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This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant.

It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything.

I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.

I find some value as kinda a better alexa.

I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.

I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"

I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.

It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa

It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.

> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks?

Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.

Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work.

This is cheap replacement for ordinary people.

It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.

I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.

> letting an AI into my comms

Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool.

Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails.

Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.

I see the appeal, but I also see the risks.

If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.

The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.

That's all great, until it isn't.

Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.

No.

But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af.

Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.

It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage.

I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol

Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.

There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.

It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.

I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.

Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.

no, it's only for scammers

Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.

In the early 1980’s, what did people use home computers such as Atari’s and Commodore 64’s for? Mostly playing games; nerds also used their computer with the goal seeming to be… using their computer.

It wasn’t (only) that, though; they also learned, so that, when people could afford to buy computers that were really useful, there were people who could write useful programs, administer them, etc.

Same thing with 3D printers a decade or so ago. What did people use them for? Mostly tinkering with hard- and software for days to finally get them to print some teapot or rabbit they didn’t need or another 3D printer.

This _may_ be similar, with OpenClaw-like setups eventually getting really useful and safe enough for mere mortals.

But yes, the risks are way larger than in those cases.

Also, I think there are safer ways to gain the necessary expertise.

I have OC on a VPS. So far it's a way for me to play with non-Claude models and try to get them to get OC under control. So far I'm about $200 all in and OC is still not under control. Every few weeks it goes on an ACP bender and blows my credits in hidden sub-agents for no damn reason. I'm determined to break this horse though, it's like a fun video game with a glitchy end boss.

The idea is to get a virtual personal assistant. Like Siri or Gemini but with access to all of your accounts, computers, etc. (Well whatever you give it access to). Like having a butler with access to your laptop.

From what I understand, the main appeal isn't the end result, but building that AI personal assistant as a hobby is the appeal.

The main "sales pitch" appears to be "You can have the computer do things for you without having to learn how to use a computer" (at the cost of now having to learn how to use a massively overcomplicated and fundamentally unreliable system; It's just an illusion of ease of use.)

The thread's linked article is about comparing MS-DOS' security, but the comparison works on another level as well: I remember MS-DOS. When the very idea of the home/office computer was new. When regular people learned how to use these computers.

All this pretension that computers are "hard to use", that LLMs are making the impossible possible, it's all ahistoric nonsense. "It would've taken me months!" no, you would've just had to spend a day or two learning the basics of python.

OpenClaw, the ultimate arbitrary code execution

To me openclaw sounds like a software clickfarm?

OpenClaw was an inevitability. An obvious idea that predates LLMs. It took this long for models and pricing to catch up. As much as I dislike this term, if there's one clear example of "Product Model Fit", it's OpenClaw - well, except that arguably what made it truly possible was subscription pricing introduced with Claude Code; before, people were extremely conservative with tokens.

But the point is, OpenClaw is just the first that lucked and got viral. If not for it, something equivalent would. Much like LangChain in the early LLM days.

OpenClaw, the ultimate example of Facebook's motto "Move Fast and Break Things"

It worked to launch the creator into a gig at OpenAI.

Similar YOLO attitude to OpenAI's launch of modern LLMs while Google was still worrying about all the legal and safety implications. The free market does not often reward conservative responsible thinking. That's where government regulation comes in.

MSDOS and similar single-user OS were not originally designed for networked computers with persistent storage. Different set of constraints.

This comparison is dishonest, and you know that it is. This is coming from someone that uses Home Assistant and wouldn’t touch OpenClaw with a 10 foot pole. If I had a horse in this race it’d be your horse, but to pretend that these achieve the same goals is just… not in the spirit of an actual discussion.

When the agent uses your GH credentials to nuke all your projects or put out a lot of crap, this separation will not save you.

There's a difference between using a thing and understanding how it works. There's a lot of stuff in this that reference things that only hardware and software creators are going to understand, and only if they're deep enough into their craft.

"Interrupts", for example, are an old concept that is rarely talked about anymore until you get into low-level programming. At a high level, you don't even think about them, let alone talk about them.