[bwb]

Hah, I read that as well and made a big "hmmmmmmmmm" sound...

The last time I talked to someone about OpenClaw and how it is helping them, they told me it tells them what their calendar has for them today or auto-tweets for them (i.e., non-human spam). The first is as simple as checking your calendar, and the second is blatant spam.

Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?

[obsidianbases1]

> how it is helping them

This should be the opening for every post about the various "innovations" in the space.

Preferably with a subsequent line about the manual process that was worth putting the extra effort into prior to the shiny new thing.

I really can imagine a better UX then opening my calendar in one-click and manual scanning.

Another frequent theme is "tell me the weather." One again, Google home (alexa or whatever) handles it while I'm still in bed and let's me go longer without staring at a screen.

The spam use-case is probably the best use-case I've seen, as in it truly saves time for an equal or better result, but that means being cool with being a spammer.

[nxobject]

Absolutely - in general, the tendency to want to replace investing in UI/UX with omnipotent chatbots raises my blood pressure.

[teratron27]

A dev on my team was trying to get us to setup OpenClaw, harping on about how it would make our lives easier etc, etc. (even though most of the team was against the idea due to the security issues and just not thinking it would be worth it).

Their example use case was for it to read and summarize our Slack alerts channel to let us know if we had any issues by tagging people directly... the Slack channel is populated by our monitoring tools that also page the on-call dev for the week.

The kicker... this guy was the on-call dev that week and had just been ignoring the Slack channel, emails and notifications he was getting!

[sanex]

This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it was fun nonetheless. I've been applying for jobs but I don't want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam, I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO LARPing at its finest. Also a big fan of giving it access to my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I need to read or update.

I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.

[CuriouslyC]

Not via OpenClaw, but I automate breakdowns of my analytics and I recently started getting digests of social media conversations relevant to my interests. It's also good for monitoring services and doing first line triage on issues.

[gyomu]

I think a sizable proportion of people just want to play "large company exec". Their dream is to have an assistant telling them how busy their day is, all the meetings they have, then to go to those meetings and listen to random fluff people tell them while saying "mmh yeah what a wise observation" or "mmh no not enough synergy here, let's pivot and really leave our mark on this market, crunch the numbers again".

I can't come up with any other explanation for why there seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that much to show for it.

They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out of it.

[mikkupikku]

Everybody here probably already has an opinion about the utility of coding agents, and having it manage your calendar isn't terribly inspired, but there is a lot more you can do.

To be specific, for the past year I've been having numerous long conversations about all the books I've read. I talk about what I liked, didn't like, the ideas and and plots I found compelling or lame, talks about the characters, the writing styles of authors, the contemporary social context the authors might have been addressing, etc. Every aspect of the books I can think off. Then I ask it for recommendations, I tell it given my interests and preferences, suggest new books with literary merit.

ChatGPT just knocks this out of the park, amazing suggestions every time, I've never had so much fun reading than in the past year. It's like having the world's best read and most patient librarian at your personal disposal.

[coolelectronics]

In the past we had "friends" for this

[sshine]

> LARP'ing CEO

My experience with plain Claude Code is that I can step back and get an overview of what I'm doing, since I tend to hyperfocus on problems, preventing me from having a simultaneous overview.

It does feel like being a project manager (a role I've partially filled before) having your agency in autopilot, which is still more control than having team members do their thing.

So while it may feel very empowering to be the CEO of your own computer, the question is if it has any CEO-like effect on your work.

Taking it back to Claude Code and feeling like a manager, it certainly does have a real effect for me.

I won't dispute that running a bunch of agents in sync won't give you an extension of that effect.

The real test is: Do you invoice accordingly?

[Spooky23]

The marketing of OpenClaw is amazing. They had a one-liner install that didn't work, started the hype-train days before they changed the name of the product and have everyone from nerd influencers to CNBC raving about it.

I'm waiting for the grift!

[skerit]

> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance

Well... no. But I do really like it. It's just an always-on Claude you can chat with in Telegram, that tries to keep context, that has access to a ton of stuff, and it can schedule wakeup times for itself.

[adastra22]

It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. User experience is important.

[Lapel2742]

> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?

Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product similar to OpenClaw. It can organize your files and directories and works really great (until it doesn't, of course). But don't worry, you surely have a backup and need to test the restore function anyway. /s

Edit:

So far, I haven’t found a practical use case for this. To become truly useful, it would need access to certain resources or data that I’m not comfortable sharing with it.