I've used OpenClaw for 2 full days and 3 evenings now. I simply don't believe people are using this for anything majorly productive.
I really, really want to like it. I see glimpses of the future in it. I generally try to be a positive guy. But after spending $200 on Claude Max, running with Opus 4.5 most of the time, I'm just so irritated and agitated... IT'S JUST SO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS.
1. It goes off on these huge 10min tangents that are the equivalent of climbing out of your window and flying around the world just to get out of your bed. The /abort command works maybe 1 time out of 100, so I end up having to REBOOT THE SERVER so as not to waste tokens!
2. No matter how many times I tell it not to do things with side effects without checking in with me first, it insists on doing bizarre things like trying to sign up for new accounts people when it hits an inconvenient snag with the account we're using, or it tried emailing and chatting to support agents because it can't figure out something it could easily have asked ME for help with, etc.
3. Which reminds me that its memory is awful. I have to remind it to remind itself. It doesn't understand what it's doing half the time (e.g. it forgets the password it generated for something). It forgets things regularly; this could be because I keep having to reboot the server.
4. It forgets critical things after compaction because the algorithm is awful. There I am, typing away, and suddenly it's like the Men in Black paid a visit and the last 30min didn't happen. Surely just throwing away the oldest 75% of tokens would be more effective than whatever it's doing? Because it completely loses track of what we're doing and what I asked it NOT to do, I end up with problem (1) again.
5. When it does remember things, it spreads those memories all over the place in different locations and forgets to keep them consistent. So after a reboot it gets confused about what is the truth.
but like a person - when the possibility of going off in the wron g direction is so high, i've always had 1 - 2 line prompts, small iterations much more appealing. The only times i've had to rollback would be when i run out of credits, and a new model cant deal with the half baked context, errors, refactoring.
Meanwhile my entire company uses AI and the on the ground reality for me versus the cohort above is so much at odds with each other we're both claiming the other side is insane.
I haven't used these bots yet but I want to see the full story. Not just one guys take and one guys personal experience. The hype exists because there are success stories. I want to hear those as well.
The person you’re criticizing says they’re a heavy AI user. The take was about OpenClaw, not AI.
I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.
Right, I'm saying AI in general is an example of the unreliability of peoples experiences on openclaw. If people are so unreliable about the narrative of AI, I don't trust the narrative of openclaw which on this thread in particular is very negative and in stark contrast to the hype.
>I dropped $200 on Claude Max in my personal capacity to test OpenClaw because I use Opus 4.5 all day in Cursor on an enterprise subscription… because it works for those problems.
The comment wasn't directed at you personally. I'm just saying I want to see counter examples of openclaw succeeding, not just examples of it failing. Frankly on this thread there's Zero success stories which I find sort of strange.
Pretty much everyone in my company also uses AI. But everyone sees the same downsides.
Everyone sees the downsides but the upside is the one everyone is in denial about. It's like yeah, there's downsides but why is literally everyone using it?
Moltbot has the shape of the future but doesn’t feel like it to me. Sort of like Langchain once was. Demonstrated some new paradigm shift but is itself flawed so may not be the implementation that lasts. Time will tell.
The only thing here to say is “put it in a VM and try it”. It’s easy to try.
And there's plenty who worship at the altar of Claude.
There's more people saying AI doesn't live up to the hype. The people who are saying it's utterly useless is still quite large on HN. It's just that most of them are midway through changing their story because reality is smashing them in the face.
>And there's plenty who worship at the altar of Claude.
I mean who doesn't use it? No one claims it's perfect or a god of code. But if you're not using it you're behind.
It is possible they are correct and nothing you have written suggests otherwise.
> The people who are saying it's utterly useless is still quite large on HN.
Are these people's opinions less valid than your own? Are you angry your opinion might be a minority on this one website?
> It's just that most of them are midway through changing their story because reality is smashing them in the face.
You made this up.
> But if you're not using it you're behind.
Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man
What I've always wanted: a morning briefing that pulls in my calendar (CalDAV), open Todoist items, weather, and relevant news. The first three are trivial API work. The news part is where it gets interesting and more difficult - RSS feeds and news APIs are firehoses. But an LLM that knows your interests could actually filter effectively. E.g., I want tech news but don't care about Android (iPhone user) or MacOS (Linux user). That kind of nuanced filtering is hard to express as traditional rules but trivial for an LLM.
If all you want to do is schedule a task there are much easier solutions, like a few lines of python, instead of installing something so heavy in a vm that comes with a whole bunch of security nightmares?
Yeah, absolutely. And that was going to be my approach for a personal AI assistant side project. No need to reinvent the wheel writing a Todoist integration when MCPs exist.
The difference is where it runs. ChatGPT Tasks and MCP through the Claude/OpenAI web interfaces run on their infrastructure, which means no access to your local network — your Home Assistant instance, your NAS, your printer. A self-hosted agent on a mac mini or your old laptop can talk to all of that.
But I think the big value-add here might be "disposable automation". You could set up a Home Assistant automation to check the weather and notify you when rain is coming because you're drying clothes on the clothesline outside. That's 5 minutes of config for something you might need once. Telling your AI assistant "hey, I've got laundry on the line. Let me know if rain's coming and remind me to grab the clothes before it gets dark" takes 10 seconds and you never think about it again. The agent has access to weather forecasts, maybe even your smart home weather station in Home Assistant, and it can create a sub-agent, which polls those once every x minutes and pings your phone when it needs to.
Yes, basically just some "appropriate MCP servers" can do. but OpenClaw sell it as a whole preconfigured package.
At some point OpenClaw will take over in terms of it's benefits but it doesn't feel close yet for the simplicity of just run the job every so often and have OpenCode decide what it needs to do.
Currently it shoots me a notification if my trip to work is likely to be delayed. Could I do it manually well sure.
My point was specifically about the news filtering part, which was something I had tried in the past but never managed to solve to my satisfaction.
The agent's job in the end for a morning briefing would be:
- grab weather, calendar, Todoist data using APIs or MCP
- grab news from select sources via RSS or similar, then filter relevant news based on my interests and things it has learned about me
- synthesize the information above
It's a little slow sometimes, but it's the first time I've felt like I have an independent agent that can handle things kind of.
The only two things I did were 1. Ask it to create a Monero address so I could send it money, and have it notify me whenever money is sent to that address. It spun up its own monerod daemon which was really heavy and it ran out of space. So I had to get it to use the Monero wallet instead, but had to manually intervene to shut down the monerod daemon and kill the process and restart openclaw. In the end it worked and still works. 2. I simply asked it "@ me the the silver price every day around 8am ET" and it just figured out how to do it and schedule it. To my understanding it has its own cron functionality using a json file. 3. Write and host some python scripts I can ping externally to send me a notification
I've had it done other misc stuff, but ChatGPT is almost always better for queries, and coding agents + Zed is much better for coding. But with a cheap enough vm and using openrouter plus glm 4.7 or flash, it can do some quirky fun stuff. I see the advantage as mainly having control of a system where it can have long term state (like files, processes, etc) and manage context itself. It is more like glue and it's full mastery and control of a Linux system gives it a lot of flexibility.
Think of it more as agent+os which you aren't getting with raw Claude or ChatGPT.
I've done nothing that interesting with it, it's absolutely a security nightmare, but it's really fun!
An embedding-based memory system (letta, mem0, or a self-built PostgreSQL + pgvector setup) lets you retrieve selectively and only grab what's relevant to the current query. Much better fit for anything beyond a narrow use case. Your assistant doesn't need to know your location and address when you're asking it to look up whether sharks are indeed older than trees, but it probably should know where you live when you ask it about the weather, or good Thai restaurants near you.
It can have full access to the system it’s running on. So it can browse internet via browser, run cli commands, api’s via skills etc.
Idea is to act like a Jarvis personal assistant. You tell what to do via chat e.g telegram, then it does it for you.
Another is that you have access to and control over its memory much more directly, since it's entirely based on text files on your machine. Much less vendor lock-in.