It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?
Automatic resumption is kind of cool.
Could you go into the the tooling for long-lived loops?
Herems is better suited as an independent agent in my opinion, and I still see OpenCode as primarily an interactive one. Sure, you can hammer OpenCode into an independent agent I'm sure, but I'd rather use a system someone else has put more hours of thought and design into.
In all seriousness, the fact that OpenClaw wasn't treated as an interesting, but failed experiment and shut down is telling for this industry. Is just letting LLMs output code without reviewing the results a path towards major issues? Nah, that can't be the case.
And to proof it, here is a piece of software with some of the most CVEs relative to its size and age we have ever seen. We then get some highly paid engineers from companies like Nvidia assigned to somehow finagle it into a workable state. Not like, if LLMs where at the point that the purveyors of OpenClaw and co. seem to think they are, the models should be able to fix any issues by themselves. Especially considering the obscene amounts of free OpenAI tokens Peter Steinberger proudly uses.
In any sane time, we'd have looked at the result of OpenClaw and assessed it as not salvageable. This was barely more than an experiment when it became apparent that the inherent design was flawed after all. Mind you, it was a very informative experiment and I am thankful it exists as clear-cut evidence of the capabilities the models have at the end of 2025 up to now in 2026. Basically, OpenClaw Alpha should have been released as proof that LLMs aren't there yet and need strict review+guidance.
Development should have been restarted from scratch with A.) humans verifying the output, B.) an actual architecture in mind that the (human) developers designed and that took some learnings from the original release and C.) admitted that LLM coding in the way that yielded the original OpenClaw (as in, low to no human verification) shouldn't be done by anyone, at least with todays models.
This is some serious irrational hatred.
It can literally use your credit card, buy a server, and ssh into it, make a full stack app, and test it.
My claw scrapes some APIs, receives some emails with job listings, and matches it all to my profile. It can also fill two folders at 2 domains with anything (ie a demo for a website). It can also receive emails, make PFDs out of them and forward them to my bookkeeping software (which can only deal with attachments, not emails.) That last thing is just a script. I use Agentmail btw (a ycombinator startup), was easy to set up.
2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured, maybe claw2 also is... I want to add some things, like have it manage my son's minecraft worlds (using docker compose), maybe have it access a calendar so it can make appointments (not sure how to set that up in a useful way yet).
The thing is in a Hetzner VM far away from anything important, dealing only with public data (except for the occasional invoice).
Except you're overestimating the barrier to entry of scripting for the overwhelming majority of people. OpenClaw is not disruptive because it does something that wasn't possible before, it's disruptive because it enables more people to do the thing that was limited to fewer people.
Where I get confused is why my techie friends are all going bananas over claws... they all know how to script already, and are crying about burning through multiple $200 claude subscriptions a month, filtering email. This I can't understand.
But sure, it's not "rocket science", in fact, the skills to set it up indeed would probably help you set up the same scripts. It's just behind a chat interface.
It can be nice to say: "Add another minecraft world with the same user whitelist on port 25566" or "create a demo website for a home battery on domain claw.xxx.com". But it is indeed not very useful for me yet. I think the more access you give it, the more it can be like a PA, but I don't want it in my calendar/home assistant/paperless-ngx etc... yet... When I even get to this point I can see it being like my secretary ("Please get my incomes taxes statement from 2024", "Estimate this years income taxes from my invoices so far", "Plan appointment with ..." etc)
Because OpenClaw (well, all AI) is well known for following instructions correctly.
https://au.pcmag.com/ai/116091/meta-security-researchers-ai-...
Yesterday I had Claude (in CC) do a large number of changes to my codebase using a bash script, even though I was in planning mode and in claude.md it says: Always first list the steps you're going to take before execution. It apologized of course... But I know how LLMs can be. I take that into account.
[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...
[2]: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
[3]: https://thecyberexpress.com/openclaw-vulnerability-open-sour...
It's all just marketing.
[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=openclaw&date=today%201-...
The term "AI Agents" has real sway over the general public, apparently.
It took the Cryptocurrency world by storm a few years ago.
All basically worthless "bot" stuff like hey this really expensive setup can interpret and reply to tweets in a way that no legal department could ever possibly approve kind of thing.
Apparently that was worth billions to investors. Until everybody realized nobody actually wanted or used one, lol.
I think if I was running my own business or organisation, I'd be using it more. However, for "home" stuff, like you I struggle to think of useful tasks for agents to do for me.
Some of which I was aware of, and didn't consider enough of a risk to mitigate. It found others which I wasn't aware of, such as open ports on printers, etc.
LLMs are really good at the cyber security stuff.
I've also tried using the LLM to tell me what it sees in my security cameras, which it's also really good at. For example identifying a rabbit run in my garden, which I built from scratch, so I know no other exists like it in the universe. I've not hooked that up in an automated fashion though.
I personally use the Matt Pocock teaching skill to learn dutch, passed reading using it, on track to pass writing with it.
Edit: I think this is a reasonable solution because the hurdles and context-free nonsensical rejections you'll face if you interact with this process in good faith are far too high. It's dehumanising.
That's certainly not justification for setting it up in the first place, but is a mildly useful benefit of having done so.
Right now these things manage most of my homelab (scoped Proxmox tokens and Portainer), help me with my projects and even bug fix themselves (they’re certainly more than good enough given guidance).
Being able to use the search to find and resume an old thread is fantastic. The thing I use lets me use whatever underlying CLI that I want, which IMO the biggest limitation on Claude Code or whatnot is that you... have to use Claude models. Sometimes I wanna use sol, sometimes a cheap chinese model, etc. And I want sol with 1m context.
I know there are other tools out there that can do this. I know some people love their tmux/cmux, but IMO the thing that matters the most is being comfy and knowing the tool well. Hell, James Gosling used NetBeans when I talked to him in 2023. Know the tool well and that matters the most, IMO.
For me, it helps with my ADHD brain. And I could spend all day just researching and trying new tools, they are a dime a dozen these days.
Pulling some stats, I have 25 "tabs", and across all of those, I have 1,298 unique threads. 9,539 unique messages.
It works for me, but I don't care about the autonomous part.
(Similar system to OpenClaw)
- too difficult for me to solve but easy enough for a cheap model to solve (if it's going to be running autonomously in the background, I ain't paying ChatGPT/Claude prices), and
- don't involve a bunch of my personal data that I am not comfortable sending off to a random inference provider.
One thing I considered was that it might be good for anything that involves web scraping, given that has traditionally been a fairly difficult thing to do well. But you'd have to be okay with the occasional mistake. (You'd also have to be morally okay with contributing to the epidemic of AI scrapers that websites now have to deal with.)
> I like the idea but do not have a good use for these employees. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?
> It sounds great to have an employee which does things. Like an assistant. I have assistants. They even have email and mobile phones so you can communicate with them conveniently. And then what?
Now, the caveat, is you have to imagine that these employees have access to your email (including ability to send email when they want), and text messages, and Slack and, well, everything. And they might have access to your debit and credit cards. You're going to have to trust them quite a lot, but when you read the references you realise that a lot of people seem to think they lie and make things up. Oh, and they occasionally commit a felony - oopsie! - and will lie to you about it consistently.
These particular employees are interesting enough to various groups of people that they are studied for signs of psychopathy and malicious intent (is that a warning sign for a new employee?), and there is evidence of both, but honestly, it's fine.
So, yeah, whatever you'd use employees for, as assistants to your life. Particularly psychopathic, malicious, lying, unreliable employees. You'd use them for that stuff. What's not to like?