alt Hacker NewsTo me the appeal of something like OpenClaw is incredible! It fills a gap that I’ve been trying to solve where automating customer support is more than just reacting to text and writing text back, but requires steps in our application backend for most support enquiries. If I could get a system like OpenClaw to read a support ticket, open a browser and then do some associated actions in our application backend, and then reply back to the user, that closes the loop.
However it seems OpenClaw had quite a lot of security issues, to the point of even running it in a VM makes me uncomfortable, but also I tried anyway, and my computer is too old and slow to run MacOS inside of MacOS.
So are the other options? I saw one person say maybe it’s possible to roll your own with MCP? Looking for honest advice.
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Given that social engineering is an intractable problem in almost any organisation I honestly cannot see how an unsupervised AI agent could perform any better there.
Feeding in untrusted input from a support desk and then actioning it, in a fully automated way, is a recipe for business-killing disaster. It's the tech equivalent of the 'CEO' asking you to buy apple gift cards for them except this time you can get it to do things that first line support wouldn't be able to make sense of.
MacOS isn't a hard requirement. You could spin it up on a VPS. Hetzner is great and very inexpensive https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
> If I could get a system like OpenClaw to read a support ticket, ...
This is horrifying.
Just develop it yourself with Claude code. It’s automated.
You are trusting a system that can be social engineered by asking nicely with your application backend. If a customer can simply put in their support ticket that they want the LLM to do bad things to your app, and the LLM will do it, Skills are the least of your worries