> why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting.

This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well.

They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.

Doing this isn't trivial if you're traveling heavily throughout the week and have lots of people vying for your attention. However, these folks usually have an exec assistant to help them wrangle the chaos. Morever, them using a Claw would likely be a huge security risk, as this kind of person is much more likely to be a high-profile target.

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot.

I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.

Not using OpenClaw - but I have a limited agent running that currently does a few things well.

Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of things done. Has access for cross referencing to my "people files" to get context on mails/appointments and chat messages.

From all this, as well as my RSS feeds, it generates a comprehensive yet short-ish morning briefing I receive on weekdays at 7am.

Two minutes and I have a good grasp of my day, important meetings/deadlines/to dos, possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies). This is a very high level overview that already enables me to plan my day better, reschedule things if necessary. And start the day focused on my most important open tasks/topics. More often than not this enables me to keep the laptop closed and do the conceptual work first without getting sucked into email. Or teams.

By the way: Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments.

Just for that alone it is worth having it to me. YMMV.

I also can fire a research request via chat. It does that and writes the results into a file that gets synced to my other devices. Meaning I have it available at any device within a minute or so. Really handy sometimes. It also runs a few regular research tasks on a schedule. And a bit of prep work for copy writing and stuff like this.

Currently it is just a hobby/play project. But the morning briefing to me is easily worth an hour of my day. Totally worth running it on my infra without additional costs.

Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years:

- A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world

- The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years

- We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers

- Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop

- A short video sharing app will kill TV

- QR codes become relevant

Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.

That's a fair point, and I guess the marketing problem here is intrinsic: If the problem is trivial, off-the-shelf solutions abound; if it's idiosyncratic, almost nobody will be able to relate (as you can't assume that people will do the transfer of "if it can solve complex problem I don't understand A, it'll probably be able to solve my complex problem B" for promotional material).

I've been super impressed with this genealogy workflow -> https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy

Somewhere should definitely make this for missing persons.

I don't use Claw. It is way too dangerous. I built my own system where I know the ins and outs and how they can break.

When it comes to agents' tasks, I tend to focus on things that I couldn't do before without automated agents, at least at the going price.

The kind of automation I'm doing is more like building a set of agents to generate marketing surveys for me. They take free form input from me and my project. They aren't particularly sexy but they go off and do something valuable that I literally would never pay for at the prices that they are normally.

> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.

They are only trivial in the simple case.

When you need a bunch of busy people in a meeting it becomes hard to book a meeting. If several people need to travel incuding get a visa it is hard to fit it all it between other meetings that refuired people caanot skip.

travel is hard when you are trying for the best deal across flights, hotels and such. many sites only guarentee prices for 15 minutes so you can't even get all the needed prices on a spreadsheet at once - particularly if you have flevible travel dates. I've booked a best price plane ticket only to discover it was the worst date for hotels and I could have saved money on a more expensive flight.

I also have the same concerns. I have my agenda meeting free and create meetings like once a few weeks. The same is for booking flight tickets - once a decade. Adding openclaw there would take more time and effort than doing it manually.

And none of the friends playing with openclaw have any useful non-trivial workflows which can't be automated in oldschool way.

The only viable workflow so far I could think of - build your own knowledge base and info processing pipeline.

The real impressive examples get turned into SaaS prototypes and not placeholders for your imagination.

If they had vision they wouldn't be thrown out in a blog post.

The dream of the middle class IT drone is to become the executive Office Man: he shouts at his PA and she books his flights.

Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.

OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you.

Just like anything in engineering really: you have to play around source control to understand source control, you have to play around with database indexes to learn how to optimize a database.

Once you've learned it and incorporated it into your tool set, you then have that to wield in solving problems "oh, damn, a database index is perfect for this."

To this end, folks doing flights and scheduling meetings using OpenClaw are really in that exploration / learning phase. They tackle the first (possibly uninventive thing) that comes to mind to just dive in and learn.

The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"

> booking a flight

> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial

No, it’s not! You are the one who made it trivial by using three words to define! How about if I could only fly out between 9 am-noon next Friday? Also, combine it with hotel and rental car. Many times total $ between sites could be a difference of close to $200 or more along with better itinerary. That’s just the surface. The more preferences you add, the complex it becomes, so make it a right scenario for agent automation along with calendar management which has similar complexity.

> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial

Well, and doing them programmatically and automatically without any AI is also possible, if not trivial...and has been for some time.

>There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows

there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up.

Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyone's pushing it the faster you should run into the opposite direction.

For example?

It's either vague notions like "more important than the invention fire", or concrete cases like booking trips that the likes of Google can enshittify at lightspeed.

I am not optimistic, not because the techs is lacking, but the context in which it is born is awful.

> Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

No.

And there’s mundane answers why.

People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots

It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else.

So it goes for agent demos.

Another reason: every agentic flow is a series of mundane steps that can be rounded to mundane and easy to do yourself. Value depends on how often you have to repeat them. If I have to book a flight once every year, I don’t need it and it’s mundane.

There’s no life changing demo out there that someone won’t reply dismissively to. If there was, you’d see them somewhere, no? It’s been years of LLMs now.

Put most bluntly: when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. The contradiction here being, everyone else doesn’t understand their agent demos are boring and if just one person finally put a little work and imagination into it, they’d be life changing.

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Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? I've had to download airline apps a majority of the time because the website failed to finish payment properly.

I don't think we should call presentations visionless or fault them for wanting to solve this UX nightmare.