soninkI've Seen a Thousand OpenClaw Deploys. Here's the Truth
https://blog.nishantsoni.com/p/ive-seen-a-thousand-openclaw-deploys
It would’ve happened eventually anyway, but OpenClaw is basically what kickstarted the beginning of the end of token subsidies. It’s a almost begging to be used wastefully. And agents would miss and lose nothing without it. It’s devoid of a reason to exist.
I don't follow the thinking here. If you are using it for coding maybe, but the main use case of openclaw is as a personal assistant. I'm using a $10 a month minimax subscription for it, and I've never used more than 10% usage of a 5 hour window.
I'm using openclaw as a personal development bot, which is pretty useful. It pings me throughout the day using crons to complete tasks and follows up on them. But aside from that, it is a very unreliable piece of software. I'm constantly having to fix it, or track down correct configurations. It can just decide to randomly edit it's own config, uses incorrect json keys and then the whole thing is dead. Or it blows through it's context and doesn't know to compact. Then it's just stuck. I can't wait till it matures or something more reliable comes along.
Amen.
I love the concept but I've never hosted such a terrible piece of software. Every update breaks something new or introduces another "anti-feature" that's enabled by default.
The documentation is often lagging behind and the changelog has such a low signal to noise ratio that you need a LLM to figure out what upgrading will break this time. For now I've just given up on updates and I've been patching bugs directly in the JS when they bother me enough.
If OpenClaw is the future of software I'm honestly a bit scared for the industry.
I'm open to suggestions, I tried Zeroclaw and Nullclaw but they're bad in their own way. I would like something that's easy to run on Kubernetes with WhatsApp integration and most important, stable releases.
From my perspective there are some people that have never built real processes in their life that enjoy having some processes now. But agent processes are less reliable slower and less maintenable then a process that is well-defined and architectured and uses llm’s only where no other solution is sufficient. Classification, drafting, summarizing.
I’ve had a Whatsapp assistant since 2023, jailbraked as easy assistant. Only thing I kept using is transcription.
https://github.com/askrella/whatsapp-chatgpt was released 3 years ago and many have extended it for more capabilities and arguably its more performant than Openclaw as it can run in all your chat windows. But there’s still no use case.
It’s really classification and drafting.
Who is this guy and why is he casually admitting to reading all the user conversations???
If you look at my comment history, you'll see what seems to be someone defending OpenClaw (even though I stopped using it).
I have some issues with the article, but I agree with some of the conclusions: It's great tinkering with it if you have time to spare, but not worth using weeks of your time trying to get a perfect setup. It's just not that reliable to use up so much of your time.
I will say, it's still amongst the best tools to do a variety of tasks. Yes, each one of those could be done with just a coding agent, but I found it's less effort to get OpenClaw to do it than you writing something for each use case.
Very honest question: One of the use cases I had with OpenClaw that I'm missing now that I don't use it: I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list.
How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw? How would you do it?
(My TODO list is strictly on a home PC - no syncing with phone - by design).
(BTW, the reason I stopped using OpenClaw is boring: My QEMU SW stopped working and I haven't had time to debug).
> It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list
You can use anything to call this API right? I have multiple iPhone shortcut that does this. Heck, I think you can even use Siri to trigger the shortcut and make it a voice command (a bit unsure, it’s been a while since I played with voice)
> I could tell it (via Telegram) to add something to my TODO list at home while I'm in the office. It would call a custom API I had set up that adds items to my TODO list. How can I replicate this without the hassle of setting up OpenClaw?
The general idea is make a simple deterministic program that runs a never ending loop. Every minute or so, check Telegram for a new message. If a message is received, then the program runs "claude -p" with a prompt, whatever MCP tools or CLI permissions it needs, and the contents of your Telegram message. Just leave the program running on your home computer while you're out, and you're done.
I don't use Telegram, so coding the part to check Telegram would be the hard part. I use email instead, and have the program check every minute for new mail (I leave my email program running and check the local inbox file). I'd already coded up a local MCP server to manage my ToDo list (Toodledo) so Claude just calls the MCP tools to add the task.