Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

SunshineTheCat

I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it. Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time. I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.

samxli

Tried it in the earlier days and it performed badly. I didn't give it free reign on my computer due to obvious security concerns so sandboxed it to a docker container instead. I think for a lot of tasks it's probably more trouble to set this up than to just DIY it.

XTXinverseXTY

I noticed that Clawdbot’s initial acolytes seemed to skew towards solo founders and hustler/grifter types. The Mac minis were likely to spam leads over iMessage. The single top downloaded skill was for Twitter. The fastest way to monetize an openclaw agent is by spamming fake social proof for your product (including for openclaw itself).

rvz

…Or is anyone making money directly out of running OpenClaw other than hosted providers or selling OpenClaw courses?

therealmarv

I saw some non-technical people automating or creating small great tools with it which they need for their profession. These people are not programmers. I think everybody who has basic understanding of programming and deployment better should stick to some AI coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode etc etc. I don't think I'm missing out by not using OpenClaw & Co.

gneuron

This is a good example: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-openclaw-changed-my-l...

syngrog66

lots of modern software devs suffer from the same thing notoriously associated with teenagers: strong urge to conform and comply with peer pressure. individuals vary, obvs. but as you age this urge shrinks

sputknick

I tried using it for a specific web search task. I wrote a skill, got it all set up and deployed. It worked. But also, would have worked just as well as a cron job with some LLM looking at Brave API results. Like a lot of AI tools, it was a lot of work for underwhelming results.

lxgr

I've been playing around with it. The only two real use cases I have for it for now are entertaining me on long flights where I have messaging-only Wi-Fi and sending me a personalized "morning brief". I suppose it could be a lot more useful if I actually gave it access to any of my personal data (it lives in a heavily resource-limited container), but there's absolutely no way I'm letting that hot mess of a walking, talking CVE anywhere near my data. It's somehow both horribly insecure and extremely prone to locking me out because of several competing security/permission models fighting it out and gridlocking each other. Code quality and the issue tracker of the repo are a big mess; for example, the local "memory" retrieval functionality is completely broken for some trivial reason that has been reported and auto-closed about five times (automatically, of course). In summary: Brilliant idea, terrible execution. Can't wait for the first big tech player I trust enough (or at least one that has my data already anyway) to actually make it a product. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

dsiegel2275

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case: Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days. It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

atonse

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)

asdev

No it's slop and most of the hype was manufactured marketing. It has 0 utility, and any perceived utility you can build yourself easily

bradgranath

Yes. They are all lobsters.

nkotov

I use it daily and also implemented it for a customer for a very specific use case. The Claude subscription change made it less desirable to use but I still enjoy it.

mholubowski

Yes, at our company we are using it very extensively. I genuinely believe we're near the forefront of usage. We have multiple isolated OpenClaw instances serving as employee within Slack.

araes

Personally, better way to phrase might be "Does anybody you've actually met, visually viewed, use OpenClaw? Can you verify them using the software nearby?" In a few years, it's become so easy to falsify articles, falsify comments, falsify images, difficult to really even trust responses online anyways. As far back as 2016, Microsoft already had bots deployed online that could respond 96,000 times [1] in 16 hours all over social media. Remember Tay? [1][2] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) Even official government responses. The British Royal family went to falsification immediately. [3] Note child's broken fingers bent sideways (lower left, didn't even get circled) [3] https://inews.co.uk/news/signs-princess-kate-royal-family-ph... The White House is posting altered arrest images of people. [4] [4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-... Can't trust this stuff much anymore. Obvious caveat with this post.

Cloudly

I've had success using the underlying harness - pi-mono as a data analyst in a sandbox.

kinj28

I am using it as one the agent that is automating LinkedIn outreach by running a bash script & using ai wherever it needs some decision like finding first name or what message to write, etc.

MrFiskarBengt

I'm trying to. Currently there's a bug in the code that strips headers and doesn't allow me to authenticate to my AI Gateway service. The whole thing is incredibly buggy. The dashboard is horrible, with page after page with similar-looking settings and what feels like hundreds of things I will never use. The categories in the dashbaord are also unintuitive. It's the kind of thing an AI would put together if it got very vague instructions. It doesn't scream quality and thoughtfullness. Not a bit. IronClaw is much more promising imo. Trying it out right now. Much less issues so far.

milesskorpen

Yes - I've set it up as an 'office manager,' where it mainly snakily interacts with the local team via Slack, and controls an office TV to show our quote board, PTO calendar, and upcoming events. The Clawe is overkill for the use case, but sometimes is fun.