Ask HN: What are people doing with their OpenClaw set ups now?
I'm always curious what happens with these viral projects a few months after they go viral. Are you still using OpenClaw in your day to day?
It's all mundane things.
Each morning I get: 1) A message with the weather and AQI for my current location. 2) A digest of version changes and any security issues on some bits I am interested in (e.g. WordPress + plugins that I manage for clients) 3) A feed of links that might be interesting in football news, to stop me browsing the web reading the football news. 4) Any carry-over items I've asked it to remind me of that morning. 5) If there are any, it lets me know about visa changes across the countries I tend to travel to.
At lunchtime, I get a language word of the day using an SM-2 schedule.
If I want it to remind me of something it sets a cron job and reminds me during the day. If I want a currency or unit conversion I do it there rather than in another app.
Essentially I have a few other tools like UptimeKuma and Freescout which send me Telegram messages, so it's just delivering info into a place I am already checking.
It doesn't have access my calendar or emails. It doesn't try to make me money. None of this is anything radical or solves anything that hasn't been solved before.
It's mostly doing stuff around my app. I have it connected to my google search console, analytics, paddle, Microsoft partner center, etc.
I prompted it to give me a 1 liner description of the current jobs:
Blog production — 05:00 UTC daily: writes new post drafts into growth/blog-drafts/ and pings you; never publishes.
Blog draft status checks — every 2h: polls the dev blog-drafts API for review/approval status on the 7 pending drafts; silent unless something changes.
Reply opportunity scan — 14:00 UTC daily: finds recent Reddit/HN/X/forum threads where LumoTray genuinely fits, writes a report with links.
SEO opportunity research — 00:30 UTC daily: keyword and content-gap research report.
Analytics optimization — Tue + Fri, 11:00 UTC: GA4 + Search Console + Partner Center read, then an actions report.
Weekly strategy review — Sunday, 18:00 UTC: aggregates the week and sets the next-week plan.
Heartbeat — every ~30 min: my own check-in lane (currently mostly skipping on an empty heartbeat file).
Skill collection review — weekly: housekeeping on the skill catalogue.
I basically just prompted OpenClaw on what steps to take and then added the API key/secret on its .env and that was pretty much it. Same on all other connections.
As long as what you want has API access and documentation, the agent should help you out on how to do it.
None of us need a condensed feed of our emails because by nature of reduction you will miss things.
Staying on top of your calendar has been a solved game since alerts.
The idea of “your own agent instance that you can link to anything” has merit, but it was just so annoying to configure and actually quite expensive when linked to OpenAI (a few dollars a day to do nothing) also seemed to be a never ending stream of happy-baked vibe-coded features being merged… the whole project just gave me the ick