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I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.

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I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great!

I similarly haven’t found it useful to run a bunch of these agents in developing the product, but it’s a nice interface for people who don’t live in their terminal all day.

So, Cowork?

Not being snarky, it seems to be Anthropic's value prop to "real" SMB is papering over Claude Code and agent protocol with a white collar business IDE.

Most of these "runs on a Mac Mini!" offerings seem to be "hipper than thou" variants for the LinkedInfluencer class, while Cowork is for the workplace.

There seem to be effectively zero Cowork alternatives that understand most SMB don't run on Google Workspace and Slack (or Hetzner and Telegram).

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