What’s most shocking to me about the whole OpenClaw hype is how little people in tech seem to know about computers…
It’s like most of the industry hasn’t ever looked any deeper than their node_modules folder.
It’s like most of the industry hasn’t ever looked any deeper than their node_modules folder.
These things seem powerful when you can schedule reoccurring scripts l but it never was easily accessible to the masses.
I looked at task scheduling on Windows and while the UI was usable, I cannot imagine any regular person using that. Just doing crontab -e feels way simpler and has less friction, BUT it doesn't really help you much with task statuses and re-running them and reporting/alerting/notifications (past MTA) and all the stuff, past "Oh hey, every day at 04:00, run this shell script."
I wonder why people haven't gotten the green light from their bosses or investments to improve OS functionality and write tools that improve general usability and just slap some basic AI on top of that for the checkmark: "Hey boss, I spent the last month and wrote a task scheduling and management GUI for Windows that's really approachable, we can totally also use this for the current AI/Copilot/claw trend wink wink."
Most didn't do even that. And yes it is shocking. amusing but also not really; now those people get credible tech jobs because of AI without actually understanding literally anything. That's why I don't get the 'AI will never replace tech people' -> most tech people were never tech people, just (resume lying) grifters and they can (and will) be easily replaced by claude or even glm. It's the vast majority of tech people I ran into at big corps in the past 20 years, especially if they are from outsourcing hubs; they just see programming/tech as trial and error, search google (now ask AI), copy/paste, see if it runs, repeat. I see people daily that cannot remember how variables work (and they often have a bachelor or even master in CS...), not even 5 minutes, they just ask ai and copy/paste it (yep also most don't know claude code exists, they use chatgpt Windows client or, if they are advanced, Copilot).
HN is a nice echo chamber and most people here don't believe it's that bad and that's why they don't believe AI has a chance. Please come with me to Barclays or Shell (or straight to Wipro etc) or so and let's have a chat with some programmers! Your jaw will be on the floor.
If something can automate my professional or personal life, it is wild technology and ppl will talk about it a lot. People are not idiots. A new thing is happening, would you not agree?
What its parts are specifically made of, it does not matter imho
It's important to know what goes into building *claws because of how pervasive they are; sooner or later because of all the hype they'll start being used everywhere and if people take your attitude it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Giving them unfettered access to your life and not even wonder if the foundation is solid is concerning imho.
How is that analogy in any way relevant?
The OpenClaw I control is extremely useful to me. I've never been more excited about technology than right now. If it's not for you, I really don't care. Go do something you enjoy. Turning it into Chicken Little doomerism is completely uncalled for.
(yes, I'm a biochemist-technologist, and I'm alluding to how the whole biosphere is made of stupid simple things, mostly the same shit in repeating patterns, but that the right combination of them, with the right transition moment and energetics, it changes the whole ecology)
People are excited all the time with junk food, drugs and lots of silly easy dopamine hits.That doesn't mean it is good for them.
People use dependencies willy-nilly, avoid proper auditing of LLM output; all that have disastrous consequences as we've seen the past few years. NPM supply chain attacks, prompt injection causing data exfil, etc.
I am simply saying it's imperative to UNDERSTAND the platform before making it a core part of your life. If wanting proper understanding of vibe coded projects with dependency hell is Chicken Little doomerism, oh well.
The homogenization of your computing life to revolve around a chatbot in a loop———is all you need!
Give in! Hackernews NEEDS you to use the 1000th vibecoded clawmolt because the influencers said so! Who needs neural net or web framework experience when you have claws?