alt Hacker NewsI'm a bit surprised that people need an LLM to automate things like this. Is the market really that large, to cause such a hype? I don't think I'm being "elitist" by having a calendar and a pen, am I..?
The one tangible usecase is perhaps booking things. But, personally, I don't mind paying 5-10% extra by going to a local store and speaking to a real person. Or perhaps intentionally buying ecological. Or whatever. What is life if you have a robot optimize everything you do? What is left?
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I think part of it is the person that wrote the blog is very wealthy. They mention a personal assistant, very expensive fashion items, and hotel reservations that are 2x the price I paid for my honeymoon. Most people are probably cross shopping Walmart brand milk with name brand, and they aren’t dropping hundreds a month on an AI subscription. It’s a class thing combined with the Bay Area engineer bubble mentality —- I have some family that came from money and they just see the world completely differently, they can’t fathom life in say, Kansas at median household income.
Well websites like AirBnB tend to make it as difficult as humanly possible to automate stuff like this, so maybe?
Although that likely only lasts until they learn how to block LLMs effectively.
IMHO the "killer app" aspect of OpenClaw (and similar) is that everything is now an API.
We think of chat apps, like WhatsApp, as being ways to communicate with people, which is a nice way of saying they are protocols. When you want something, you send a message, and you get an answer, just like with HTTP, except the endpoints have been controlled by meat. With OpenClaw, the meat is gone. Now you can send a message on WhatsApp to schedule a date with your spouse, their OpenClaw will respond with availability, they'll negotiate a time and place. We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the interface library.
You can say "make an appointment at my dentist" and even if your dentist doesn't have a website, the bot can call up and schedule an appointment. (I don't know if OpenClaw can do this now, but it seems inevitable.) In other words, the (human) receptionist is now an API that can be accessed programmatically.
Totally agree its basically the equivalent of a few low end apps as of now. The interesting thing to me is that it does MANY low end apps all together.
It's a calendar, reminder, notebook, fridge scanner, and a webscraper
I think the interesting idea here is that overtime this will grow to more applications. None require integration or effort to work you only need plug the infrastructure and tooling.
This to me is what will eventually wipe out most agentic startups. The enterprise version of this little thing is just a bot and a set of documents of what it should do and a few tools. Why pay and setup a new system when I can just automate what I already have?
There's a lot of irony right now regarding the cost of these things too (although I know the cost curve will drop over time). I know developers that are burning $1,000/day on tokens for Claude Code or VC's using the $200/month ChatGPT pricing plan who are then talking about Vibe coding TurboTax away. TurboTax for most people is $50 to $100 a year. We are still a far way off even from a cost justification standpoint let alone a reliability standpoint of relying on a vibe coded solution for filing your taxes.
heartily agree. It takes ~10s to see what's in the freezer. Also "this is water" etc
If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.
I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.