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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or all you describe would be easily scriptable like 5 years ago? Not being confrontational, it’s just that every description of what OpenClaw does sounds quite… not disruptive at all for something that was hailed as the biggest invention since sliced bread.

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100% easily scriptable. Just like running an (S)FTP server is easy, and Dropbox is not at all disruptive.

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.

I would agree if OpenClaw was at all accessible to common people. It’s even more nerdy than scripting

Yeah that's true, and in many cases the AI just sets up a cronjob and a script (and a mailbox, and an interface to telegram, and a reporting structure). But it's nice that in case of errors it handles the edge cases or it fixes the scripts. It can give the crontable over telegram, you can pause it for the holiday "Number one, pause all processing until further notice"...

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)

"Number one, pause all processing until further notice"...

Because OpenClaw (well, all AI) is well known for following instructions correctly.

https://au.pcmag.com/ai/116091/meta-security-researchers-ai-...

There are reasons to be careful indeed, but for me all instructions were followed nicely so far.

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.

This is my pet peeve. All the disastrous failures get reported big, but the news doesn't report when a system just quitely does the task.

In this case the "disastrous failure" is even from a super careless "experiment" by a "competitor" that likes regulation.

I believe the thing which makes OpenClaw interesting is you can just ask it to do these things and it just does. Rather than you having to write these scripts. I understand with LLMs, writing these scripts would now be trivial, but I believe this is even more convenient.

Yeah, that's absolutely a real phenomenon, but I don't think it's especially OpenClaw-specific: I have lots of folders that are just collections of instructions and scripts that have mostly started with a prompt, and that I run sandboxed agents over. Previously I'd have considered automating them, but now it's just "fire up sandbox in a project folder, let the tool build itself". I wrote about this a bit here: https://sgnt.ai/p/the-software-i-stopped-writing/

At least writing scripts you know what it will and won’t do, with open claw it will probably do what you want and maybe won’t do anything you don’t want.

You can check the scripts and cronjobs, als ask it to summarize the scripts actions (using another agent/model if you want). All in all, LLMs are not 100% trustworthy but generally things go as intended.

“Generally” I am not anti ai in any way but I do worry people will end up in trouble by giving things like ai agents too much fredom

Ah yes people get into trouble in all sorts of ways.

I have heard some stories about people's clawbot doing things like deleting their entire email inbox or buying random shit with their credit cards. it's difficult to tell how many of those stories are real or if they were just stories that would be funny.

It's also things like being able to change runtime configs in human language without having to turn to computer, eg "please also track when this artist is in my area". Nothing revolutionary, but kinda the whole point? Tell it what to do, it goes off, does some chores and searches, updates some configs so that later on some crons would use them.

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