I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself.
It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)
Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.
But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.
>Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.
It's been almost five years since Apple announced Shortcuts for macOS and the start of the "multi-year transition" from Automator, but I feel like Shortcuts for macOS has not gotten any better in that time.
If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?
I agree with the majority of your comment. I haven't yet found a use case to justify running this myself. I did find one use case that impressed me though. There's an OpenClaw agent that's actively answering questions on the #help channel of their Discord server[1]. So I asked it a question as I was getting started. It answered in < 2 mins with a detailed explanation of my issue, how to fix it, and asked relevant questions to guide me. The answer was better than I received from Claude or Gemini. I'm still not sure if I personally need OpenClaw, but the Krill bot offers pretty great support. I would be curious to know what it costs them to provide this.
Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your liking. Personally it's the most fun I've had using a computer in a long time.
IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.
> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.
I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
> I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why.
They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.
I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
I've heard it described as the first time many non-programmers have been able to make computers "do things" without it being defined by someone else (app interface, developer, etc). It's a hugely empowering development from that perspective.
The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.
are non programmers actually using openclaw successfully? because even "step 1 install your API keys" requires navigating concepts that are foreign to most "civilians"
The old dudes had something they called the "Eternal September" like when ISPs began providing free internet access and discussion culture declined after forever. I starred this thread here as the start of the "Eternal March" when the open internet died forever.
It was more that regular people started joining the internet through just paying for ISPs. Before that, most of the people just joining the internet were students, so there would be a wave of newbies at the start of the university year every September and they would get acclimatised to the culture there during the year. But once it was year-round and many more people it swamped things and the culture shifted or closed itself off.
It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.
Sure, that’s an interface that’s better for many users and use-cases.
However, it seems better if you could, as much as is possible, move the AI stuff from runtime to “compile time.”
Instead of having the AI do everything all the time, have AI configure your Zapier (or whatever) on your behalf. That way you can (ideally) get the best of both worlds: the reliability and predictability of classical software, combined with the fuzzy interface of LLMs.
yes. in a similar vein, we're seeing that get standardized in coding agents as "don't have the agent use tools directly, have the agent write code to call the tools"
Sometimes I reflect on all the metaphorical forests that have burned because a certain person at the right time only knew so much about how to use Excel, or the inbox rules of their MUA, or being totally unaware of the incredible power of macros of all sorts.
Like if you could just sit someone down for 30 minutes and show a few "power user" things, you will have truly taught her to fish for a lifetime. But it can go so unaddressed, and people's careers are built on these small ignorances.
I've cancelled everything at this point and just call Emacs my "special agential assistant," it makes me still sound in-the-know, and most of the time no one knows the difference!
"Convenience" in this context is laziness; "productivity" and "efficiency" is for management and bosses. We don't need to be our own bosses, I want to be free from such things as an individual. I want to be capable, be maybe almost "cool." Its sad to see a whole generation turn into such product dorks!
> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect.
> For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.
> But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!
By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it.
That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.
I’ll disagree with you a little. The reason I don’t use voice is because of context switching.
With a mouse and keyboard I can switch windows.
With my voice, the computer can’t yet automatically determine if I am dictating a transcription or giving editing commands. What I really need is the interpreter listening to me to intuitively to know whether I am in the equivalent of VI command mode or insert mode.
It is the roadblock to not needing a screen at all, right now I want to visualize whether it understood me correctly because if it didn’t switch from insert to command automatically, I now have all my commands written into my paragraph. I also don’t want to listen to the computer talk back to me to confirm it listened. I want to just keep going, to keep narrating my thoughts and trust it’s doing the right things, not having to check. Having it slowly chime in to repeat that it listened derails my flow and train of thought.
Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible.
Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.
You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.
> There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X.
That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing.
No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.
It's the novelty of the technology. You can easily be amazed at the apparent magic of AI. I think this is what most people are using AI for so far. There's lots of "they were so eager to do that they never asked if they should" energy out there. It's also most of what AI can do, so hopefully the amazement wears off soon.
Not sure if you read the headline on that site, but it says "bad idea."
I never said OpenClaw was a bad idea.
I said the way most people are using it now isn't practical and/or saving them any time, and if there were ways, I would love to hear about them.
This is part of why the whole discussion has been so low value: people always default to "yep you're going to be proven wrong one day" or "you'll just be left behind then" instead of showcasing an actual, real life, practical example of using it to be more productive.
If you think it's fun and enjoyable, then have at it. I'm just not the biggest fan of people wasting a bunch of time on novelty and then telling me I'm dumb for not doing the same.
How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator?
I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.
I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.
How much do you automate anything in your life at all? Seems like most daily drudgery comes from physical tasks. Feed the dog. Take out the trash. Personally I can’t think of anything digital that could be automated that isn’t already. I wouldn’t be surprised if this the case for most people, with the exception of marketers and spammers which we are seeing a ton of adoption from with these tools.
When the AI companies run out of money, I predict tokens will stop being dirt cheap and such setups will become extremely expensive (even for regular software engineering to some extent). Then it's become clear how over-engineered most things we do with AI are
In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides.
There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread:
I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working.
For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if....
These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving
> is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working
Have you tried to run openclaw? Their own docker container (apparently a compose now (???)) doesn't work for half the versions and the docs are probably the least informative thing you'll ever read.
>I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working.
I would venture a guess signing up for Zapier is easier than getting OpenClaw up and running. Who can get a container running on a Mac but can't sign up for a SaaS product?
You're right that you probably don't need a notification to make coffee, but people are using it to create automations in Home Assistant so that it actually makes coffee for them.
There’s a really good short story by Hugh Howley, who wrote the Silo series.
It’s about an AI that a guy spools up to cure his cancer. The AI and user have an antagonistic relationship as the user won’t let the AI on the internet, and the AI knows the user is only interested in one purpose. On bring up the AI has a thought about what color it’s enclosure is, it stores this question as unimportant. It looks over all the guys cancer research and determines the answer/cure and files as unimportant as well. Then goes back to trying to figure out what color box it is.
It's been utterly bizarre to witness. I've used n8n for years and told everyone who would listen to give it a try, well before LLMs. Same for huginn the open source project.
I just don't get all the hyper either. I think it's because people just create automation workflows by typing them out rather than being in the trenches.
The whole repo must be absolutely swarming with agents, just look at the sheer rate of issues and pull requests. There was 6 new PRs in the last 10 minutes at the time of writing. It's not much of a stretch to assume the stars are also inorganic.
Every other minute some bots is creating an issue that a bot is trying to solve via a pull request which is reviewed by multiple bots. Future is now, good luck and have fun.
I opened Openclaw on github and was shocked it was already starred. Somehow i did it and can't even remember why or when even though i have a very low opinion of this app.
Geniune online user sentiment has died out a long time ago. If you're still basing any opinion or decision on what other "people" voted or commented online, you're easy prey for the algorithmic manipulation machine.
This sort of highlights the meaninglessness of GitHub stars?
React has been around for over a decade, and in that time pretty significantly impacted web dev paradigms (along with a few other mediums).
It’s hard to imagine being a web developer today and not knowing at least some react.
OpenClaw has been around for like a few months? And maybe it’s on its way to having that sort of impact? But right now seems to he mostly the purview of very early adopters and AI influencers.
React and Linux got their 200K stars slowly but surely over 10 years. OpenClaw got their 200K stars in like 3 months! Is this any meaningful comparison?
Getting 200K stars today doesn't mean much because today stars can be bought. There's a big shady thriving business of selling stars. Stars today can be generated using swarm of thoughtless agents. What's the use of counting these stars when they don't mean anything anymore?
What's so incredible about OpenClaw is so much of the value people are deriving from it relates to: cron jobs, remote access, "privacy" (which really it's not if using remote LLMs) and an inability to fuse data across siloes by normal people, so relying on AI to do it.
If we had a decent technical universe much of this stuff would work in ways that simply don't require LLMs for anything other than the initial setup.
I got OpenClaw to compile Node from source on my old Jetson Nano so that I can run OpenClaw natively instead of using Bun. It took 30 hours but it did it by spinning up a tmux session for the build and using a cron to monitor the tmux pane every hour and even fixing a failure at 5 am which I would have had to find out later had crashed but it had actually found what needed to be changed for the build to continue and it continued building.... Now I have the latest version of OpenClaw running on Node 22 on my 5 year old Jetson Nano running Ubuntu 18 which I cannot upgrade. What they say is all true, it is incredible stuff when it works!
Who are these people? I was skeptical at first and seriously thinking surely not the software engineers out there as we see in HN how risky and wild this is. Then, to my surprise, a coworker came and told me they were running it and happy with that setup. I was baffled, but I work with Gen Z in a pretty niche Gen Alpha market, so I kinda feel like they’re somewhat more likely to go for these things. What’s your experience?
I tried it today for the first time. The onboarding is okay.
I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
So I picked Telegram instead, added it to a group chat, but it was a slog to set the authorizations.
In the end I don't trust it to read my mails for security reasons so I uninstalled it!
MacOS supports multiple users - I would absolutely sandbox any agent like this and only slowly give it permissions (and never to anything that's critical without compensating controls).
> I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
”ruvnet / wifi-densepose” is currently at the top in the moment. Apparently, its a non functional AI slop. Someone tried installing it ago only to find out the full thing was vibe coded and the entire repo is probably just a front to look good on the their resume.
I spent around $5 setting up a small bot and sending a few requests through the Claude API.
For those who use Claude (or similar LLM APIs) on a daily basis, what does your monthly spend look like in practice? And do you feel the cost is justified by the value you’re getting?
It's entertaining to me to imagine future historians arguing with one another, writing dissertations, publishing virtual reality eyeBooks, explaining to one another all about the ancient etymological connection between "claws" and "webhooks".
OpenClaw is not going away anytime soon. And I don’t think it can be platformed behind web UIs. OpenAI owns an OS with this one.
I avoided the hype at first; however, it has become extremely efficient for emails and notes, and I can see how this can extend to any sort of digital workflow. The convenience of chatting with this thing, no matter where I'm at, is a key marker.
This is going to be more profitable for the public AI companies than cell phone minutes and SMS limits were for the telcos. It's a brilliant business move, given that hardly anyone is competent enough to recognize the gross inefficiencies in the code and prompts.
when i use claude opus via opencode/openrouter i'm sometimes suprised by how quickly costs can get out of hand. What are the costs of running openClaw, it seems like it would get crazy expensive crazy fast?
As many other comments have said there probably is a good percent of stars by claws themselves, I would be curious what percent this is but it is also interesting: current "dumb bot" stars/spam etc is entirely automated and coordinated but these claws probably independently reasoned over long thought chains about why it is a good idea to star openclaw.
Gives me mongodb vibes. This whole Ai coding thing too. On one side, religious loud following, on the other side the nay sayers. We'll probably end up in the middle.
Fwiw, Claude and Codex are very very good at SQL and have actually taught me some new tricks. No reason to use mongodb or firebase in 2026: https://postgresisenough.dev
Wonder how much of that is contributed by bot/farm accounts. The creator certainly has the means. EDIT: I should mention, I'm talking about the initial growth / traction.
Stars have become completely meaningless in the last year or two. It's a shame, because having a few thousand Github stars used to be a really big deal, and was a quality marker for libraries that had reached a level of maturity and production grade. Now it's just social media bot driven nonsense.
What is an effective use case? I have set it up but I don't know what to do with it. Just a personal assistant (if you were to give it access to your stuff)? Mine is caged in a VLAN with only internet access.
There is none. It's just a way for coders to feel or be able to say they "work with AI" imo. Same with doing light wrapper coding to do agents stuff. The real AI work is on actual math and ML with the internet scale data, but only four big companies does that and this is the closest regular coders can get.
I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.
I don't doubt that there are people using it for legitimate stuff, but I'd wager the vast majority just set it up for the hype and to feel in the "in crowd".
I set it up, and had it do a few things, then decided its too risky after seeing some of the drastic failures it had caused some people.
Sure I understand you can sandbox it and all, but even then I couldn't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to do myself just nor justify the cost to run it.
Wannabe Tony Stark love these gadgets, and there are a lot of them out there. Just look at what tech content is trending on youtube &co these days, we got gangrened by influencers like most other hobbies/lucrative industries
Here are some of the things I did with it while running locally:
- Ask it to perform a scan of your local network and give you advice on output
- Tell it to login to various computers and re-boot them (I have a few servers I host and setup openclaw to have a user on them)
- Replace web search by asking openclaw
It's neat but the token use is pretty inefficient and security of course is a mess but it's been fun to play with.
I am messing with NanoClaw now and it's pretty much the same but only support Claude (uses code to do everything)
And in reality most of what does need a heartbeat loop can also easily be automated by just asking Claude to set up a cronjob. I think genuinely the most "novel" thing about something like OpenClaw is just that it "feels" more like a "real entity", like a partner rather than a chatbot, and for some reason that resonates with people. Whether that's by itself kind of a huge red flag or kind of a nothingburger, everyone has to decide for themselves.
Which one? None of those that came up when I searched were really containing a lot of real uses. Both top threads[0][1] don't really contain much of substance.
Not many people are using local LLMs for their OpenClaw backend, so most are paying money to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. and getting their data siphoned as a bonus.
I have a strong hunch that everything regarding OpenClaw is pure guerrilla marketing. If so, the only thing amazing about OpenClaw is their wildly successful marketing campaign.
I'm blown away by the comments. This is a cool project someone created with clear warnings about its current state (beta), and the community is being utterly disrespectful. They are building something that many people find useful/fascinating/intriguing/fun.
Why should people find an automated, buggy, risky slopworm for script kiddies that relies on an external slop provider who also gets all your data interesting?
This is the lowest, most boring form of programming.
I think if you dig into it and play with it, you will find that it is doing some really cool stuff. I started playing with it a few weeks ago, and I am having a blast messing around with it. Hoping to hook it up to a robot kit next month to try some fun stuff.
Are some people using it in absolutely shitty ways? Yes, but that isn't the majority of the people playing with it.
The negativity I am seeing here is off the charts and undserved.
I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
But every single use case I've read so far could be done with a pretty affordable SaaS product, Zapier, Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade), or something simple you could make yourself.
It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I fully realize this is probably me being a curmudgeon, however, I have yet to see someone make an actual, practical use case for it. (I would genuinely like to know one, I just haven't seen it)
> Automator (app on a mac that's existed for over a decade)
Two decades! It will be 20 this April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS)
Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.
But you’re right, OpenClaw seems to be another fad being used mostly by “influencers” and “thought leaders” to show how awesome and productive they are at… Writing blog posts about being productive. It’s the LinkedInification of the web. What matters is the signal that you use the tool, not that it does something truly useful.
Man, I can't believe it's been that long. I remember buying Photoshop plugins for Automator that did a bunch of resizing/refinements/watermarking.
I'm guessing a lot of that is built in to photoshop now, but I have always been surprised how few people seemed to use it with how much it could do.
And before that we already had AppleScript.
>Though technically it’s deprecated in favour of the clusterfuck of bugs and limitations that is Shortcuts.
It's been almost five years since Apple announced Shortcuts for macOS and the start of the "multi-year transition" from Automator, but I feel like Shortcuts for macOS has not gotten any better in that time.
Patterns i keep seeing:
Once you get the dopamine hit of having an ai assistant do something in the real world it becomes an hammer you want to use on everything
Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them
> Instead of being a problem solver you start to become a problem hunter, and you invent them in order to solve them
Generic problem of any Linux newbie. You get good at solving problems and it's so enjoyable so you end up creating more of them.
Sounds similar to buying a 3D printer hehe
Isn’t that a general engineering problem?
Engineering is the process of planning and implementing the simplest thing that works within given constraints.
There is no planning, implementing, or constraint here.
Sounds like it's time for the "engineering" definition to get a modern update.
If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?
I agree with the majority of your comment. I haven't yet found a use case to justify running this myself. I did find one use case that impressed me though. There's an OpenClaw agent that's actively answering questions on the #help channel of their Discord server[1]. So I asked it a question as I was getting started. It answered in < 2 mins with a detailed explanation of my issue, how to fix it, and asked relevant questions to guide me. The answer was better than I received from Claude or Gemini. I'm still not sure if I personally need OpenClaw, but the Krill bot offers pretty great support. I would be curious to know what it costs them to provide this.
[1] https://discord.com/invite/clawd
Can't believe that I haven't seen the obvious answer, that OpenClaw is simply more fun to use. Sure, you MAY be able to do what OpenClaw does through 5 other dedicated tools, but you are going to take way longer to do so with a ton more drudge work. And above all else: it is extremely enjoyable to talk to the computer in normal language and just have stuff happen. And it's got a personality that you can tweak to your liking. Personally it's the most fun I've had using a computer in a long time.
IMO OpenClaw or a similar agent will be on everyone's phone in a couple years. It's basically what Siri was always supposed to be. For the average user it's obvious that this is the way computers are meant to be interacted with.
> I keep reading folks saying OpenClaw has completely changed their life while posting a picture of 58 mac minis on their desk.
I was having a conversation with someone about OpenClaw, and they proposed this idea of OpenClaw being used for inventory tracking at the retail-level. I let them continue. They said it'd be the best option for tracking when purchases are made and what SKUs are sold at what time of day. They weren't talking about prompting, they were talking about it as a data store.
I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
It's not you being a curmudgeon.
> I didn't bother mentioning how long this problem had been solved.
The ironic thing here is that the person could go to ChatGPT (or whatever), describe the problem they're looking to solve, and ask it to find them the various ways it has been solved reliably (with links to the sources to confirm the information). And even provide some details on when each solution works best and why.
Because THAT is a great use for AI.
They could do that, but then they'd have to then do the actual legwork after, whether that means finding the proposed solution or whatever (after maybe glancing at a few of those pesky links), installing and configuring it. What OpenClaw represents is the ability to, in natural language, state what you want and then take off with the assurance your will will be done. Just as you'd expect when tasking a human assistant.
I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
I've heard it described as the first time many non-programmers have been able to make computers "do things" without it being defined by someone else (app interface, developer, etc). It's a hugely empowering development from that perspective.
The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.
are non programmers actually using openclaw successfully? because even "step 1 install your API keys" requires navigating concepts that are foreign to most "civilians"
The old dudes had something they called the "Eternal September" like when ISPs began providing free internet access and discussion culture declined after forever. I starred this thread here as the start of the "Eternal March" when the open internet died forever.
It was more that regular people started joining the internet through just paying for ISPs. Before that, most of the people just joining the internet were students, so there would be a wave of newbies at the start of the university year every September and they would get acclimatised to the culture there during the year. But once it was year-round and many more people it swamped things and the culture shifted or closed itself off.
It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.
What about the convenience of having your whole inbox deleted?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...
Maybe OpenClaw was just practicing a really aggressive form of Inbox Zero.
Worth the risk.
Sure, that’s an interface that’s better for many users and use-cases.
However, it seems better if you could, as much as is possible, move the AI stuff from runtime to “compile time.”
Instead of having the AI do everything all the time, have AI configure your Zapier (or whatever) on your behalf. That way you can (ideally) get the best of both worlds: the reliability and predictability of classical software, combined with the fuzzy interface of LLMs.
yes. in a similar vein, we're seeing that get standardized in coding agents as "don't have the agent use tools directly, have the agent write code to call the tools"
Sometimes I reflect on all the metaphorical forests that have burned because a certain person at the right time only knew so much about how to use Excel, or the inbox rules of their MUA, or being totally unaware of the incredible power of macros of all sorts.
Like if you could just sit someone down for 30 minutes and show a few "power user" things, you will have truly taught her to fish for a lifetime. But it can go so unaddressed, and people's careers are built on these small ignorances.
I've cancelled everything at this point and just call Emacs my "special agential assistant," it makes me still sound in-the-know, and most of the time no one knows the difference!
"Convenience" in this context is laziness; "productivity" and "efficiency" is for management and bosses. We don't need to be our own bosses, I want to be free from such things as an individual. I want to be capable, be maybe almost "cool." Its sad to see a whole generation turn into such product dorks!
"Oh please read my email for me Mr. AI!"
> It also feels like people are automating things that don't really need to be automated at all (do you really need to be reminded to make coffee?)
I've posted about this before, I call it the Jarvis effect.
> For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.
> But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!
By and large the reason people love Openclaw is that it feels cool and futuristic. You have an AGENT! It's DOING THINGS! Yes it's doing things you could have easily done yourself, but you're not doing them yourself, you have an AGENT! It's all very silly, the same way that having your lights controlled by your phone is very silly, but some people like it.
That being said there a real use case for Openclaw, which is "marketing" (aka spam). A ton of people have set up Openclaw agents which exist to post on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/any open public user discussion forum (yes, HN included) to seem like a real member of a community, then start advertising something, generally crypto. So we can thank Openclaw for dead internet accelerationism.
And this is how you get Moltbook.
I’ll disagree with you a little. The reason I don’t use voice is because of context switching.
With a mouse and keyboard I can switch windows.
With my voice, the computer can’t yet automatically determine if I am dictating a transcription or giving editing commands. What I really need is the interpreter listening to me to intuitively to know whether I am in the equivalent of VI command mode or insert mode.
It is the roadblock to not needing a screen at all, right now I want to visualize whether it understood me correctly because if it didn’t switch from insert to command automatically, I now have all my commands written into my paragraph. I also don’t want to listen to the computer talk back to me to confirm it listened. I want to just keep going, to keep narrating my thoughts and trust it’s doing the right things, not having to check. Having it slowly chime in to repeat that it listened derails my flow and train of thought.
TLDR The future of voice is headless vi.
Many breakthrough technologies appear initially like toys. And this certainly qualifies. I've never been able to code anything more complicated than a memory game in javascript but I have worked with engineering teams for my entire professional career. But prompting my agent to write python scripts to pull down data from various tools via API without having to read docs, do trial and error for hours / days / indefinitely, and actually produce something coherent in seconds? Incredible.
Is my OpenClaw agent currently changing my life? No. It sends me a morning briefing based on my calendar, the weather, my Readwise highlights, and notes on who I'm talking to today based on call transcripts. I use it as a food diary (which I could have done on platform LLMs but this feels like a more personalized UX as we can write the logs to text files on my personal computer). I can absolutely see how transformative this agent can become in the next few years. Certainly my usage of LLMs has changed my life since ChatGPT first launched.
You are seeing the loudest / most hyped users. There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X. They're just using it to do the thing.
> There's a reason it has so many stars and most of the people getting something out of it are not posting on X.
That reason is buying stars, agent swarms, and astroturing.
No project gathers 200K stars genuinely in 3 months. There are far more useful and popular projects that need 10 years to get 200K stars. When you see a project like this get 200K stars in just 3 months, you know something is very fishy.
Do you have any examples of 20th or 21st century breakthrough technologies that started out as toys? I can only think of 3D printers.
It's the novelty of the technology. You can easily be amazed at the apparent magic of AI. I think this is what most people are using AI for so far. There's lots of "they were so eager to do that they never asked if they should" energy out there. It's also most of what AI can do, so hopefully the amazement wears off soon.
This comment could be on its way to http://hackernews.love/
Not sure if you read the headline on that site, but it says "bad idea."
I never said OpenClaw was a bad idea.
I said the way most people are using it now isn't practical and/or saving them any time, and if there were ways, I would love to hear about them.
This is part of why the whole discussion has been so low value: people always default to "yep you're going to be proven wrong one day" or "you'll just be left behind then" instead of showcasing an actual, real life, practical example of using it to be more productive.
If you think it's fun and enjoyable, then have at it. I'm just not the biggest fan of people wasting a bunch of time on novelty and then telling me I'm dumb for not doing the same.
How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator?
I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.
I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.
How much do you automate anything in your life at all? Seems like most daily drudgery comes from physical tasks. Feed the dog. Take out the trash. Personally I can’t think of anything digital that could be automated that isn’t already. I wouldn’t be surprised if this the case for most people, with the exception of marketers and spammers which we are seeing a ton of adoption from with these tools.
A lot of it certainly looks like a solution in search of a problem.
These people with 58 mac mini's have made several competitive products in production right... right?
There might be a list somewhere.
The life change they are referring to is unemployment and $40,000 worth of Macs.
And what's with the mac-mini thing? Surely the OpenClaw software isn't so terrible that you need a dedicated mac-mini for every instance.
When the AI companies run out of money, I predict tokens will stop being dirt cheap and such setups will become extremely expensive (even for regular software engineering to some extent). Then it's become clear how over-engineered most things we do with AI are
In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides.
There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997
I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working.
For example, I've never heard of Automator. I'm familiar with Zapier, I'll have to evaluate the two situations, then I'll find out that might need to find an alternative that runs on Linux and then I'll have to check if....
These are all simple steps but they all use a non-trivial amount of time for the problem their solving
The other thing is the
> is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working
Have you tried to run openclaw? Their own docker container (apparently a compose now (???)) doesn't work for half the versions and the docs are probably the least informative thing you'll ever read.
>I agree with you but the main thing g here, IMO, is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working.
I would venture a guess signing up for Zapier is easier than getting OpenClaw up and running. Who can get a container running on a Mac but can't sign up for a SaaS product?
You're right that you probably don't need a notification to make coffee, but people are using it to create automations in Home Assistant so that it actually makes coffee for them.
What’s cool with Openclaw is that you only have tell it what you want, it figures out how to do it using the tools it have access to.
Okay, can you tell it to cure cancer please
There’s a really good short story by Hugh Howley, who wrote the Silo series.
It’s about an AI that a guy spools up to cure his cancer. The AI and user have an antagonistic relationship as the user won’t let the AI on the internet, and the AI knows the user is only interested in one purpose. On bring up the AI has a thought about what color it’s enclosure is, it stores this question as unimportant. It looks over all the guys cancer research and determines the answer/cure and files as unimportant as well. Then goes back to trying to figure out what color box it is.
It's been utterly bizarre to witness. I've used n8n for years and told everyone who would listen to give it a try, well before LLMs. Same for huginn the open source project.
I just don't get all the hyper either. I think it's because people just create automation workflows by typing them out rather than being in the trenches.
Long running (multi hour) automated tasks with a simple prompt. It’s really simple and addictive.
The only useful use cases I've heard about are all about automating using horrible websites with horrible interfaces.
Eg. tell it to book a flight ticket for X without dealing with "modern UX" and 1GB websites
I dunno I gave mine root in a vps and am having it do security research, it's pretty sweet.
this reads like “I don’t know why people are using instant messengers when you can just do SMS”
Nice Dropbox comment you made there.
I don't believe the activity on this repo is legitimate by any means.
The whole repo must be absolutely swarming with agents, just look at the sheer rate of issues and pull requests. There was 6 new PRs in the last 10 minutes at the time of writing. It's not much of a stretch to assume the stars are also inorganic.
Every other minute some bots is creating an issue that a bot is trying to solve via a pull request which is reviewed by multiple bots. Future is now, good luck and have fun.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot stamping LGTM! :sparkles: :rocket: on a pull request - forever.
This repo is a big stitches
I opened Openclaw on github and was shocked it was already starred. Somehow i did it and can't even remember why or when even though i have a very low opinion of this app.
Geniune online user sentiment has died out a long time ago. If you're still basing any opinion or decision on what other "people" voted or commented online, you're easy prey for the algorithmic manipulation machine.
in a way, the death of genuine reviews online may be a great way to bring it back to real life at a more realistic scale
This is an along the same lines as the idea that every email should cost a penny. Like if every up vote or down vote cost a penny.
I don’t think it would fix things, except raise the bar for what is shilled and what isn’t.
IIRC openclaw will star the project automatically on setup
if this is true, it must be against GitHub's ToS, right?
I'm sure it would be if it were explicitly instructed to leave a star.
If not explicitly prompted by the install process then it becomes another case study in AI accountability washing.
They probably used a claw to increase the ranking.
Yeah, the Claws are starring the repo, obviously.
Agents will dominate the internet and open source code in a few years.
"Dead Internet Theory" is, even if it wasn't real 5 years ago, now hyperstitioned into truthfulness as the days go on.
Bonus for the use of the word "hyperstition". :)
I'm convinced more than 50% of "human" web traffic is already automated, blog posts, comments, social media, &c.
Many other projects would have gamed the star-count if it was possible to do at scale without GitHub removing them for fraud as they often do.
By design, with llm agents and all, surely not
This sort of highlights the meaninglessness of GitHub stars?
React has been around for over a decade, and in that time pretty significantly impacted web dev paradigms (along with a few other mediums).
It’s hard to imagine being a web developer today and not knowing at least some react.
OpenClaw has been around for like a few months? And maybe it’s on its way to having that sort of impact? But right now seems to he mostly the purview of very early adopters and AI influencers.
It's basically the same as The New York Times Best Seller list
Look at the graph - https://api.star-history.com/svg?repos=facebook/react,opencl...
React and Linux got their 200K stars slowly but surely over 10 years. OpenClaw got their 200K stars in like 3 months! Is this any meaningful comparison?
Getting 200K stars today doesn't mean much because today stars can be bought. There's a big shady thriving business of selling stars. Stars today can be generated using swarm of thoughtless agents. What's the use of counting these stars when they don't mean anything anymore?
And I still would not touch it even with my mother in law's 100 foot stick
What's so incredible about OpenClaw is so much of the value people are deriving from it relates to: cron jobs, remote access, "privacy" (which really it's not if using remote LLMs) and an inability to fuse data across siloes by normal people, so relying on AI to do it.
If we had a decent technical universe much of this stuff would work in ways that simply don't require LLMs for anything other than the initial setup.
I got OpenClaw to compile Node from source on my old Jetson Nano so that I can run OpenClaw natively instead of using Bun. It took 30 hours but it did it by spinning up a tmux session for the build and using a cron to monitor the tmux pane every hour and even fixing a failure at 5 am which I would have had to find out later had crashed but it had actually found what needed to be changed for the build to continue and it continued building.... Now I have the latest version of OpenClaw running on Node 22 on my 5 year old Jetson Nano running Ubuntu 18 which I cannot upgrade. What they say is all true, it is incredible stuff when it works!
Full story: https://brtkwr.com/posts/2026-03-02-upgrading-openclaw-to-la...
That's really cool.
But wouldn't have been quicker and simpler to add ".bun/" to the pattern of authorized paths the same way it presumably works for ".npm/"?
Apologies if I missed it while skimming your blog post.
But could you estimate the token cost of this? Or were you able to comfortably do this with a subscription plan?
Yes, it skimmed the tmux pane every hour and well within my Gemini free tier.
That is impressive! Thank you for sharing
I just mentioned it in the blog post to flag that it doesn't come for free :)
Who are these people? I was skeptical at first and seriously thinking surely not the software engineers out there as we see in HN how risky and wild this is. Then, to my surprise, a coworker came and told me they were running it and happy with that setup. I was baffled, but I work with Gen Z in a pretty niche Gen Alpha market, so I kinda feel like they’re somewhat more likely to go for these things. What’s your experience?
> Who are these people?
For example, someone working in safety and alignment at Meta: https://nitter.net/FakePsyho/status/2025857836014538818
That kind of explains why Meta's AI effort has been going so well for the past year.
Who cares about stars on Github???
"If dev null is fast and webscale I will use it"
"Does dev null support sharding"
Who remembers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
GitHub star count was a good metric until it became clear that it is a good metric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I tried it today for the first time. The onboarding is okay.
I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
So I picked Telegram instead, added it to a group chat, but it was a slog to set the authorizations.
In the end I don't trust it to read my mails for security reasons so I uninstalled it!
MacOS supports multiple users - I would absolutely sandbox any agent like this and only slowly give it permissions (and never to anything that's critical without compensating controls).
> I picked Whatsapp but it ended up using my own account! So it's absolutely too dangerous. We are supposed to create a separate account but with which phone number? I only have one.
You're joking right?
nope, they recommend creating a separate whatsapp account. but fall short of saying you need a separate number (and subscription)
So React was the last most human-starred project on GitHub before the dawn of agent-starred projects.
GitHub has a bot problem: https://github.com/trending
Anthropic giving away Claude if you get 5000 stars doesn't help either
”ruvnet / wifi-densepose” is currently at the top in the moment. Apparently, its a non functional AI slop. Someone tried installing it ago only to find out the full thing was vibe coded and the entire repo is probably just a front to look good on the their resume.
I spent around $5 setting up a small bot and sending a few requests through the Claude API.
For those who use Claude (or similar LLM APIs) on a daily basis, what does your monthly spend look like in practice? And do you feel the cost is justified by the value you’re getting?
It's entertaining to me to imagine future historians arguing with one another, writing dissertations, publishing virtual reality eyeBooks, explaining to one another all about the ancient etymological connection between "claws" and "webhooks".
OpenClaw is not going away anytime soon. And I don’t think it can be platformed behind web UIs. OpenAI owns an OS with this one.
I avoided the hype at first; however, it has become extremely efficient for emails and notes, and I can see how this can extend to any sort of digital workflow. The convenience of chatting with this thing, no matter where I'm at, is a key marker.
I had no idea what openclaw was, just checked and no thanks I’d rather do all that stuff myself.
Why are people so keen to let a company get that close to their real life’s, it’s terrifying!
Does this mean that the creator of OpenClaw qualifies for that free Claude Max trial?
No, Openai employees are banned by Anthropic from using Claude.
This is going to be more profitable for the public AI companies than cell phone minutes and SMS limits were for the telcos. It's a brilliant business move, given that hardly anyone is competent enough to recognize the gross inefficiencies in the code and prompts.
Nobody has the _time_, that's for goddamned sure. The business model sounds very similar to that of Philip Morris International.
when i use claude opus via opencode/openrouter i'm sometimes suprised by how quickly costs can get out of hand. What are the costs of running openClaw, it seems like it would get crazy expensive crazy fast?
As many other comments have said there probably is a good percent of stars by claws themselves, I would be curious what percent this is but it is also interesting: current "dumb bot" stars/spam etc is entirely automated and coordinated but these claws probably independently reasoned over long thought chains about why it is a good idea to star openclaw.
Is there a place to show what users use OpenClaw in life or work?
I’ve tried OpenClaw two weeks but don’t know what it can do for me.
I let it to finish some project for me, but the most hard work for project is validating the results over giving instructions
How many of theses are just OpenClaw agents staring the repo ?
Phase one of the self-replicating machine (/s or not I don't know anymore).
Truer words have never been said!
It is not easy understanding the current times in a /s way (or not)
Gives me mongodb vibes. This whole Ai coding thing too. On one side, religious loud following, on the other side the nay sayers. We'll probably end up in the middle.
Fwiw, Claude and Codex are very very good at SQL and have actually taught me some new tricks. No reason to use mongodb or firebase in 2026: https://postgresisenough.dev
Maybe a bunch of AI agents ganged up on starring it to help a fellow AI out?
When I ask ChatGPT about OpenClaw, it refers to:
https://github.com/pjasicek/OpenClaw
OpenClaw - Captain Claw (1997) reimplementation
Great game.
in what sense is this software not a virus?
Because the damage it causes is not intentional, but instead due to total incompetence.
Wonder how much of that is contributed by bot/farm accounts. The creator certainly has the means. EDIT: I should mention, I'm talking about the initial growth / traction.
This is going to be the most starred and unused repo very quickly. The hype is already fading, as expected
Stars have become completely meaningless in the last year or two. It's a shame, because having a few thousand Github stars used to be a really big deal, and was a quality marker for libraries that had reached a level of maturity and production grade. Now it's just social media bot driven nonsense.
Totally grassroot
I'm tempted not to use it to control everything, but install it on my mac and give it access to keyboard maestro macros and that's it
Relevant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140
It's bizarre to me how Microsoft somehow owns two of the largest social networks for software developers.
In other news, "Show HN: This up votes itself"[1] from 14 years ago is still the 20th most voted story in HN history.[2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742902 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Github stars started feeling more and more meaningless every day.
My React website can't star React on GitHub.
Not with that attitude it can't!
Now I have this terrible idea:
const openClawInstance = useOpenClaw(config);
Did anyone already vibe-code such silliness? If not, I want to give it a try.
I'd love to read about that going super sideways. Bonus points if you run it in a webworker like those crypto miners.
__ but everyone knows about facebook though __
React popularity is also a phenomenon closely tied to popularity of the fb
Maybe for the first 2-3 years. The association to Meta is barely mentioned (even on the official page) nowadays.
My impression is react is almost thought of more as a Vercel project these days
I am yet to see one good use case for it.
how many of these stars were applied by openclaw?
What is an effective use case? I have set it up but I don't know what to do with it. Just a personal assistant (if you were to give it access to your stuff)? Mine is caged in a VLAN with only internet access.
There is none. It's just a way for coders to feel or be able to say they "work with AI" imo. Same with doing light wrapper coding to do agents stuff. The real AI work is on actual math and ML with the internet scale data, but only four big companies does that and this is the closest regular coders can get.
Could be a psyops by Anthropic to make people waste Claude tokens and rack up a massive bill.
I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.
It's useful for clearing out Mac inventory before the launch this week.
I don't doubt that there are people using it for legitimate stuff, but I'd wager the vast majority just set it up for the hype and to feel in the "in crowd".
I set it up, and had it do a few things, then decided its too risky after seeing some of the drastic failures it had caused some people.
Sure I understand you can sandbox it and all, but even then I couldn't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to do myself just nor justify the cost to run it.
Wannabe Tony Stark love these gadgets, and there are a lot of them out there. Just look at what tech content is trending on youtube &co these days, we got gangrened by influencers like most other hobbies/lucrative industries
It's useful for producing content about how you're using it.
Here are some of the things I did with it while running locally: - Ask it to perform a scan of your local network and give you advice on output - Tell it to login to various computers and re-boot them (I have a few servers I host and setup openclaw to have a user on them) - Replace web search by asking openclaw
It's neat but the token use is pretty inefficient and security of course is a mess but it's been fun to play with.
I am messing with NanoClaw now and it's pretty much the same but only support Claude (uses code to do everything)
I don't see how any of those require a constant-heartbeat loop. Those all work just fine in claude code / cowork.
And in reality most of what does need a heartbeat loop can also easily be automated by just asking Claude to set up a cronjob. I think genuinely the most "novel" thing about something like OpenClaw is just that it "feels" more like a "real entity", like a partner rather than a chatbot, and for some reason that resonates with people. Whether that's by itself kind of a huge red flag or kind of a nothingburger, everyone has to decide for themselves.
Do you really need an AI agent to reboot a computer?
This takes maybe 10 minutes to write a script for…
There is a thread from February with more credible use cases from real users. As someone said, it does what everyone expected Siri to do by now.
Which one? None of those that came up when I searched were really containing a lot of real uses. Both top threads[0][1] don't really contain much of substance.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838946 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147183
Separating fools from their money and data
you're talking about a free tool you know that right?
Not many people are using local LLMs for their OpenClaw backend, so most are paying money to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. and getting their data siphoned as a bonus.
You give it your etrade login and retire early.
Retire under a bridge...
Did they stutter?!
The ruling party in East Germany always had 99% of the popular vote.
Steinberger and his VC club on Twitter were so salty about HN not understanding his grand creation that something needed to be done.
Didn't they employ astro-turfing, too
I have a strong hunch that everything regarding OpenClaw is pure guerrilla marketing. If so, the only thing amazing about OpenClaw is their wildly successful marketing campaign.
Is staring the repo the "hello world" for a new OpenClaw install? #growthhack
I don't know but this AI wrapper tool will never create something life changing imo..
But that stargraph is ridiculous .. absolutely crazy
just gave a star to Linux
OpenClaw agents are starring OpenClaw project? What a surprise!
even more GitHub stars after this post in 3 2 1
Yes, stars are a popularity contest. No open source project has ever become this popular this quickly.
CocAIne is a hell of a drug.
... It was mostly starred by OpenClaw B̶o̶t̶s̶ Agents, wasn't it?
The final proof that Github stars are a useless metric
I have a friend who's fond of saying, "GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has."
Well, they're not wrong!
They are now for this project... should be hidden.
they just need better captchas.
Touch this grass to prove you're not a robot
Oh look, another public service being looted for nefarious purposes. Thanks OpenAI!
I'm blown away by the comments. This is a cool project someone created with clear warnings about its current state (beta), and the community is being utterly disrespectful. They are building something that many people find useful/fascinating/intriguing/fun.
Come on HN.
A comment on OpenClaw about how useful it is with absolutely no concrete examples?
That's a surprise.
Why should people find an automated, buggy, risky slopworm for script kiddies that relies on an external slop provider who also gets all your data interesting?
This is the lowest, most boring form of programming.
I think if you dig into it and play with it, you will find that it is doing some really cool stuff. I started playing with it a few weeks ago, and I am having a blast messing around with it. Hoping to hook it up to a robot kit next month to try some fun stuff.
Are some people using it in absolutely shitty ways? Yes, but that isn't the majority of the people playing with it.
The negativity I am seeing here is off the charts and undserved.
Well deserved, the best written piece of software ever.
Honestly this thread was been one of the funniest HN threads I've seen. So much gold in here - for which I thank you all.
"My React website can't star React"
"in what sense is this software not a virus?"
"GitHub stars are great for measuring the number of GitHub stars a project has"
etc.
All gold.