Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Rekindle8090 66 days ago
My biggest issue with OpenClaw is everyone talks about doing things with it but doesn't explain what it actually is doing.

First of all is not an LLM, you're beholden to an api or local llm limitations. Second of all it's always calendars, email replies, summarizing.

You do not need an LLM for that, and an LLM doesn't make it easier either. It sounds like executive cosplay, not productivity. Everything I see people talking about that's actually productive, it's doing probabilistically when deterministic tools already exist and have for in some cases over 20 years.

You don't need an LLM to put a meeting on a calendar, that's literally two taps with your phone or a single click in gmail. Most email services already have suggestions already built in. Emails have been summarized for 10 years at this point. If you're so busy you need this stuff automated, you probably have an assistant, or you're important enough that actually using general intelligence is critical to being successful at all.

The idea of getting an LLM email response sounds great for someone who has never worked a job in their life.

This comment section is full of llm writen responses too, to the point where its absurd. Noticing how most of them just talk in circles like "But I think many people criticizing the various Claws are missing out on the cronjob aspect. There's value in having your AI do work automatically while you're asleep. You don't even need OpenClaw for that, just a cronjob that runs claude -p in the early morning. If you give your AI enough context about yourself, you get to a point where it just independently works on things for you, and comes to you with suggestions. It doesn't need to be specifically prompted. The environment of data it can access is its own context, its own prompt. With that, it can sometimes be surprising and spooky what you wake up to, without being directly prompted."

This literally isn't even saying anything. This paragraph does not mean anything. It's not saying what its doing, whats happening or what the result is, just "something is happening".

No, you didn't save time using openclaw, you just changed to managing openclaw instead of doing your actual job.

You don't need custom scripts for most things if its actually something that matters, most tools already exist, and if you do openclaw isn't going to help you do it.

1 comments

I'm gonna die shaking my fists at clouds pretty soon, but amen. I had a guy in work Slack evangelizing about this in January when it first came out and he's talking about automatically ordering groceries and getting reminders to do laundry and shit and I just don't get it. Sure, that's a use case, but I figured out how to feed, clothe, and house myself without digital assistance 25 years ago. How'd you live this long if you can't eat without a machine telling you what to buy and how to cook?

I can't even tell if these replies are in fact just astroturfed bot armies flooding us with marketing or there really is an entire generation of people out there right now who can't do anything unless their phone is telling them what to do.

And where are the outcomes? Okay, you've got OpenClaw telling you every few hours how many calories you've had so far today. Have you gotten leaner? Faster? Stronger? Healthier or fitter by any quantifiable objective metric at all? Or are you just doing exactly what you did before but now your phone is scripting it for you?

> I had a guy in work Slack evangelizing about this in January when it first came out and he's talking about automatically ordering groceries and getting reminders to do laundry and shit and I just don't get it. Sure, that's a use case, but I figured out how to feed, clothe, and house myself without digital assistance 25 years ago. How'd you live this long if you can't eat without a machine telling you what to buy and how to cook?

Some people have developed personal coping strategies for neurodivergence, and can probably do better with some AI assistance.

I myself tend to live by my calendar. Even then, I may eventually forget to follow up on something until it's too late, because I'm busy or overwhelmed with other things.