Hacker News Reader

Comment by SimianSci | Hacker News Reader

There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed. Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool.

Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.

View on HN

I'm not sure it's astroturfed exactly; but the hype is not coming from technical professionals. Like you find a linkedin post with a thousand likes about this or similar projects, and everybody is either #opentowork or ~~Agentic Head of AI Brainstorming at My Bedroom~~

Also clawdbot is objectively a pretty inconvenient way to hook Claude Code up to a chat app. I made a bare-bones one that takes 2 minutes to run with npx: https://github.com/clharman/afk-code

So if I have CC running say on a VPS then that's where your thing needs to run too right?

Correct!

The most interesting part of it to me (that isn't anything particularly special, but I hadn't seen it before) is giving it full file system access so it'll write it's own tools to come back to later.

It's an obvious move in hindsight, but I hadn't thought of it. Now, the amount of people running it outside of a sandbox or isolated machine and giving it that kind of access would probably make me cry.

Isn’t that just literally Claude Code’s own “make skill” skill?

The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I gave it a try here with some opinionated choices:

https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith

Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash.

It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harness for the very specific environments they end up in (whether it's a business, or a super personalized agent for a user, etc). How to make it not a security nightmare is probably the biggest open question and why I assume Anthropic/others haven't gone full bore into it.

Another way to isolate on a server via LXC containers (disclosure my project):

https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

So much opportunity to build botnets, that I can't even.

The actual founder/developer of it already had a 9 figure exit (what he's claimed his personal payout was) and claims to be building these free and open source tools for the fun of it after coming out of retirement

100M eh?

Most of this hype appears to be coming from grifters who aren't actually connected to the project. So, it's there, but not the fault of the people doing the work.

This has come up in a few recent statements by the project lead, including scammy memecoins and name-sniping. One source:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/clawdbot_moltbot_secu...

I mean couldn't this literally have been a OpenCode addon or something standalone or even ollama. Like the hype behind it is really ridiculous and I sort of hate it because I feel like its a grift.

I saw an AI generated (not even local llm but some cloud llm SORA) AI video ad of lobster/clawdbot on r/localllama not by any reddit ad (whcih gets block by ubo) but rather by a human.

I really got pissed by it and there was one comment which was pissed too. I really resonated with that comment. Clawdbot is really dumb, I seriously don't understand the hype.

WE are getting into purely crypto version of somehow AI (like with all of its weird hype mostly). The bubble is near imo.

the only advantage is the claude chrome extension completely sucks and takes forever

There's so much of it, everything being reinvented as 'X for LLM' when you don't need it, can just use existing X tools perfectly well with LLMs. Even MCP was an example of that.

sounds similar to bun, it got super hyped until it was acquired

Why would you compare them, bun is a complex tech used by real projects

I know, but it was a similar pattern, every tech youtuber/twitter were talking about it until it got acquired

Yeah, Anthropic must love that people are sharing access to their entire online lives with them.

Probably more glad that people are paying subscription fees to do digital assistant stuff... without them having to directly provide the assistant interface. That way they won't be directly blamed for the wave of hacked accounts from people foolish enough to connect this to their email.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com