I'm not sure what these people who have strong opinions like this think Openclaw is, but to me, it's a product with 1) a somewhat easy to setup prompt passing wrapper that can span many channels like Telegram, Whatsapp etc. 2) A (at least optimistically) plug-n-play, configurable architecture to wake up to events (cron entries, webhooks etc.) and fire up agents in order to get 'proactive' behavior, with the flexibility to integrate models from a gazillion providers. Pretty much everything else it's bundled with is general purpose tooling that does or could easily exist in any other agentic tool.

It's a rather simple framework around an LLM, which actually was a brilliant idea for the world that didn't have it. It also came with its own wow effect, ("My agent messaged me!") so I consider some of the hype as justified.

But that's pretty much it. If you can imagine use cases that might involve emailing an LLM agent and get responses that share context with other channels and resources of yours, or having the ability to configure scheduled/event-based agent runs, you could get some use out of having an Openclaw setup somewhere.

I find the people who push insanity like "It came alive and started making money for me" and the people who label it utterly, completely useless (because it has the same shortcomings as every other LLM-based product) like Mr. "I've Seen Things. Here's the Clickbait" here, rather similar. It's actually hard to believe they know what they're talking about or that they believe what they're writing.