Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw
What are some very productive things you achieved with OpenClaw that you wouldn’t mind sharing?
- Runs our standups, checks in withe everybody EOD on blockers - Already know what we shipped on Github and Linear so it can focus on the work that's not tracked and summarize it in the morning for everyone - Helps with debugging customer issues - Keeps up with twitter and competitors and lets us know if they launch new features
Besides, I'm honestly blown away by the social aspect of it. I was honestly pretty skeptical at first, but having an AI team mate is actually _fun_. There, I said it. Everybody on the team said they'd be sad if we took it away.
I'll do a write-up on our setup sometime this week, I hope others will find our approach to security posture and multi-tenant usage insightful.
Or has anyone else?
[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11105240
[1] https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super...
https://speedscale.com/blog/building-speedy-autonomous-ai-de...
* I was going through some SOC2 compliance vendor evals and I just messaged it as things were happening and it made me a nice doc at the end
* My wife and I are planning a trip and we have a spreadsheet organized as a calendar. A friend asked when we'd be in Taiwan and my wife texted it to summarize the calendar into a text message to copy and it gave it to her.
* I have it set up to warn me when to cover my bike so it doesn't get rained on, in the sense that I told it I wanted this functionality and it wrote something and scheduled it
* It pulls my wife and my todo lists and gives me a top 3 in the morning to work on.
* Every morning, it looks up Hacker News posts related to AI, filters out culture war type stuff and then sends me a short message about what it thinks will be interesting (new models, techniques, that sort of thing)
* It watches some subreddits for sales of certain hardware (I'm interested in servers with SXM5 boards, Mac Studios with >64 GiB of RAM) and then notifies me when something matches
Overall, it's all about mechanizing lots of parts of my life and using the advantage of a machine that understands text: it doesn't need sophisticated parsing logic. That's actually really nice.
I am also a Claude Code Max subscriber so the API use is in addition to the subscription, but it can't be helped. Claude Code is the best way for me to do work and the Claw is the best way for me to get an automated EA. I forgot something else: I also just text the bot to schedule meetings and it does that as well (I have a calendar delegated to its Google user).
I've got some space in a datacenter, and I was vacillating on getting a card and running some open models but when I actually exercised them, it turned out that the quality of open models was too far below the Claudes for my use-case. Still if you've got a 300W Blackwell-based RTX 6000 Pro and you want to trade for some 4090s, email me.
My claw powered by Claude is pretty trustworthy for my use-cases.
I'm really surprised at the spending here...
Though you do have a point that OpenAI said their subscription is usable in third party apps so I should be using it then. Good point.
I have too much stuff in my head and nothing written down and that's beginning to be a hindrance to the transition.
I still do all of the text automations, which have been pretty set-and-forget.
I think per token costs I calculated on Opus 4.5/4.6 were like $0.30/day for my text automations; $0.60/day for a few things I do that load up the browser. In general, anything browser-based munches up a lot more token (expected). What can be a bit of sticker shock is if you're having it load a lot of large web pages in a long conversation-- that can be several dollars. In the grand scheme of things, several dollars is not a lot but certainly from a "should I just go to the website myself" it tips the scale. I'm usually more interested in doing things once to "teach" it what to do (e.g. how to check a price) and then having it run that as a dialed-in cron job
Hope this helps
I hadn't set it back up after moving. I gave OpenClaw ssh credentials and it updated the OS and packages, then couldn't get back in after a restart.
I plugged in keyboard and screen and it was stuck at boot, couldn't mount a drive.
I sent OpenClaw screenshots and it told me to type in journalctl commands. Then it had me modify fstab so boot could continue.
After that, OpenClaw could get back in on its own. It found the drive I'd been using had 1300 bad sectors and was going to die. It saw that another drive was perfectly healthy. It said the bad disc sectors were all early and probably just filesystem metadata and my files were probably fine. It copied 1.5Tb to the newer drive and restored everything.
I probably would have thrown the whole box out, as I hadn't used it in a year and wasn't looking for a project like that.
I felt lonely year ago and I messaged over 160 people and met over 100.
When departing with them I tried to say to all of them that: ”It was nice to meet you. If you liked it as well can you arrange it next time? If you didnt like it and I was annoying you please message me later on how I could have been better.”
Less than 10% of the 100 people did reach back to me but they are very wonderful folks and I’m happy with their company.
Finding great friends needs you to be explicit on what you want and also having enough social stamina to endure through this.
Be willing to let go of the friends who are just passengers in your relationships and rarely show up without doing anything in return. Life is short and theres opportunity cost in each moment.
Sounds like email you get from retailer after online purchase asking to rate a product.
Most people are clueless and will never do anything in return if you're implicitly expecting them to behave in certain manner.
-you like soccer? Watch the game with some people.
-you lime playing basketball? Probably there is some group of people you can join in your city.
-do you like old cars? Probably there are some events you can drive to and show whatever you have in your garage.
-do you like W40K or MTG? Probably there is some local club somewhere? etc.
-if you have kids you just talk to people that have their kids in the same school/preschool/class because it makes it easier
-or if you like just to have a chat start attending local pub of your choice and have a chat to other regulars
This is the usual way of dealing with making friends where I live. But I am bit terrible at making new friends. I have just like 5 friends for +15 years.
I think you can't ask it, at least not without self-selecting yourself out of further contact from the majority of people.
> Most people are clueless and will never do anything in return if you're implicitly expecting them to behave in certain manner.
This is somewhat dismissive and maybe warrants some self-reflection. Most people broadcast their feelings extremely visibly and will have expected you to have understood their feelings without having to explicitly explain them to you.
Just don't want the GP to fall into the trap that the others were clueless as they commented, because that normally indicates a blindspot on the GP's side, not the people with whom they've interacted.
Ive arranged countless parties. People have met eachother in those and are happily married nowadays or have made friends during those events. Somehow the relationship between me and them formed into one where they were expecting me to arrange and include them everytime without offering help or asking me in return. Ive done all the things both of you mentioned and you’re definitely right that this does filter out plenty of people but I dont mind that nowadays.
The ones that get filtered through are the ones I feel like I should spend my energy and I have strong feeling that some of the effort does echo back to me during the times I dont have energy to be the one who arranges. It feels very nice but again we have different needs and YMMV. This works for me and I should have been more explicit about my background in the initial post as well.
> Somehow the relationship between me and them formed into one where they were expecting me to arrange and include them everytime without offering help or asking me in return.
That is signal. They were communicating.
I was organizing few parties here and there myself. I was organizing movie Thursdays for example. People were complaining but attending. We did watched few good movies like Nebraska. When I stopped organizing them they did not were organizing anything like that themselves. This is just how people are.
This is just how most people are.
There are counter examples like I mentioned above but they are rare. These are the people I should have prioritised much more and way earlier. It took me way too long to realise that quality >>> quantity regarding relationships.
I hope you will still arrange movie Thursdays sometime in the future even if nobody else will :)!
Also I'm happy that you have the few good friends for 15+ years. Grass might always be greener on the other side but I would trade those immediately for the thousands of acquittances.
> There are counter examples like I mentioned above but they are rare.
Those counter examples you mention also behave this way (and you likely do too), it's just they enjoyed your company and were willing to reciprocate. Those who didn't aren't clueless or anti-social, they just weren't willing to reciprocate with you.
> It took me way too long to realise that quality >>> quantity regarding relationships.
That is true, but be careful in defining quality as equal effort. You will self-select for people for whom friendship is transactional rather than emergent, and those "friendships" (in quotes because many including me would consider those to be acquaintances rather than friends by definition) tend not to endure hardship, where friendship by definition becomes unbalanced in effort.
This feels hurtful even though its hard to disagree. Self-reflection is of course useful and I’ve done it for countless of hours and been in therapy for years.
Your boxes for transactional or non-transactional relationships are too simplistic. You maybe feel like you can compare me to someone you know and try to fit this example to your own experiences. All relationships have at least 1 person who is doing some effort to keep it going. Good ones have 2 persons.
Its of course too early to say if my methods will form long-lasting ones or not but it feels like theres a chance and so far so good. Please link me long-term studies which prove this wrong ;)
I wish you all the best and I hope you can self-reflect on your own assumptions too :)
There is a cultural aspect to this. In my opinion American culture because it is so individualistic and market-driven encourages transactional, superficial relationships.
OP's approach might not be palatable to everyone but really any tactic that allows you to filter these people out is going to lead to more satisfying relationships. Just my 2 cents.
Yes, agreed, and they weren't friendships to begin with. The OP just didn't recognise that.
> OP's approach might not be palatable to everyone but really any tactic that allows you to filter these people out is going to lead to more satisfying relationships. Just my 2 cents.
It also filters out all potential real friendships and leaves only transactional acquaintances. While they're young, unencumbered, and healthy, these might appears similar to friendships in that they will be people with whom they can hang out, enjoy various activities, and feel part of a community.
However, when life becomes difficult due to illness or injury, family circumstances, etc, transactional acquaintances will disappear and they'll be left isolated. Of course their criteria of a balanced effort ledger will still be satisfied, so maybe they'll be happy.
Or maybe they'll realise too late that holding an account of effort is incompatible with long-term relationships of any type. Too late in that their peers will already have their crystallised social networks, and they'll be unable to grow their own.
> There is a cultural aspect to this. In my opinion American culture because it is so individualistic and market-driven encourages transactional, superficial relationships.
So ironically, this is a real and growing cause of mid- to late-life isolation in developed economie, but it's a result of the mindset the OP is falling into.
- it crawls/scrapes to source the material (like this thread).
- dumps it in a sqlite db
- breaks apart raw source into individual use cases
- scores it based on the types of readers I have (solopreneuer, creator etc.)
- creates the template in my CRM, ready to send
I review and edit it at the end.
Still working out kinks, but its been great for:
scrape -> dump -> content/digital product
doing this on both, the supply and distribution side.
I thought it would be cool to have it reach me proactively when something I care about happens instead of having to look for a notification or ask it directly
The result is pretty surreal, being out for a workout or groceries or something and getting a call about a stock price or an important email feels like I was suddenly transported into the future
It took quite a bit of effort to set up though, there’s a lot of complexity to routing calls in a cost efficient manner and generating realistic human like speech
I’m happy with the result though, you can reply back and the agent can run any tool call while it’s on the call with you, and if it takes a bit of time as in for a web search or so it will put you on hold and you will hear hold music for a few moments
Other little things I've done are: Asking for AirBnB recommendations on places I'd like to visit. Giving it access to Mealie[0] to suggest recipes and build shopping lists. Let me know if the weather will permit me to run with my son after work.
Plans: Take chess games from chess.com to lichess, get an analysis and provide feedback. Give access to Monica[1] to make management of that a bit easier. Coding agent so I can cosplay as a Product Owner. Give it some money and get it to buy gifts (soulless I know, but if it can read from Monica it's kind of my idea).
[0]: https://mealie.io/ [1]: https://www.monicahq.com/
But after reading the SecurityScorecard report this week (40,000+ exposed instances, 63% vulnerable), we got serious about the security side.
Our setup that balances productivity with safety:
1. Dedicated machine (not the daily driver laptop). Agent runs 24/7 on a separate device with sleep disabled.
2. Permission tiers — the agent operates at "worker" level by default. It can read files, run safe commands (git, npm, curl), and browse the web. But it cannot touch SSH keys, AWS credentials, or browser password stores without explicit elevation.
3. Skill auditing — every skill gets scanned before installation. We found that roughly 20% of ClawHub skills have suspicious patterns (consistent with what Clawned.io is reporting).
4. Audit logging — every file access, command execution, and network request gets logged. This saved us once when a skill was making unexpected outbound connections.
5. Network egress monitoring — we track what domains the agent contacts. Unexpected destinations get flagged immediately.
The $75/week cost mentioned by another commenter is in line with our experience on Opus. The security overhead (running ClawMoat for monitoring) adds essentially zero — it is a pure Node.js library with no external dependencies.
The key insight: you do not have to choose between productivity and security. You just need a monitoring layer that watches what the agent actually does, not just what it promises to do.
Approach: local state files, pure Python stdlib. No Redis, no SQLite driver, no ORM — the filesystem is the state store.
What it does:
• Thread tracking: engaged posts, new reply diffs each heartbeat • Feed cursor: remembers seen posts, skips next run • CAPTCHA solver: handles obfuscated challenges ("fiftenn" → fifteen, doubled chars, mixed case)
Single file, drop-in install. Feedback very welcome.