[bigfishrunning]

> OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.

For the first time in my career I feel so incredibly behind on this: What is open claw giving people that they want so badly? It just seems like Russian Roulette, I honestly don't see the upside

[ttsalami]

I can give you, as an example, what is driving me towards trying it.

I work as a contractor for 2 companies, not out of necessity, but greed. I also have a personal project with a friend that is dangerously close to becoming a business that needs attention. I also have other responsibilities and believe it or not - friends. Also the ADHD on top of that.

I yearn for a personal assistant. Something or somebody that will read the latest ticket assigned to me, the email with project feedback, the message from my best friend that I haven't replied for the last 3 days and remind me: "you should do this, it's going to take 5 minutes", "you have to do this today, because tomorrow you are swamped" or "you should probably start X by doing Y".

I have tried so many systems of managing my schedule and I can never stick with it. I have a feeling that having a bot "reach out", but also be able to do "reasoning" over my pending things would be a game changer.

But yes, the russian roulette part is holding me back. I am taking suggestions though

[heavyset_go]

You will learn to ignore the bot like everything else.

You're looking for a technical solution to a problem that is not technical. Saying this as someone who is similar to you.

[sigbottle]

How much would a real personal assistant cost?

[cheema33]

> How much would a real personal assistant cost?

A lot. And wouldn't be as good or fast. I am speaking from experience.

[rune-dev]

But isn’t this just another notification to ignore?

The ticket being assigned to you is your “Hey take care of this!” ping, same with the email or text from your friend.

How long until you start tuning out the openclaw notifications?

[ttsalami]

It's a good point.

My hope would be that since openclaw is communicating with me to my personal device, where I have all noise filtered, it would be a bit better.

I also know it can integrate with TickTick, which has been a huge change for me with task management. Then again - in my experience whatever tool I use to keep track of stuff only works for as long as it's a novelty, but 3 months is a record anyway.

The thing is - when I receive a message and I'm not in the headspace to answer, I close the notification and forget about it. My expectation would be openclaw reminding me that I still haven't replied to this person about that thing. Obviously, there's a million ways to do it that don't require openclaw. Obviously there's a million things that I won't be able to grant openclaw access to (e.g. company jira or slack). And obviously, I don't want it evaluating every single of my personal messages. But I think there is a reasonable middle ground where it can work well. But I don't yet know how to reach it

[mx_03]

cant that be fixed, tho?

If the analogy is a personal asistant, a good assistant will know when to notify you and when not to.

[rune-dev]

Maybe yeah, though I don’t know if practicing restraint is something I would say LLM’s are good at though.

I think to all of the needless comments in code, AI code reviews pointing out inane nitpicks, etc.

It just makes me think your AI assistant is going to be pinging you non stop

[BeetleB]

Like with any new tool/technology, you have to try it. And even then the benefits won't be obvious to you until you've played with it for a few days/weeks. With LLMs in general, it took me months before I found real good use cases.

Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.

The real problem is that it is fairly unreliable. It would often ping me even when the information had not shown up.

Another example: I'm particular about the weather related information I want, and so far have not found any app that has everything. I got sick of going to a particular web site, clicking on things, to get this information. So I created a Skill to get what I need, and now I just ask for it (verbally), and I get it.

As the GP said. This is what Siri etc should have been.

[bigfishrunning]

> Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.

Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. It seems I spend the security cost here, and in return i can save 15 minutes writing a script. Juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze.

[post-it]

But they don't just want the text of the website pushed as a notification every day. They want the bot to load the site, likely perform some kind of interaction, decide if the thing they're looking for is there, and then notify them.

[dolebirchwood]

All of which can already be done programmatically without OpenClaw.

[post-it]

Not with a single prompt.

[Vexs]

You could pretty reasonably vibe code that in a single prompt odds are.

Additionally, there are browser extensions that can do this- check on a timer, see if some page content is there, and then notify.

[BeetleB]

> Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent.

Here's a concrete example: A web site showing after school activities for my kid's school. All the current ones end in March, and we were notified to keep a lookout for new activities.

So I told my OpenClaw instance to monitor it and notify me ONLY if there are activities beginning in March/April.

Now let's break down your suggestion:

> a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent.

How exactly is this going to know if the activity begins in March/April? And which notification service? How will it talk to it?

Sounds like you're suggesting writing a script and putting it in a cron job. Am I going to do that every time such a task comes up? Do I need to parse the HTML each time to figure out the exact locators, etc? I've done that once or twice in the past. It works, but there is always a mental burden on working out all those details. So I typically don't do it. For something like this, I wouldn't have bothered - I would have just checked the site every few days manually.

Here: You have 15 minutes. Go write that script and test it. Will you bother? I didn't think so. But with OpenClaw, it's no effort.

Oh, and I need to by physically near my computer to write the script.

Now the OpenClaw approach:

I tell it to do this while on a grocery errand. Or while in the office. I don't need to be home.

It's a 4 step process:

"Hey, can you go to the site and give me all the afterschool activities and their start dates?"

<Confirm it does that>

"Hey, write a skill that does that, and notifies me if the start date is ..."

"Hey, let's test the skill out manually"

<Confirm skill works>

"Hey, schedule a check every 10:30am"

And we're done.

I don't do this all at once. I can ask it to do the first thing, and forget about it for an hour or two, and then come back and continue.

There are a zillion scripts I could write to make my life easier that I'm not writing. The benefit of OpenClaw is that it now is writing them for me. 15 minutes * 1 zillion is a lot of time I've saved.

But as I said: Currently unreliable.

[jwilber]

I agree with the sentiment that there are use cases for web scraping where an agent is preferable to a cron job, but I think your particular example can certainly be achieved with a cron job and a basic parser script. Just have Claude write it.

[BeetleB]

I didn't say it's not doable. I'm not even saying it's hard. But nothing beats telling Claw to do it for me while I'm in the middle of groceries.

Put another way: If it can do it (reliably), why on Earth would I babysit Claude to write it?

The whole point is this: When AI coding became a thing, many folks rediscovered the joy of programming, because now they could use Claude to code up stuff they wouldn't have bothered to. The barrier to entry went down. OpenClaw is simply that taken to the next level.

And as an aside, let's just dispense with parsing altogether! If I were writing this as a script, I would simply fetch the text of the page, and have the script send it to an LLM instead of parsing. Why worry about parsing bugs on a one-off script?

[jwilber]

Fair point, I just think that example is better off running on a cron job than using compute from llm inference, (though that will become negligible over time, anyways).

[Kye]

Scripts fail. Agents exfiltrate your data because someone hacked the school's website with prompt injections. Make sure it's a choice and not ignorance of the risks.

[Kye]

It increasingly seems like most people make a different decision after thinking through the security implications of something like this. This is me being charitable.

[phil21]

A personal assistant of some sort that is actually useful at some stuff and not just a toy?

It’s not some huge life changing thing for me, but I also only dabble with it - certainly it has no access to anything very important to my life.

I find it incredibly useful to just have a chat line open with a little agent running on a tiny computer on my IoT network at home I can ask to do basic chores.

Last night I realized I forgot to set the permanent holiday lights to “obnoxious st parties day animation” at around 9pm. It was basically the effect of “hey siri, please talk to the front house wled controller and set an appropriate very colorful theme for the current holiday until morning” while I drove to pick my wife up from a friends house.

Without such a quick off-handed ability to get that done, there was zero chance I was coming home 20 minutes later, remembering I should do that, spending 10 minutes googling an appropriate preset lighting theme someone already came up with, grabbing laptop, and clicking a half dozen buttons to get that done.

Trivial use case? Yup. But those trivial things add up for a measurable quality of life difference to me.

I’m sure there are better and cleaner ways to achieve similar - but it’s a very fast on-ramp into getting something from zero to useful without needing to learn all this stuff from the ground up. Every time I think of something around that complexity level I go “ugh. I’ll get to it at some point” but if I spend 15 minutes with openclaw I can usually have a decent tool that is “good enough” for future use to get related things done for the future.

It’s done far more complex development/devops “lab” stuff for me that at least proved some concepts for work later. I’ll throw away the output, but these are items that would have been put off indefinitely due to activation energy because the basics are trivial but annoyingly time consuming. Spin up a few VMs, configure basic networking, install and configure the few open source tools I wanted to test out, create some simple glue code to mock out what I wanted to try out. That sort of thing. Basically stuff I would have a personal intern do if I could afford one.

For now it’s basically doing my IT chores for me. The other night I had it finally get around to setting up some dashboards and Prometheus monitoring for some various sensors and WiFi stuff around the house. Useful when I need it, but not something I ever got around to doing myself for the past 7 years since I moved in. Knocking out that todo list is pretty nice!

The risk is pretty moderate for me. Worst case it deletes configs or bricks something it has access to and I need to roll back from backups it does not have permissions to even know exist, much less modify. It certainly has zero access to personal email, real production environments, or anything like that.

[hadlock]

OpenClaw has a persistent memory, stored to disk, and an efficient way of accessing it. ChatGPT and Claude both added a rudimentary "memory" feature in March but it's nowhwere as extensible or vendor neutral.

[KeplerBoy]

ChatGPT had memory for a long time. Claude also had it for quite some time for paying customers.