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Comment by redact207 | Hacker News Reader

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype.

No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

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Every time I've sat down to consider how it could be useful, I can't think of anything that I couldn't build as a series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts. (even using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting at first, but then the tokens are spent and I don't have ongoing cost)

I can only guess it's really not for "us", but rather for those who aren't afraid of technology but aren't really engineers.

I’ve built a few recurring tasks with an OpenClaw. It’s fun to sit on the sofa and task it. That said, everything I’ve built with it I’ve realised would work better as a script.

>series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts

This is approximately the Dropbox reply.

>I can only guess it's really not for "us"

Exactly correct.

numberOfProgrammersInTheWorld : numberOfPeopleInTheWorld

> >series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts

> This is approximately the Dropbox reply.

lol that wasn't my intent but I totally see it now.

I actually don't want to be dismissive of OpenClaw; I want to believe the hype. It's just what I've heard and what I see don't add up to me. If anything, it's a calculus where I have to decide if it's worth the time of setting up a machine and the learning curve.

My thoughts exactly. If whatever i wanted it to do was so unimportant that I can trust this thing to have full control over it and to do it successfully why even do it anyways? The risks of giving it full unparalleled API key access and control fully outweigh whatever gain.

My observation is that people who love this stuff are not programmers so they feel like they have been empowered to automate things that they could not otherwise automate.

For people who are already highly skilled in scripting/automation it's a lot less impressive.

They notice all the things that could go wrong. All the non-determinism issues. And they think I could do this better with a custom script myself.

The use cases I have heard all seem like gimmicks to me.

Monitors my company's support email, searches though code, GitHub etc to try and triage the issue and shoot me a message to give me a head start.

Connects stripe subscription cancellation with PostHog events to see if something was frustrating.

Does the same leading up to when someone subscribes to describe successful paths.

Lots of novel thinking when events happen on its own being proactive.

Just because people aren't talking about it doesn't mean it isn't useful. Think creatively.

> No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.

That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.

All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.

What a scam.

didn’t Anthropic block open claw usage?

Yes, from using flat rate subscriptions. Everyone is welcome to run it on top of the usage-billed Anthropic API

It's massive in China. Search for "raise a lobster" and check out the videos from the events.

Surprising seems like they'd favor Manus

It's massive in the sense of people hyping it on social media and grifters trying to profit from it. Pure FOMO, not dissimilar from the earlier "earning a side income using ChatGPT" hype. I doubt there are many people using it successfully for any purpose other than producing social media content promoting courses promising people to teach them how to use OpenClaw, for a fee of course.

Yes. OpenClaw is (weirdly) tangled with anime/gaming culture in China.

Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.

Except it's so janky and unreliable that the audience hasn't fully realized that it's not the winning move.

I think it has obscure uses here and there, like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1shutzt/openclaw_...

But did it really warrant running an openclaw machine to do that ?

Claude Code, Codex or something else running on your laptop could also have done that, and with Claude Cowork / Dispatch you could leave Claude running on your laptop at home, using your phone to have it do the work.

I have no doubt agentic AI exists in our future, I'm just no so sure about needing openclaw.

For that Reddit post, it seems OpenClaw submitted that claim at a website, which I don’t think Claude code, codex or any other model can do. It requires a skill and tool calling combination.

Yes agree, I imagine that's why NVIDIA and OpenAI jumped at them.

I wouldn't touch that vibe-coded mess with a ten foot pole.

The dev uses AI to build but it's not vibe coded.

That's because it automatically stars itself when installed

> No one can tell me a compelling use case.

I get it to run really slow unit tests and fix them, I provide it feeedbak while at lunch, walking the dog, whatever else.

My developer friends also do the same.

There is one usecase: you can laundry your actions and just say "oopsies, llms when rogue I guess"

It's not pretty and not honest but if you're desperate I guess it's an option

I would prefer it if it could do my laundry. I can launder my actions on my own..

"Thing that has huge adoption is fake, they're all morons!"

Unironically yes

That's like saying NFTs (remember those?) has "huge adoption".

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