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Comment by _pdp_ | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to use OpenClaw, NanoClaw or any of these new variants. You can literally use Codex, Claude Code, Gemini, OpenCode for the same thing. The only thing that it is missing from all of them is the communication channels because none of them come with native communication tools like OpenClaw.

But this is not such a big deal.

I made an open-source lightweight daemon in Go that fills that gap. All it does is to provide the means to connect to popular messaging systems like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. and expose this all through the CLI.

The project is hosted here: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk

My personal realisation recently has been that the unix way is the best way. We just need to go back creating daemons and lightweight composable CLIs and let agents do their thing. They are increasing being trained to operate the command-line and they are getting pretty good at it.

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What about heartbeats, cron etc? Seems like a major part of the 'claw' appeal is that it can work autonomously, monitor your email inbox for stuff and take action automatically...

You can do both with the cron daemon. But pantalk can also trigger the agent after some notifications are buffered too. So that also is a trigger. You don't really need one massive library. All operating systems have native ways to do all of these things and more.

I don't know. You can even use systemd if you like.

Hahaha a year ago I did this. Crontab -e

Run Claude -p and Claude already has mcp,'s configured so it can do anything I wanted.

You should be like '$10,000,000 please'

Dont be ridiculous. He needs to make it deployable by normies and hype it up on twitter first. then he could ask for 10mil

I'd love if someone with experience can correct me if I'm wrong but in my experience it can do all of that really, really badly. I find the happy and most likely case for any sort of autonomous thing is that it totally fails to do anything. The sad case is it does the wrong thing. There's just no case where these things make good judgement calls or understand what you think is important.

I do still find some things useful about my nanoclaw setup - convenience and easy scheduling of LLM related tasks. Well, promising actually, not useful yet. But autonomy is not one of those things.

I hear a lot about people doing this but it really seems like it is prompt injection as a service. eventually the things that can happen when you give the world write access to an unattended LLM that can access both your browser and password reset mechanism will happen.

or someone will just make it email lewd pics to people’s bosses for the lols

I would never use it on my MacBook or any machine but I understand why technical people would want to experiment with something dangerous like that. It’s novel, exciting, and might inspire some real practical products in the future (not just highly experimental alpha software).

That theory is being tested. So far no prompt injection has broken in:

https://hackmyclaw.com/

It's a neat idea but it's not exactly plausible real world conditions to have an agent that pretty much exclusively spends its time wading through an email inbox that's 99% repeated prompt injection attempts. As the creator acknowledges in the original thread, its context/working memory is going to be unusually cognizant of prompt injection risk at any given time vs. a more typical helpful agent "mindset" while fulfilling normal day-to-day requests. Where a malicious prompt might be slipped in via any one of dozens of different infiltration points without the convenience of a static "prompt injection inbox".

Mostly because no one cares about trying to hack "hackmyclaw", there is zero value for any serious attacker to try. Why would they waste their time on a zero value target?

The only people who tried to hack "hackmyclaw" are casual attempts from HN readers when it was first posted.

Meanwhile, tons of actual OpenClaw users have been owned by malware which was downloaded as Skills.

Also, there have been plenty of actual examples of prompt injection working, including attacks on major companies. E.g. Superhuman was hacked recently via prompt injection.

https://x.com/benhylak/status/2025873646724800835

turns out it doesn’t even need to be an attacker…

Since when do security researchers and black hats give away their tools for free?

Ask your claude to make a cron to wake itself up. Done.

You could literally set up a heartbeat or a cron. It's faster than setting up the claw.

And if you don't know how, CC does.

Crontab entry to read a file and run a prompt?

It is truly odd in a way. You had posts here about Google managers or execs saying AI coded something solid in a few days what their own team were working on for months or years, or something along those lines. But people seem to ignore that creating a clone of your favorite "Claw" product seems like an ideal first project for the sea of mid or senior engineers that haven't dipped their toes into the vibe-coding ocean.

You have people talking about the tired topic of the lack of moat for AI businesses. But people should be calling out the moat that most tech businesses take for granted. Forget the moat that prevents other businesses, what about the moat that prevents your own users from creating your own product "from scratch"?

This is basically just telling people to learn to code

Which IMO they should anyway if they are doing advanced automation

No coding is required. You can literally ask your agent to install and configure it. It is only 2 small binaries and no external dependencies. It cannot be any easier than that.

Shameless plug: https://www.supyagent.com - we basically want to give away the integrations for free. For Claude users you just need to run `supyagent skills generate` and you get all the integrations. Works well with cursor and codex as well, and if you want a UI to go with it that can be tinkered, just run `npx create-supyagent-app`

Seriously, for anyone that knows how to code it’s super easy to setup your own thing. I set up an cloudflare email worker that just forwards emails to my server and Claude can send me emails back. It’s super nice because email already has all the functionality for threads and nice formatting.

Since I control the server and all the code it’s very simple to setup up schedules or new tools.

I can’t see myself using most of these because I don’t want them having my conversations.

I really want a native iOS chat client that connects directly to my home server.

You’re missing the point. None of those have the same integrations into other software and APIs that the OpenClaw plugins provide. And not everyone wants to write their own minimal implementation. This is why OpenClaw is popular.

I’ve been using happy cli, works great

> You don't need to use OpenClaw, NanoClaw or any of these new variants.

> Here's my own implementation!

Insert xkcd standards joke.

Umm, is it out of the grey area of Whatsapp (and others') TOS?

As much as claws are

Openclaws recommends Telegram which promotes bots.

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