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Comment by nlitened | Hacker News Reader

About three weeks ago I was seduced by people singing praise to OpenClaw, and also by the fact that OpenClaw team burns millions of dollars of tokens per month on developing it — surely it must be good.

It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.

Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.

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That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.

My Mac Mini took so long to arrive that I never messed with OpenClaw/Hermes and just went straight to Claude CoWork w/ Dispatch from my phone. One of the biggest blessings in disguise I can remember.

I read /r/openclaw for ideas on automations and 95% of the content is complaints or people having it do things that just don't need to be done.

As a side question for anyone reading this, what are the best agentic AI subreddits for people who are actually using it for work and not just personal dashboards?

I'm not so sure of that.

A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.

It’s nice that they closed deals but pretty soon this kind of bot spam is going to drown everything out IMO

One success case doesn't prove the comment you responded to isn't true.

It literally does though? GP said they'd never seen anyone achieve anything interesting.

The person you're replying to said they know someone who closed a few deals as a result of their OpenClaw. How is that not interesting?

It doesn't prove that it's globally useful, well implemented, or even worth the cost/effort. But it is something interesting.

But did you notice that all such success stories is someone automated marketing or generation of slop content?

Yes. That is an insight but then again, most marketing emails were templatised slop1.0 from mailchimp and other sites. This just makes it slicker. So, I'm not sure.

You know what, you're right. Somehow between reading the parent comment and this one, I forgot the details of it. My mistake.

I don't think I share your experience. I've been using open claw for the past 3 months and it has some quirks but it works pretty well. The web UI is not the nicest but it gets the job done and you rarely interact with it through that interface. You use telegram, WhatsApp, discord, etc. The CLI install flow is one of the best I've seen. It really takes you through every single step to set everything up. I've helped organized the Openclaw events in Dublin where we usually have 80 to 100 people come and we've seen great success with the install flow. Especially for non-technical people. The biggest issue was with Windows and WSL but other than that no major problems. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.

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