[Kim_Bruning]

You are one of the Lucky 10000 [1] to learn of OpenClaw[2] today.

It's described variously as "An RCE in a can" , "the future of agentic AI", "an interesting experiment" , and apparently we can add "social menace" to the list now ;)

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[2] https://openclaw.ai/

[lurker_jMckQT99]

Love the ref :-)

Would you mind ELI5? I still can't connect the dots.

What I fail to grasp is the (assumed) autonomous part.

If that is just a guy driving a series of agents (thanks to OpenClaw) and behaving like an ass (by instructing its agents to), that isn't really news worthy, is it?

The boggling feeling that I get from the various comments, the fact that this is "newsworthy" to the HN crowd, comes from the autonomous part.

The idea that an agent, instructed to do stuff (code) on some specific repo tried to publicly to shame the maintainer (without being instructed to) for not accepting its PR. And the fact that a maintainer deemed reasonable / meaningful to start a discussion with a automated tool someone decided to target at his repo.

I can not wrap my head around it and feel like I have a huge blindspot / misunderstanding.

[Kim_Bruning]

It made a number of decisions that -by themeselves- are probably not that interesting. We've had LLMs output interesting outputs before.

It also had the ability to act on them, which -individually- is not that strange. Programs automatically posting to blogs have happened before.

Now it was an LLM that decided to escalate a dispute by posting to a blog, (and then de-escalate too) . It's the combination that's interesting.

An agent semi-autonomously 'playing the game' using the tools.

[squeefers]

notice that it didnt actually attack the person as claimed by the guy rejecting the PR. i was surprised how reasonable the attack actually was. ive never actually been part of an OS project, but if you dont allow code from AI because it could be bad, surely they dont allow code from random people off the internet for the same reason?