{"slug": "openclaw", "name": "OpenClaw", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI models and assistants", "description": "Open-source, self-hosted AI agent that acts as a personal assistant through chat apps.", "recommenders": 42, "commenters": 144, "warners": 39, "score": 18.147, "rising": -11.09, "first": "2026-01-30", "latest": "2026-10-29", "why": "HN commenters like it as an always-on personal assistant they can message from Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord, running scheduled digests, life tracking and small business tasks.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 42, "neutral": 56, "compare": 9, "warn": 42}, "spark": [0, 0, 2, 13, 8, 12, 1, 3, 1, 1, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": ["Personal assistant", "Chat app control"], "caveat": "Security", "short_quote": "I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/openclaw/openclaw", "official_url": "https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["OpenClaw"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like it as an always-on personal assistant they can message from Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord", "cites": [{"id": 759873456, "item_id": 47492091, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492091", "by": "jwang987", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal.", "excerpt": "I'm using it to manage product backend operations through Telegram. Without OpenClaw, most tasks were automatable with Claude Code anyways, but OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal. I also built a tax filing engine that handles my tax locally (demo: https://x.com/artoriatech/status/2036111002790490365 web: https://oktax.app) As for security, I don't run OpenClaw on my machi", "context": "runs product backend operations", "use_case": "managing product backend via Telegram", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Are you using OpenClaw or similar agents? How?"}, {"id": 756568672, "item_id": 47285542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285542", "by": "airbreather", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions.", "excerpt": "I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering and Control/Safety Systems design and build. So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code myself by hand. For my coding AI \"stack\" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can", "context": "nearly 60, electrical engineering and control systems", "use_case": "orchestrating Claude Code", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has ignited a passion again"}, {"id": 764555312, "item_id": 47784707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784707", "by": "ryanmcgarvey", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it.", "excerpt": "Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it. It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff \u2014 emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another", "context": "software engineer using AI daily", "use_case": "emailing, drafting, deploying small apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764596000, "item_id": 47787250, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787250", "by": "luxuryballs", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love it, it is like Claude on steroids", "excerpt": "I love it, it is like Claude on steroids, I can just chat with it on my phone and iterate projects\u2026 sadly it\u2019s really expensive now to keep using Opus, looking for alternatives that doesn\u2019t gimp the reasoning and creativity is hard.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat with agent from phone to iterate projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}]}, {"text": ", running scheduled digests, life tracking and small business tasks.", "cites": [{"id": 764603360, "item_id": 47787710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787710", "by": "godot", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly", "excerpt": "I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work. The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of \"scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only ", "context": "runs it on a VPS", "use_case": "scheduled scraping and reporting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764584672, "item_id": 47786542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786542", "by": "blackmanta", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers without much effort.", "excerpt": "I have an instance that does search related to my research interests, tracks news related to viruses in the US, events happening around my area and an \u201curgent\u201d news job that uses searx and for things going on around me. I used Qwen 3.5 9B and tuned some of the jobs with GPT 5.4. I recently switched to use Gemma 4 and there was seemingly no major difference. I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers ", "context": "", "use_case": "research and news digests", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 755597120, "item_id": 47224820, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224820", "by": "pclark", "date": "2026-03-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup.", "excerpt": "Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet. I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM. 1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics \u2014 and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens. 1", "context": "previous Zapier power user", "use_case": "personal assistant automation", "switched_from": "Zapier", "story": "OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub"}, {"id": 764121296, "item_id": 47757581, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757581", "by": "operatingthetan", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'", "excerpt": "The only thing I use openclaw for is managing my obsidian vault. The flow is a series of crons that prompt me to fill out daily files and update projects as they progress. I also use it for calorie tracking and basic daily journaling. This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'", "context": "", "use_case": "managing Obsidian vault, journaling", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Introduction to Obsidian"}, {"id": 765321760, "item_id": 47832610, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832610", "by": "ymolodtsov", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts.", "excerpt": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaini", "context": "runs it for company tasks", "use_case": "personal assistant querying accounts", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is weak security", "cites": [{"id": 764635312, "item_id": 47789707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789707", "by": "opak", "date": "2026-04-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak", "excerpt": "In general, AI agents are a good idea, but OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak, so I use an alternative: https://github.com/opentalon/opentalon", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 778417809, "item_id": 48651113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651113", "by": "buremba", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security", "excerpt": "It's not built on OpenClaw, it uses Pi the harness that powers OpenClaw. We're using the GTM for multi-tenant OpenClaw when there was hype but quickly moved away from it as OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security.", "context": "building an agent product", "use_case": "multi-tenant agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Tag"}, {"id": 777385296, "item_id": 48586581, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586581", "by": "_pdp_", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed", "excerpt": "I might be a little more paranoid than most because of my profession, but none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed - let alone directly on the machine I use every day. OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics, which is a huge red flag to me. And then there is the code.", "context": "security-minded profession", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 792297792, "item_id": 49518612, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518612", "by": "EagnaIonat", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models.", "excerpt": "I used it to try it out. Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models. It was able to create an application that Claude created, using the same instructions file. Considerably slower but I was surprised it could do it.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 786047969, "item_id": 49127998, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127998", "by": "noodlescb", "date": "2026-07-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the limitations/security of it kind of made it a novelty for me", "excerpt": "Honestly the limitations/security of it kind of made it a novelty for me. I use web hosted stuff like surfboard now for my llm-assistant work stuff.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "qm \u2013 Multiplayer agent harness for work"}]}, {"text": ", followed by bugginess and high token costs.", "cites": [{"id": 764571312, "item_id": 47785707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785707", "by": "fny", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I used it, found it buggy", "excerpt": "I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you. - Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite - Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder - Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 768932369, "item_id": 48058273, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058273", "by": "ikidd", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "What a mess that's turned into", "excerpt": "I switched to Hermes Agent and it's been night and day how much more stable and usable it is over OpenClaw. What a mess that's turned into", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw Had a Rough Week"}, {"id": 764575024, "item_id": 47785939, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785939", "by": "superfrank", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting.", "excerpt": "I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it. What do I use it", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 792263041, "item_id": 49516440, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516440", "by": "InterviewFrog", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high..", "excerpt": "I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 764613456, "item_id": 47788341, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788341", "by": "nfgrep", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase.", "excerpt": "I tried it for a few days and then dropped it. The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase. I was mostly interested in having AI writing little toy projects. I used pi over ssh instead, and eventually built myself a little mobile-first web UI wrapping pi.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI writing toy projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Personal assistant", "summary": "Used for everyday errands, journaling, calorie tracking, email and family tools.", "quotes": [{"id": 764555312, "item_id": 47784707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784707", "by": "ryanmcgarvey", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it.", "excerpt": "Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it. It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff \u2014 emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another", "context": "software engineer using AI daily", "use_case": "emailing, drafting, deploying small apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 775306208, "item_id": 48456638, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456638", "by": "mybbor", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent", "excerpt": "Before agentic coding went mainstream, one of my main use cases was creating sticker designs for concerts and music festivals. Creating the stickers and giving them away was a good way to meet new people. I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It", "context": "", "use_case": "health coach agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 764575392, "item_id": 47785962, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785962", "by": "pama", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it a lot for personal stuff.", "excerpt": "I use it a lot for personal stuff. Off the top of my head: Best way so far to build and use personalized/family tools for dining/recipe/movie/literature/reminder/organizer/security/notes\u2014-in addition to robust text input, all of them have a voice and image UI via telegram without extra code via an intermediate LLM agent, and all data end up on your machine in your format of choice. More fun than codex/claude-code for", "context": "", "use_case": "personal and family tools via Telegram", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}]}, {"label": "Chat app control", "summary": "Can be run from Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord instead of a terminal.", "quotes": [{"id": 759873456, "item_id": 47492091, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492091", "by": "jwang987", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal.", "excerpt": "I'm using it to manage product backend operations through Telegram. Without OpenClaw, most tasks were automatable with Claude Code anyways, but OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal. I also built a tax filing engine that handles my tax locally (demo: https://x.com/artoriatech/status/2036111002790490365 web: https://oktax.app) As for security, I don't run OpenClaw on my machi", "context": "runs product backend operations", "use_case": "managing product backend via Telegram", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Are you using OpenClaw or similar agents? How?"}, {"id": 756568672, "item_id": 47285542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285542", "by": "airbreather", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions.", "excerpt": "I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering and Control/Safety Systems design and build. So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code myself by hand. For my coding AI \"stack\" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can", "context": "nearly 60, electrical engineering and control systems", "use_case": "orchestrating Claude Code", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has ignited a passion again"}, {"id": 759075136, "item_id": 47442196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442196", "by": "kevin42", "date": "2026-03-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What I love about OpenClaw is that I was able to send it a message on Discord with just this github URL", "excerpt": "What I love about OpenClaw is that I was able to send it a message on Discord with just this github URL and it started sending me voice messages using it within a few minutes. It also gave me a bunch of different benchmarks and sample audio. I'm impressed with the quality given the size. I don't love the voices, but it's not bad. Running on an intel 9700 CPU, it's about 1.5x realtime using the 80M model. It wasn't an", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent assistant", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models \u2013 smallest less than 25MB"}]}, {"label": "Business automation", "summary": "Handles company lookups, cold outreach, backend operations and ecommerce monitoring.", "quotes": [{"id": 765321760, "item_id": 47832610, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832610", "by": "ymolodtsov", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts.", "excerpt": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaini", "context": "runs it for company tasks", "use_case": "personal assistant querying accounts", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"}, {"id": 764576400, "item_id": 47786025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786025", "by": "dhruvkar", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it personally for cold outreach - specifically list building, enriching, and qualifying.", "excerpt": "I'm collecting caught-in-the wild use cases at https://www.clawdrop.org I use it personally for cold outreach - specifically list building, enriching, and qualifying.", "context": "", "use_case": "cold outreach list building", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 757823264, "item_id": 47363954, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363954", "by": "OpenClawguru", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you're building Shopify + AI automation, check out OpenClaw.", "excerpt": "If you're building Shopify + AI automation, check out OpenClaw. We built an ecommerce agent on top of it \u2014 monitors inventory, tracks ROAS, flags competitor changes. All from Slack 24/7. selzee.com/openclaw?via=hn (http://selzee.com/openclaw?via=hn)", "context": "built an ecommerce agent on it", "use_case": "ecommerce AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Supabase Engineer (Automation System)"}]}, {"label": "Scheduled digests", "summary": "Good at recurring scraping, news and calendar summaries sent on a schedule.", "quotes": [{"id": 764603360, "item_id": 47787710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787710", "by": "godot", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly", "excerpt": "I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work. The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of \"scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only ", "context": "runs it on a VPS", "use_case": "scheduled scraping and reporting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764584672, "item_id": 47786542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786542", "by": "blackmanta", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers without much effort.", "excerpt": "I have an instance that does search related to my research interests, tracks news related to viruses in the US, events happening around my area and an \u201curgent\u201d news job that uses searx and for things going on around me. I used Qwen 3.5 9B and tuned some of the jobs with GPT 5.4. I recently switched to use Gemma 4 and there was seemingly no major difference. I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers ", "context": "", "use_case": "research and news digests", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 755597120, "item_id": 47224820, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224820", "by": "pclark", "date": "2026-03-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup.", "excerpt": "Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet. I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM. 1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics \u2014 and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens. 1", "context": "previous Zapier power user", "use_case": "personal assistant automation", "switched_from": "Zapier", "story": "OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub"}]}, {"label": "Cheap hardware", "summary": "Runs fine on a $4 VPS or an old mini PC.", "quotes": [{"id": 765321760, "item_id": 47832610, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832610", "by": "ymolodtsov", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts.", "excerpt": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaini", "context": "runs it for company tasks", "use_case": "personal assistant querying accounts", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"}, {"id": 757756016, "item_id": 47359751, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359751", "by": "LennyHenrysNuts", "date": "2026-03-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use a repurposed HP Elitedesk 800 Mini from a decade ago for OpenClaw and it works just fine.", "excerpt": "Why does it have to be a Mac Mini? I use a repurposed HP Elitedesk 800 Mini from a decade ago for OpenClaw and it works just fine. Cost me maybe $50 US.", "context": "", "use_case": "running OpenClaw on cheap mini PC", "switched_from": "", "story": "Personal Computer by Perplexity"}, {"id": 792139825, "item_id": 49508739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508739", "by": "SipitenoMK", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor", "excerpt": "Actually I use Hermes Agent who delegates tasks to OpenClaw. It works perfectly, we run OpenClaw experiments with my partner as an independent drop shipper, it\u2019s much more complicated setup, which cannot disclose publicly, but it works. The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor :)", "context": "independent drop shipper", "use_case": "executing delegated tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally"}]}, {"label": "Depth for tinkerers", "summary": "Commenters call it deep, capable and fun to experiment with.", "quotes": [{"id": 777384721, "item_id": 48586545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586545", "by": "Multiplayer", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw is deeper with more capabilities.", "excerpt": "My simple take: Hermes is for the less technical and is more polished. OpenClaw is deeper with more capabilities. OpenClaw has come so far since its' original launch/craze. I recommend taking a second look if you haven't touched it in a while. If for no other reason than it's just a really fun playground with a LOT of areas to experiment in. Setup a myriad of agents with various models, skills, cron jobs, etc. The co", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent experimentation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 758247460, "item_id": 47390466, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390466", "by": "eranation", "date": "2026-03-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "What excites me the most right now is my experiments with OpenClaw / NanoClaw, I'm just having a blast.", "excerpt": "What you said about \"we're all cooked\" and \"AI is useless\" is literally me and everyone I know switching between the two on an hourly basis... I find it the most exciting time for me as a builder, I can just get more things done. Professionally, I'm dreading for our future, but I'm sure it will be better than I fear, worse than I hope. From a toolset, I use the usual, Cursor (Super expensive if you go with Opus 4.6 m", "context": "builder, has children", "use_case": "agent experiments", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"}, {"id": 764612480, "item_id": 47788280, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788280", "by": "evbogue", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I think everyone should try the original version out", "excerpt": "I use it. I think everyone should try the original version out before it gets too muddled so they get the spirit of the thing even if it doesn't end up being the thing -- in a safe space where you know what data you're allowing it to claw thru.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Security", "summary": "Many commenters don't trust it and run it isolated or avoid it.", "quotes": [{"id": 778417809, "item_id": 48651113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651113", "by": "buremba", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security", "excerpt": "It's not built on OpenClaw, it uses Pi the harness that powers OpenClaw. We're using the GTM for multi-tenant OpenClaw when there was hype but quickly moved away from it as OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security.", "context": "building an agent product", "use_case": "multi-tenant agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Tag"}, {"id": 764635312, "item_id": 47789707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789707", "by": "opak", "date": "2026-04-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak", "excerpt": "In general, AI agents are a good idea, but OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak, so I use an alternative: https://github.com/opentalon/opentalon", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 792297792, "item_id": 49518612, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518612", "by": "EagnaIonat", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models.", "excerpt": "I used it to try it out. Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models. It was able to create an application that Claude created, using the same instructions file. Considerably slower but I was surprised it could do it.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}]}, {"label": "Bugs and fragility", "summary": "Reported as buggy and fragile, with updates breaking setups and agents bricking their config.", "quotes": [{"id": 764571312, "item_id": 47785707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785707", "by": "fny", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I used it, found it buggy", "excerpt": "I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you. - Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite - Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder - Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 757863840, "item_id": 47366490, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366490", "by": "LaurensBER", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "my OpenClaw instance broke last week", "excerpt": "Amen, my OpenClaw instance broke last week. Some update broke the OpenRouter integration and I haven't been able to fix the issue. I took a quick look at the code, hoping to narrow it down and it's pretty much exactly what you would expect, there's hidden configuration files everywhere and in general it's just a lot of code for what's effectively a for loop with Whatsapp integration (in my case :)). Not to mention th", "context": "runs a rootless, locked-down Kubernetes deployment", "use_case": "personal agent with WhatsApp integration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes"}, {"id": 755121699, "item_id": 47195106, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195106", "by": "buremba", "date": "2026-02-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "if agent bricks itself (often does with Openclaw if you give it access to change config)", "excerpt": "My take is that agents should only take actions that you can recover from by default. You can gradually give it more permission and build guardrails such as extra LLM auditing, time boxed whitelisted domains etc. That's what I'm experimenting with https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu 1. Don't let it send emails from your personal account, only let it draft email and share the link with you. 2. Use incremental snapshots an", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Don't trust AI agents"}]}, {"label": "Token costs", "summary": "Its prompting and context system burns tokens, which makes API costs high.", "quotes": [{"id": 792263041, "item_id": 49516440, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516440", "by": "InterviewFrog", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high..", "excerpt": "I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 764613456, "item_id": 47788341, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788341", "by": "nfgrep", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase.", "excerpt": "I tried it for a few days and then dropped it. The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase. I was mostly interested in having AI writing little toy projects. I used pi over ssh instead, and eventually built myself a little mobile-first web UI wrapping pi.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI writing toy projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 787934050, "item_id": 49245878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49245878", "by": "seanmcdirmid", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "didnt bloat context too much with system prompts (like openclaw)", "excerpt": "Not parent, but I use Goose for my non-handcrafted Qwen use cases, I\u2019m also working on handcrafting as well. Goose was the only harness that didnt bloat context too much with system prompts (like openclaw) and I could get reasonable web search working with Qwen.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Meta Muse Glimmer \u2013 open weights 30B local coding model"}]}, {"label": "Messy codebase", "summary": "The code is described as large and messy, with many open bugs.", "quotes": [{"id": 782347088, "item_id": 48896693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48896693", "by": "crooked-v", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "That codebase is a nightmare. Just take a look at the hundred-plus pages of bugs on the Github repo.", "excerpt": "I wouldn't want OpenClaw anywhere near a business I was running, even if I was all aboard the LLM hype train. That codebase is a nightmare. Just take a look at the hundred-plus pages of bugs on the Github repo.", "context": "", "use_case": "business agent use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenClawMachines \u2013 Extending OpenClaw to the Enterprise"}, {"id": 757863840, "item_id": 47366490, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366490", "by": "LaurensBER", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "my OpenClaw instance broke last week", "excerpt": "Amen, my OpenClaw instance broke last week. Some update broke the OpenRouter integration and I haven't been able to fix the issue. I took a quick look at the code, hoping to narrow it down and it's pretty much exactly what you would expect, there's hidden configuration files everywhere and in general it's just a lot of code for what's effectively a for loop with Whatsapp integration (in my case :)). Not to mention th", "context": "runs a rootless, locked-down Kubernetes deployment", "use_case": "personal agent with WhatsApp integration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes"}, {"id": 759005073, "item_id": 47437817, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437817", "by": "dirk94018", "date": "2026-03-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "watching OpenClaw users burn $800-$3600/month on tokens, deal with 1,100+ malicious ClawHub skills", "excerpt": "Author here. We built NoClaw after watching OpenClaw users burn $800-$3600/month on tokens, deal with 1,100+ malicious ClawHub skills, and have agents email their entire contact list unprompted. An AI assistant can be genuinely useful but it doesn't require 400,000+ lines of code and burn tokens like they are free. We use small C CLI tools that talk to native macOS apps, Emails, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts \u2014 so eve", "context": "", "use_case": "AI assistant", "switched_from": "", "story": "NoClaw \u2013 Mac Mini Assistant the Unix Way"}]}, {"label": "Redundant tools", "summary": "Some find Claude Code or Codex already cover what they need.", "quotes": [{"id": 777398592, "item_id": 48587412, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587412", "by": "nullbio", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw?", "excerpt": "I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.", "context": "uses AI about 12 hours a day", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 764550768, "item_id": 47784423, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784423", "by": "atonse", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code.", "excerpt": "I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code. But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat. I'm running half my company with Nanoclaw. Same idea, and has some benefits, but I live in CC all day so it's marginal (except for the fact that my laptop has to be on)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764585873, "item_id": 47786617, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786617", "by": "lz400", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Also I'm concerned about security.", "excerpt": "I use claude code everyday. Most of my friend circle have a CC max subscription and we talk about and use AI all the time. Not a single one has installed openclaw yet. For me personally I don't see that it can do a lot of things that CC/codex doesn't do and that _I_ want to do. Also I'm concerned about security. For a while I wanted some agent I could tell what to do in my PC at home from my phone, so I just vibe cod", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}]}, {"label": "Setup effort", "summary": "It takes effort to set up and learn its quirks.", "quotes": [{"id": 764603360, "item_id": 47787710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787710", "by": "godot", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly", "excerpt": "I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work. The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of \"scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only ", "context": "runs it on a VPS", "use_case": "scheduled scraping and reporting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764018608, "item_id": 47751163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751163", "by": "Robelkidin", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I do believe it absolutely amazing product.", "excerpt": "I have been experimenting with openclaw for the past 3 months and I am Software Engineer and I had difficulties setting it up and managing it. I almost bought Mac Studio to run it, bought into the hype. I do believe it absolutely amazing product. I recently launched AlitaGPT.COM (Alita.com was already registered) to provide a managed openclaw with hundreds of custom application integration. I used GCP GKE -Autopilot ", "context": "software engineer", "use_case": "agentic assistant", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenAI GPT worst AI GPT/model vs. Claude/MiniAAX"}, {"id": 775288065, "item_id": 48455504, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455504", "by": "hank1931", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I decided OpenClaw was too raw for me.", "excerpt": "Check out Eve (https://eve.new). I saw it here on Hacker News after I decided OpenClaw was too raw for me. Eve is amazing. My theory as to why it's so good is that the founders have a strong background in design -- they met getting their masters in design at UC Berkeley. Their secret sauce is the harness they've constructed IMHO. Here is what Zach Dive said in the original HN announcement-- Eve is an AI agent harness", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Hermes Agent \u2013 Open-Source AI Agent with Persistent Memory"}]}], "who": [{"by": "dangerface", "context": "building an agent marketplace", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166647", "date": "2026-10-20"}, {"by": "themgt", "context": "research authors", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49688673", "date": "2026-09-13"}, {"by": "SipitenoMK", "context": "independent drop shipper", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508739", "date": "2026-08-31"}, {"by": "cuchoi", "context": "author of the experiment", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48684846", "date": "2026-06-26"}, {"by": "ymolodtsov", "context": "runs it for company tasks", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832610", "date": "2026-04-20"}, {"by": "devashish86", "context": "runs local inference on a DGX Spark", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795202", "date": "2026-04-16"}, {"by": "godot", "context": "runs it on a VPS", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787710", "date": "2026-04-15"}, {"by": "bitmasher9", "context": "self-hosted user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786020", "date": "2026-04-15"}, {"by": "ryanmcgarvey", "context": "software engineer using AI daily", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784707", "date": "2026-04-15"}, {"by": "nkotov", "context": "implemented it for a customer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784522", "date": "2026-04-15"}, {"by": "Robelkidin", "context": "software engineer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751163", "date": "2026-04-13"}, {"by": "jwang987", "context": "runs product backend operations", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492091", "date": "2026-03-23"}], "tags": ["self-hostable", "runs on a VPS", "for personal automation", "for small business tasks", "for tinkerers"], "use_cases": ["ai agent", "ai assistant", "agent harness", "personal ai agent", "personal agent", "ai agents"], "compared": [{"slug": "claude-code", "name": "Claude Code", "co": 30, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 4}, {"slug": "hermes", "name": "Hermes", "co": 22, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 5}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 12, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "codex", "name": "Codex", "co": 12, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "nanoclaw", "name": "NanoClaw", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "zeroclaw", "name": "ZeroClaw", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "pi", "name": "Pi", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "chatgpt", "name": "ChatGPT", "co": 8, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 757396304, "item_id": 47337269, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47337269", "by": "OpenClawguru", "date": "2026-03-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use AI agents for ecommerce backoffice \u2014 inventory alerts, ad monitoring, support triage.", "excerpt": "We use AI agents for ecommerce backoffice \u2014 inventory alerts, ad monitoring, support triage. Runs in Slack 24/7: selzee.com/openclaw?via=hn", "context": "", "use_case": "ecommerce backoffice AI agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: G0 \u2013 The control layer for AI agents (scan, test, monitor, comply)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783940", "title": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?", "mentions": 23}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586005", "title": "Migrate from OpenClaw", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49505310", "title": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396", "title": "Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to be used with OpenClaw", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154803", "title": "Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508982", "title": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-02": {"compare": 5, "recommend": 13, "warn": 10, "neutral": 10}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 8, "neutral": 7, "warn": 4}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 12, "neutral": 16, "warn": 9, "compare": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {"warn": 6, "recommend": 3, "neutral": 6, "compare": 1}, "2026-07": {"warn": 5, "recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-08": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 2, "compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 4}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 7, "recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804739360, "item_id": 50296210, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296210", "by": "mbesto", "date": "2026-10-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "For the record I use OpenClaw but it has its own services (gmail address, phone number, etc.) and I don't give it any of mine", "excerpt": "Am I missing something, how is there any sort value in these assistants acting as agents on your behalf when they are basically a black box? Like if it can't use my drivers license or my phone number or my credit card, it can't do 75% of things people claim it can do without being massive security issues. What am I missing? For the record I use OpenClaw but it has its own services (gmail address, phone number, etc.) ", "context": "", "use_case": "personal assistant agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful"}, {"id": 803920577, "item_id": 50245036, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245036", "by": "myphpgothacked", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I spent unbelievable amounts of money on Opus tokens for OpenClaw", "excerpt": "To be fair, I spent unbelievable amounts of money on Opus tokens for OpenClaw. Easily my biggest expense this year. The risk is that other models are pretty comparable to Opus since around July. Unless they have cheaper electricity costs, I can switch models interchangeably. They don't have a moat. Gosh I wish it was easier to short stocks. Whatever platform I used made me sell/buy 100, and I wanted to do this short ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anthropic S-1"}, {"id": 803562658, "item_id": 50222666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50222666", "by": "chrisinnes", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used Kimi 2 (or 2.5) with my Openclaw and enjoyed it there", "excerpt": "I used Kimi 2 (or 2.5) with my Openclaw and enjoyed it there so took out a subscription to Kimi 3.0 when it came out. Found it functional but boring. Preferred Qwen. Am not going to try the latest Kimi but it seems to be giving patchy results.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed"}, {"id": 803114497, "item_id": 50194656, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194656", "by": "sksksk", "date": "2026-10-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable.", "excerpt": "I'm always a bit wary about doing write up on things like this, as I kind of just muddle things together and definitely don't follow best practices. I used OpenClaw a while back, I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable. This time around, I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure. One thing I think has improved it is building apps to \"pre-compute\" data. For example, with my email, instead of accessing m", "context": "", "use_case": "personal AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Duet"}, {"id": 802666352, "item_id": 50166647, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166647", "by": "dangerface", "date": "2026-10-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I gave openclaw a bitcoin wallet and $100 to spend.", "excerpt": "I gave openclaw a bitcoin wallet and $100 to spend. I told it the $100 was our marketing budget for the month and it should come up with a marketing strategy and then implement it using the budget. With in minutes it had spent all the budget buying fake follows on an X account that was similar to mine. Lessons learnt: Most checkout pages have strong anti bot / fraud protection it struggles to get past. Most checkouts", "context": "building an agent marketplace", "use_case": "autonomous agent marketing experiment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you cap what your coding agents can spend?"}, {"id": 801021057, "item_id": 50063816, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50063816", "by": "jiscariot", "date": "2026-10-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been running OpenClaw for a year--its been fine", "excerpt": "I've been running OpenClaw for a year--its been fine, but I really wanted an enterprise experience and to spend less time troubleshooting my agent. Muse exceeded expectations out of the gate, and still does. It has become my daily driver and I shutdown OpenClaw last week. I get that some are adverse to Meta or want to run local. I don't care who wins the personal agent space, so long as it's not Apple. Buying Siri an", "context": "", "use_case": "personal AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Wonder"}, {"id": 799873280, "item_id": 49992080, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49992080", "by": "Theory42", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "something like OpenClaw (which I use a lot)", "excerpt": "I suspect you might be right. My conclusions from the digging are that this kind of compression works best with settled instructions/data for machine to machine talk. For something like OpenClaw (which I use a lot), that might mean the AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, etc. Compression there would free up the context for the agent.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Write Like It's 1866: LLMs Relearn Telegraphese"}, {"id": 799202258, "item_id": 49950141, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950141", "by": "mcdoolz", "date": "2026-10-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Openclaw happened so I started engineering a plugin for it", "excerpt": "Markdown files aren't a memory system!!!!! I started SULCUS a year and some ago because I got tired of waiting on compaction processes. I fell down a rabbit hole and over engineered a system that uses an integral postgres to provide a memory system for my LLM agent. Openclaw happened so I started engineering a plugin for it and started leveraging the harness lifecycle to proactively populate the context window. This ", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 798500768, "item_id": 49906298, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906298", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-09-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I ran an OpenClaw instance for a few months on a vm. It was fun but also very flaky.", "excerpt": "That gets you a long way actually. This actually sounds a bit like a tamed version of openclaw. A self learning and adapting always on agent that takes care of stuff for you. And of course they do employ Peter Steinberger who created OpenClaw since early this year. So, I expect it might be borrowing some ideas from that. Probably/hopefully not any of the code. I ran an OpenClaw instance for a few months on a vm. It w", "context": "", "use_case": "always-on personal agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dots: Always-on agents"}, {"id": 795932817, "item_id": 49745801, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49745801", "by": "chris_marino", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "OpenClaw was one example that fit the pattern", "excerpt": "My response was simplified because your question was basic. OpenClaw was one example that fit the pattern, not a claim that every deployment holds the credential in the sandbox. Injection proxies exist and I should have said so. As for showing the data for advantages, I'll refer you to Anthropic and Cloudflare's Code Mode https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mcp https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-m", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Aclif \u2013 Agent CLI framework: one grammar, canonical names across SaaS"}, {"id": 795018768, "item_id": 49688673, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49688673", "by": "themgt", "date": "2026-09-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We used OpenClaw to run these experiments so that our scaffold was agnostic to the model provider.", "excerpt": "We used OpenClaw to run these experiments so that our scaffold was agnostic to the model provider. We conducted dry-run experiments with models from OpenAI and Anthropic before settling on Opus 4.8 as the best-performing model. In response to concerns that our results might be principally explained by a limitation in our scaffold, we repeated our experiment on one paper using GPT-5.6 Sol and Codex, its native scaffol", "context": "research authors", "use_case": "agent experiment scaffold", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all"}, {"id": 794759105, "item_id": 49672444, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672444", "by": "initramfs", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back", "excerpt": "This is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... They discovered the agents started raising money for themselves, including crypto. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open... Their iLands uses Claude and Codex, but their website says they will be using these too: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle"}, {"id": 794035489, "item_id": 49627218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49627218", "by": "fnordpiglet", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "even OpenClaw, and I\u2019ve yet to find a meaningful use of such an assistant.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve desperately tried to use the Claude work, ChatGPT work, even OpenClaw, and I\u2019ve yet to find a meaningful use of such an assistant. Maybe my life is too boring, but what I see here is a bunch of stuff that makes life more complicated. IF the things I use are well supported here, and IF I have manual repetitive tasks to delegate with them, it feels a bit like taking a nap while using FSD - I don\u2019t trust an LLM to ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse \u2013 Meta\u2019s personal AI agent"}, {"id": 792297792, "item_id": 49518612, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518612", "by": "EagnaIonat", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models.", "excerpt": "I used it to try it out. Security wise I don't trust it at all so I had it running in a VM and local models. It was able to create an application that Claude created, using the same instructions file. Considerably slower but I was surprised it could do it.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 792263041, "item_id": 49516440, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516440", "by": "InterviewFrog", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high..", "excerpt": "I used it initially. It was great and useful but the api costs were pretty high.. Now, I use claude code directly on my machine with the remote control flag.. so its like open claw exactly. I can be outside and give commands to it via mobile app", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 792139825, "item_id": 49508739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508739", "by": "SipitenoMK", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor", "excerpt": "Actually I use Hermes Agent who delegates tasks to OpenClaw. It works perfectly, we run OpenClaw experiments with my partner as an independent drop shipper, it\u2019s much more complicated setup, which cannot disclose publicly, but it works. The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor :)", "context": "independent drop shipper", "use_case": "executing delegated tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally"}, {"id": 792138016, "item_id": 49508626, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508626", "by": "saberience", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "nobody uses OpenClaw anymore and nobody is talking about \"claws\"", "excerpt": "I still remember Karpathy's breathless excitement about \"claws\" and how all autonomous agents would be called \"claws\" in the future. Now fast forward six months and nobody uses OpenClaw anymore and nobody is talking about \"claws\". I love it.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally"}, {"id": 792106148, "item_id": 49506634, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506634", "by": "Schlagbohrer", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Does anyone have a good pro vs con for Pi vs OpenClaw?", "excerpt": "I have found the Pi agent harness, running in a docker container, with Qwen3.8-27B in back in LM Studio, to be amazing and i use it daily. Just last weekend I used it to do PDF editing which previously would have required me to download really shady software online to do. I have never tried OpenClaw so maybe I am missing out but considering how much my agent can modify the Pi environment to work better, I am happy wi", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally"}, {"id": 792098784, "item_id": 49506174, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506174", "by": "teekert", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile.", "excerpt": "I think this is a good question, as with any of these new things you don't really feel any need indeed. My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments,", "context": "", "use_case": "job listing matching, automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally"}, {"id": 789144993, "item_id": 49321562, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321562", "by": "LaurensBER", "date": "2026-08-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run my OpenClaw on whatever is the latest GLM model", "excerpt": "I run my OpenClaw on whatever is the latest GLM model and ever since the release of GLM 5 it has been a smooth ride. The models solve whatever problem I throw at them and the code is good enough that I barely ever have to look at it (to guide the mode). The 5.3 release seems particularly strong, I asked if to audit all the scripts that the previous versions have written and it identified some issues and hard to find ", "context": "", "use_case": "personal agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3: Frontier Coding with Emergent Cyber Capabilities"}, {"id": 787934050, "item_id": 49245878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49245878", "by": "seanmcdirmid", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "didnt bloat context too much with system prompts (like openclaw)", "excerpt": "Not parent, but I use Goose for my non-handcrafted Qwen use cases, I\u2019m also working on handcrafting as well. Goose was the only harness that didnt bloat context too much with system prompts (like openclaw) and I could get reasonable web search working with Qwen.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Meta Muse Glimmer \u2013 open weights 30B local coding model"}, {"id": 786659904, "item_id": 49166244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166244", "by": "mlsu", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the crappy mechanism we have now is something like openCLAW.", "excerpt": "Yes I love this comment! GPs are awesome. Prompting is conditioning, that is what it is. The visual of a GP (like the thing you get if you google image search \u201cGaussian process\u201d) is a great metaphor for what prompting an LLM is doing. The output of the LLM is the logits which is sampled - plucking out tokens from a distribution. The input of the LLM is data which constrains the logits. That is what it is. That\u2019s also", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "LLMs reward expertise"}, {"id": 786047969, "item_id": 49127998, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127998", "by": "noodlescb", "date": "2026-07-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the limitations/security of it kind of made it a novelty for me", "excerpt": "Honestly the limitations/security of it kind of made it a novelty for me. I use web hosted stuff like surfboard now for my llm-assistant work stuff.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "qm \u2013 Multiplayer agent harness for work"}, {"id": 783942915, "item_id": 48996432, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996432", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "haystack framework, which is a bit less of a messy basket case than Openclaw", "excerpt": "Bots in team chat is not a bad idea. I've been experimenting with that for a few months. We started with Slack. This kind of works but dialing in the gazillion of permissions needed to end up with something that works is a bit painful. And you have to do this over and over again for each new bot. So, we started experimenting with self hosted alternatives. First we tried Matrix. It's nice but a bit too strict on end t", "context": "", "use_case": "chat bots", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting"}, {"id": 782454465, "item_id": 48903404, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903404", "by": "rstuart4133", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "things like claude-code, OpenClaw, and the occasional project I see mentioned here", "excerpt": "> All I can say is skill issue. I regularly see claims by people that they have produced large, reliable bodies of code using vibe coding. Unfortunately, no vibe coded project I've used comes anywhere close to code reviewed by a human. Admittedly, my sample size is very small: things like claude-code, OpenClaw, and the occasional project I see mentioned here. But compared to the things I used regularly like GNU coreu", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Control the Ideas, Not the Code"}, {"id": 782401009, "item_id": 48900063, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900063", "by": "rush86999", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "compare", "quote": "OpenClaw needs to be built from the ground up.", "excerpt": "OpenClaw needs to be built from the ground up. I created Atom based on current research on agentic systems and am looking for maintainers & testers to help out. https://github.com/rush86999/atom https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/docs/features/atom-vs-openclaw.md", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenClawMachines \u2013 Extending OpenClaw to the Enterprise"}, {"id": 782347088, "item_id": 48896693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48896693", "by": "crooked-v", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "That codebase is a nightmare. Just take a look at the hundred-plus pages of bugs on the Github repo.", "excerpt": "I wouldn't want OpenClaw anywhere near a business I was running, even if I was all aboard the LLM hype train. That codebase is a nightmare. Just take a look at the hundred-plus pages of bugs on the Github repo.", "context": "", "use_case": "business agent use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: OpenClawMachines \u2013 Extending OpenClaw to the Enterprise"}, {"id": 781973138, "item_id": 48873321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873321", "by": "gabriel-uribe", "date": "2026-07-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a lot of the esoteric setups people have created with things like OpenClaw have become outdated as quickly as they were conceived", "excerpt": "Fwiw, don't buy into all the hype that you're falling behind. Yes, AI does cool things now, but I would say the impact is still unproven past indie hackers or early-stage startups. And a lot of the esoteric setups people have created with things like OpenClaw have become outdated as quickly as they were conceived. The popular thing is now to setup loops (eg I setup hourly integrations for Claude/Codex to 1) scrape my", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI 2040: Plan A"}, {"id": 781693584, "item_id": 48855849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855849", "by": "hackerbone", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The future is you having an OpenClaw/Hermes agent connected to these native MCPs", "excerpt": "native mcp tools are the way to go - frontend is essentially dead. The future is you having an OpenClaw/Hermes agent connected to these native MCPs and you texting on telegram/whatsapp etc.. with your agent to get information. I'm already doing this - the future is now!!", "context": "", "use_case": "agent texting for information", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: MCP Native Tools?"}, {"id": 781563026, "item_id": 48847689, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847689", "by": "HarHarVeryFunny", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I don't need OpenClaw running 24x7 trying to hack it's way into my gmail.", "excerpt": "I've integrated AI into my daily life by installing the Gemini voice app onto my phone, which I typically may use once a week, and adding Gemini and Claude bookmarks to my browser which I use all the time - but mostly Gemini since free usage is effectively unlimited. That's all the integration I need. I don't need OpenClaw running 24x7 trying to hack it's way into my gmail.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"}, {"id": 779393986, "item_id": 48712124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712124", "by": "pimeys", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw just felt... not what I wanted.", "excerpt": "I have taken another look on these open models after the fiasco of Fable and GPT 5.6 this weekend and... GLM-5.2 truly is a good workhorse model for daily programming. I consider myself a heavy user of LLMs and a seasoned developer. A typical session for me with GPT is usually over a hundred dollars... This weekend I programmed a matrix bot with encryption and a Rust agent with some tools. Because I need one and Open", "context": "", "use_case": "agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Semgrep: GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our Cyber Benchmarks"}, {"id": 779045505, "item_id": 48690344, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690344", "by": "9294", "date": "2026-06-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use railway to host my openclaw like personal agent for friends and family", "excerpt": "No one talks about new Railway Sandboxes - https://docs.railway.com/sandboxes I think they have one of the best sandbox environments on the market with pay per utilized resources pricing, it's a huge cost reduction for agentic workloads when you have 95%+ idle CPU time and occasional spikes for CPU heavy work (e.g. agent run tests or something like this). I use railway to host my openclaw like personal agent for frie", "context": "", "use_case": "personal agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS introduces MicroVMs"}, {"id": 778957536, "item_id": 48684846, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48684846", "by": "cuchoi", "date": "2026-06-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It was usable like any Openclaw agent.", "excerpt": "Author here. It was usable like any Openclaw agent. For example, I used it to ask it questions about the VPS, to summarize emails, etc.", "context": "author of the experiment", "use_case": "VPS questions, email summaries", "switched_from": "", "story": "What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant"}, {"id": 778417809, "item_id": 48651113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651113", "by": "buremba", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security", "excerpt": "It's not built on OpenClaw, it uses Pi the harness that powers OpenClaw. We're using the GTM for multi-tenant OpenClaw when there was hype but quickly moved away from it as OpenClaw is a nightmare in terms of security.", "context": "building an agent product", "use_case": "multi-tenant agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Tag"}, {"id": 777497025, "item_id": 48593564, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593564", "by": "david_shi", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "compare", "quote": "There's definite tradeoffs when it comes using a remote agent service vs. setting up OpenClaw or Hermes on a Mac Mini", "excerpt": "I actually built my own daily driver at https://operator.io. There's definite tradeoffs when it comes using a remote agent service vs. setting up OpenClaw or Hermes on a Mac Mini, but being able to access an agent with a completely isolated file system and network gives me peace of mind when I'm using it.", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Harajuku Moment"}, {"id": 777473488, "item_id": 48592093, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592093", "by": "deadbabe", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "They already know OpenClaw", "excerpt": "You can build your own, but it won\u2019t give you social currency the way it does when you just tell people \u201cYea I use OpenClaw\u201d. They already know OpenClaw and what it\u2019s about so you instantly gain rapport vs having to explain your custom agent system that they will doubt is better than OpenClaw and probably write you off as a crank.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 777398592, "item_id": 48587412, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587412", "by": "nullbio", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw?", "excerpt": "I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.", "context": "uses AI about 12 hours a day", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 777395936, "item_id": 48587246, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587246", "by": "ransom1538", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I don't understand people running OpenClaw.  I just full shot a prompt to create a better clone.", "excerpt": "I don't understand people running OpenClaw. I just full shot a prompt to create a better clone. Its extremely custom to my work and flow. I use it as a personal agent, emails, slacks + as a hardcore coding agent. If it sees a problem in email it will create a ticket, assign it to an agent monitor progress, get a PR ready for me - then it harasses me until I review the PR. If I ignore the PR it will call my wife. It c", "context": "", "use_case": "personal agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 777394320, "item_id": 48587145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587145", "by": "jacobgold", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used OpenClaw -> Hermes -> my own thing now.", "excerpt": "What are you automating with OpenClaw in June, 2026? I used OpenClaw -> Hermes -> my own thing now. I've got things like code review, email inbox/spam filtering, website monitoring for bad links/typos, HN/Bluesky notifications, favorite director/actors/author alerts, etc. I mostly interact with them using Slack and Email.", "context": "", "use_case": "automation agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 777385296, "item_id": 48586581, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586581", "by": "_pdp_", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed", "excerpt": "I might be a little more paranoid than most because of my profession, but none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed - let alone directly on the machine I use every day. OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics, which is a huge red flag to me. And then there is the code.", "context": "security-minded profession", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrate from OpenClaw"}, {"id": 768932369, "item_id": 48058273, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058273", "by": "ikidd", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "What a mess that's turned into", "excerpt": "I switched to Hermes Agent and it's been night and day how much more stable and usable it is over OpenClaw. What a mess that's turned into", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw Had a Rough Week"}, {"id": 765321760, "item_id": 47832610, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832610", "by": "ymolodtsov", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts.", "excerpt": "I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaini", "context": "runs it for company tasks", "use_case": "personal assistant querying accounts", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS"}, {"id": 764635312, "item_id": 47789707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47789707", "by": "opak", "date": "2026-04-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak", "excerpt": "In general, AI agents are a good idea, but OpenClaw\u2019s security is weak, so I use an alternative: https://github.com/opentalon/opentalon", "context": "", "use_case": "AI agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764613456, "item_id": 47788341, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788341", "by": "nfgrep", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase.", "excerpt": "I tried it for a few days and then dropped it. The prompting/memory/context system for OpenClaw chewed tokens and performed subpar for my usecase. I was mostly interested in having AI writing little toy projects. I used pi over ssh instead, and eventually built myself a little mobile-first web UI wrapping pi.", "context": "", "use_case": "AI writing toy projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764603360, "item_id": 47787710, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787710", "by": "godot", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly", "excerpt": "I use it, it works well for a certain limited category of tasks once you've set it up properly, it's not as easy and straightforward as it seems, but once you've learned its quirks you can make it work. The category of task I have it do is basically the pattern of \"scrape some certain websites on a regular schedule, do some light data processing/understanding/analyzing, report the result to me [all or sometimes only ", "context": "runs it on a VPS", "use_case": "scheduled scraping and reporting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764596000, "item_id": 47787250, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787250", "by": "luxuryballs", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love it, it is like Claude on steroids", "excerpt": "I love it, it is like Claude on steroids, I can just chat with it on my phone and iterate projects\u2026 sadly it\u2019s really expensive now to keep using Opus, looking for alternatives that doesn\u2019t gimp the reasoning and creativity is hard.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat with agent from phone to iterate projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764584672, "item_id": 47786542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786542", "by": "blackmanta", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers without much effort.", "excerpt": "I have an instance that does search related to my research interests, tracks news related to viruses in the US, events happening around my area and an \u201curgent\u201d news job that uses searx and for things going on around me. I used Qwen 3.5 9B and tuned some of the jobs with GPT 5.4. I recently switched to use Gemma 4 and there was seemingly no major difference. I\u2019ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers ", "context": "", "use_case": "research and news digests", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764575024, "item_id": 47785939, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785939", "by": "superfrank", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting.", "excerpt": "I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it. What do I use it", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764571312, "item_id": 47785707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785707", "by": "fny", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I used it, found it buggy", "excerpt": "I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you. - Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite - Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder - Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversa", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764555312, "item_id": 47784707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784707", "by": "ryanmcgarvey", "date": "2026-04-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it.", "excerpt": "Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it. It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff \u2014 emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another", "context": "software engineer using AI daily", "use_case": "emailing, drafting, deploying small apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"}, {"id": 764121296, "item_id": 47757581, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757581", "by": "operatingthetan", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'", "excerpt": "The only thing I use openclaw for is managing my obsidian vault. The flow is a series of crons that prompt me to fill out daily files and update projects as they progress. I also use it for calorie tracking and basic daily journaling. This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'", "context": "", "use_case": "managing Obsidian vault, journaling", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Introduction to Obsidian"}, {"id": 759873456, "item_id": 47492091, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492091", "by": "jwang987", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal.", "excerpt": "I'm using it to manage product backend operations through Telegram. Without OpenClaw, most tasks were automatable with Claude Code anyways, but OpenClaw lets me to chat in TG and get things done without opening up a terminal. I also built a tax filing engine that handles my tax locally (demo: https://x.com/artoriatech/status/2036111002790490365 web: https://oktax.app) As for security, I don't run OpenClaw on my machi", "context": "runs product backend operations", "use_case": "managing product backend via Telegram", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Are you using OpenClaw or similar agents? How?"}, {"id": 756568672, "item_id": 47285542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285542", "by": "airbreather", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I find the OpenClaw can prompt Claude Code better and keep it running for me without it stopping for stupid questions.", "excerpt": "I am 60 in October, I have a couple of PyQt projects that were desktop apps, specialised tools I use for Electrical Engineering and Control/Safety Systems design and build. So I decided that I wanted web apps, something that is probably beyond me in any reasonable time, if at all, if I was to code myself by hand. For my coding AI \"stack\" I am now running OpenClaw sitting on top of Claude Code, I find the OpenClaw can", "context": "nearly 60, electrical engineering and control systems", "use_case": "orchestrating Claude Code", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has ignited a passion again"}, {"id": 755597120, "item_id": 47224820, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224820", "by": "pclark", "date": "2026-03-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been _amazed_ at how effortless it is to setup.", "excerpt": "Ok, I'll bite and run the HN skepticism guantlet. I have an OpenClaw setup with a Claude API token and Qwen local model, running on an M4 Mac Mini with 32GB RAM. 1. At 7AM and periodically throughout the day it checks my calendars (work, parenting schedule, personal), a hyper local weather station, and some specific news topics \u2014 and sends me a summary and throughout the day updates if anything significant happens. 1", "context": "previous Zapier power user", "use_case": "personal assistant automation", "switched_from": "Zapier", "story": "OpenClaw Surpasses React to Become the Most-Starred Software Project on GitHub"}]}