It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.
Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.
A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.
The person you're replying to said they know someone who closed a few deals as a result of their OpenClaw. How is that not interesting?
It doesn't prove that it's globally useful, well implemented, or even worth the cost/effort. But it is something interesting.
I read /r/openclaw for ideas on automations and 95% of the content is complaints or people having it do things that just don't need to be done.
As a side question for anyone reading this, what are the best agentic AI subreddits for people who are actually using it for work and not just personal dashboards?
To that end, I found this amazing project called OpenCrow. It's aggressively DM chat, and I wanted support for group chats (so it can be a household helper), so I forked* it and made it exactly what I want.
Now I actually have two personal agents, one just for me, and one for the household. They are each in their own container, and the whole thing is managed by my Nix* config.
* https://github.com/pkulak/opencrow
* https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...
Hermes is focused, tight and does exactly what it set out to do. I already moved to Hermes.
But after trying both Hermes and OpenClaw, it feels like they both... miss the point? Last time I tried OpenClaw it wanted to download something like 11 GB of local models to do... something (embeddings for memory indexing or chat labeling/classification maybe?) which my sorry old 16gb M1 is certainly not capable of running.
Hermes seems to suffer from the same problem: why do I need to download (and then immediately disable to avoid confusing my poor "agents"... a concept which I also feel like way too many tools fundamentally misunderstand) skills for managing Spotify playlists or pokemon or minecraft in order to run the thing? (I acknowledge that they cleaned some of this up in a recent release, so maybe this isn't as bad as it was when I last tried it)
WRT "agents"... can someone explain to me why there's so much effort put into naming agents and giving them personalities? An "agent" is simply a separate context window with different prompting (itself written by the spawning/parent "agent") that's specific to a partial slice of the task you're trying to solve. If you have to write their prompt ahead of time that defeats the whole purpose of a programmable, autonomous subagent, doesn't it?
OpenClaw is just a toy. There is no use case for it and I haven’t heard of anyone do anything remotely interesting with it. People like to vaguely say it “manages” stuff for them, whatever that means.
Anything requiring serious automation can be automated deterministically via a script, probably written by an LLM.
If you want a coding agent, get a coding agent, you do not need OpenClaw.
What an enormous waste of money and effort (Actually, there’s no effort at all, it’s just AI slop running wild)