's best read and most patient librarian at your personal disposal.
> LARP'ing CEO
My experience with plain Claude Code is that I can step back and get an overview of what I'm doing, since I tend to hyperfocus on problems, preventing me from having a simultaneous overview.
It does feel like being a project manager (a role I've partially filled before) having your agency in autopilot, which is still more control than having team members do their thing.
So while it may feel very empowering to be the CEO of your own computer, the question is if it has any CEO-like effect on your work.
Taking it back to Claude Code and feeling like a manager, it certainly does have a real effect for me.
I won't dispute that running a bunch of agents in sync won't give you an extension of that effect.
The real test is: Do you invoice accordingly?
Our cognition evolves over time. That article was written when the Rabbit R1 presentation video was first released, I saw it and immediately reflect my thoughts on my blog. At that time, nobody had the actual product, let alone any idea how it actually worked.
Even so, I still believe the Rabbit has its merits. This does not conflict with my view that OpenClaw is what is truly useful to me.
I think this shows an unfettered optimism for things we don't know anything about. Many see this as a red flag for the quality of opinions.
> R1 is definitely an upgraded replacement for smartphones. It’s versatile and fulfills all everyday requirements, with an interaction style akin to talking to a human.
You seemed pretty certain about how the product worked!
No, he seemed pretty certain about how they demoed it.
We're allowed to have opinions about promises that turn out not to be true.
If the rabbit had been what it claimed it would be, it would have been an obvious upgrade for me, at least.
I just want a voice-first interface.
You literally wrote in the blog post:
> Today, Rabbit R1 has been released, and I view it as a milestone in the evolution of our digital organ.
You viewed it as a “milestone in the evolution of our digital organ” without you let alone anyone having even tested it?
Yet you say ”That article was written when the Rabbit R1 presentation video was first released, I saw it and immediately reflect my thoughts on my blog.”?
> Maybe it's unfair to judge an author's current opinion by their past opinion
Yes I think it is
The blogger lists 6 years of experience on their homepage. Safe to take their opinions with a grain of salt.
No, it's actually reasonable und perfectly fine.
Reputation, trustworthiness, limited/different perspectives exist.
And one sided media does as weil. Or do you expect Fox News to publish an unbiased report just next?
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".
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.
> 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.
A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correct thing as "it is too big of a refactor", doesn't understand that the dev database is not the prod database and avoids migrations. And so forth.
I've got 10+ years of coding experience, I am an AI advocate, but not vibe coding. AI is a great tool to help with the boring bits, using it to initialize files, help figure out various approaches, as a first pass code reviewer, helping with configuring, those things all work well.
But full-on replacing coders? It's not there yet. Will require an order of magnitude more improvement.
I agree with you in part, but I think the market is going to shift so that you won’t so many need “mega projects”. More and more, projects will be small and bespoke, built around what the team needs or answering a single question rather than forcing teams to work around an established, dominant solution.
How much are you willing to bet on this outcome and what metrics are you going to measure it with when we come to collect in 3 years?
You’re right, but on the other hand once you have a basic understanding security, architecture, etc you can prompt around these issues. You need a couple of years of experience but that’s far less then the 10-15 years of experience you needed in the past.
If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
> If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
I don't feel like most providers keep a model for more than 2 years. GPT-4o got deprecated in 1.5 years. Are we expecting coding models to stay stable for longer time horizons?
I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp, training provider, educational foundation, etc has an incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one.
A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of security that things are going fine while overlooking potential massive security issues.
Somewhere on an HN thread I saw someone claiming that they "solved" security problems in their vibe-coded app by adding a "security expert" agent to their workflow.
All I could think was, "good luck" and I certainly hope their app never processes anything important...
Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects.
SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!
>Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.
Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no one will ever use?
Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they feel the public won't feel the same.
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.
I was reading the post and had the same feeling of superficiality. I don’t think a human wrote it tbh
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.
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.
It’s a fun example, because openclaw is the boss in it and you are the agent.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
When everyone can become a manager easily, then no one is a manager.
> My answer is: become a “super manager.”
Honestly I'd rather die
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?
Nothing, that is why it change his life ;-)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
Can only reasonably be described as "shitshow".
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.
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.
> Adding tags like "Warning: Untrusted content" can help
It cannot. This is the security equivalent of telling it to not make mistakes.
> Restrict downstream tool usage and permissions for each agentic use case
Reasonable, but you have to actually do this and not screw it up.
> Harden the system according to state of the art security
"Draw the rest of the owl"
You're better off treating the system as fundamentally unsecurable, because it is. The only real solution is to never give it untrusted data or access to anything you care about. Which yes, makes it pretty useless.
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.
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.
Many companies have totally banned it. For example at Qt it is banned on all company devices and networks
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.
I think in the future this might be known as AI megalomania
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.
Yeah i do not know, still waiting to see actual openclaw practical application usage in real world
Once again I am asking for you to please show us what you have built. Bring receipts.
This is for people that talk to ChatGPT at length in voice mode. You are not the audience.
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.
Unfortunately to the detriment of the people who like doing the actual work, software dev pays far too good salaries. In the last 10 years the industry has been inundated with people from other backgrounds, who think "alignment" and "coordination" and "calibration" and "strategy" is all there is to it.
Where's the code and what did you build? Everything else is just platitudes
what was the instruction to write and promote this post?
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
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?
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.
It only has 11 points. It just got caught in the algorithm. That's all.
But I see these kinds of post every day on HN with hundreds of upvotes. And it's a thousand times worse on Reddit.
The hundreds of billions of dollars in investment probably have something to do with it. Many wealthy/powerful people are playing for hegemonic control of a decent chunk of the US economy. The entire GDP increase for the US last year was due to AI and by extension data centers. So not only the AI execs, but every single capitalist in the US whose wealth depends on line going every up year. Which is, like, all of them. In the wealthiest country on the planet.
So many wealthy players invested the outcome, and the technology for astroturfing (LLMs) can ironically be used to boost itself and further its own development
I was thinking the exact same thing earlier today. I think you're right. They have so much at stake, infinite money and the perfect technology to do it.
Thank you; this explains why working with AI doesn't interest me.
> Thank you, AGI—for me, it’s already here.
Poe's law strikes... I can't tell if this is satire.
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.
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.
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.
I get the impression LLM agents are a bit like tamagochi but for tech bros.
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.
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.
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.
I beg to differ, and so do a lot of other people. But if you're locked into this mindset, I can't help you.
Also, Codex isn't a model, so you don't even understand the basics.
And you spent "several hours" on it? I wish I could pick up useful skills by flailing around for a few hours. You'll need to put more effort into learning how to use CLI agents effectively.
Start with understanding what Codex is, what models it has available, and which one is the most recent and most capable for your usage.
Well, I will not be berated by an ostrich!
this feels like the only thing you've probably done with open claw
I guess things look great when you are on top of the world.
Just be careful, you may actually be near the Mount in a Dunning–Kruger graph.
I am currently cleaning up after Claude in a project and dont feel the same enthusiasm.
> 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.
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.
There is a reason I stopped listening to All-In Podcast.