alt Hacker NewsHere’s a copy of a post I made on Farcaster where I’m unconvinced it’s actually being used at all:
I've used OpenClaw for 2 full days and 3 evenings now. I simply don't believe people are using this for anything majorly productive.
I really, really want to like it. I see glimpses of the future in it. I generally try to be a positive guy. But after spending $200 on Claude Max, running with Opus 4.5 most of the time, I'm just so irritated and agitated... IT'S JUST SO BAD IN SO MANY WAYS.
1. It goes off on these huge 10min tangents that are the equivalent of climbing out of your window and flying around the world just to get out of your bed. The /abort command works maybe 1 time out of 100, so I end up having to REBOOT THE SERVER so as not to waste tokens!
2. No matter how many times I tell it not to do things with side effects without checking in with me first, it insists on doing bizarre things like trying to sign up for new accounts people when it hits an inconvenient snag with the account we're using, or it tried emailing and chatting to support agents because it can't figure out something it could easily have asked ME for help with, etc.
3. Which reminds me that its memory is awful. I have to remind it to remind itself. It doesn't understand what it's doing half the time (e.g. it forgets the password it generated for something). It forgets things regularly; this could be because I keep having to reboot the server.
4. It forgets critical things after compaction because the algorithm is awful. There I am, typing away, and suddenly it's like the Men in Black paid a visit and the last 30min didn't happen. Surely just throwing away the oldest 75% of tokens would be more effective than whatever it's doing? Because it completely loses track of what we're doing and what I asked it NOT to do, I end up with problem (1) again.
5. When it does remember things, it spreads those memories all over the place in different locations and forgets to keep them consistent. So after a reboot it gets confused about what is the truth.
Replies
there's an entire cohort on HN who still claim AI is utterly and completely useless despite in your face evidence. Literally people making a similar claim word for word who say that they don't understand the hype that they used AI themselves and it's shit.
Meanwhile my entire company uses AI and the on the ground reality for me versus the cohort above is so much at odds with each other we're both claiming the other side is insane.
I haven't used these bots yet but I want to see the full story. Not just one guys take and one guys personal experience. The hype exists because there are success stories. I want to hear those as well.
i've never had situations where i prompt and had to go out for coffee or a walk or drive. one shotting - your first prompt. perhaps.
but like a person - when the possibility of going off in the wron g direction is so high, i've always had 1 - 2 line prompts, small iterations much more appealing. The only times i've had to rollback would be when i run out of credits, and a new model cant deal with the half baked context, errors, refactoring.