Most things I use it for could be done without it, it's just more convenient and entertaining.

I had it make a daily aviation weather brief for a private airpark. It uses METAR, outdoor IP cameras I have including one that looks at a windsock and another that looks at the runway surface, and a local weatherstation. It sends me a text message with all of that information aggregated into "It's going to be really windy this afternoon, visibility is high, but there is ice on the runway surface", that sort of thing.

The thing is, all I had to do is point it to a few endpoints and it wrote the entire script and set up a cron for me. I just gave it a few paragraphs of instructions and it wrote, then deployed the rest.

The other day, there was a post here about a new TTS model. I wanted to try it out, so I gave my claw the github URL, and it pulled everything down and had it running without any effort on my part. Then it sent me a few audio messages on discord to try.

When I'm away from home, I can text it to say "what's going on at home" and it will turn on the lights around the house, grab a frame from each camera turn lights back off, and give me a quick report. I didn't have to do any work other than tell it I wanted that skill.

I also have a group chat with some friends on signal that's hilarious. It roasts us, gives us reminders, lets us know about books we might be interested in, that sort of thing. It's really fun.

I am not running either of these at the moment, because of security concerns, but I did play with openclaw for a day or so. It was clearly potentially useful. I got two use cases working easily:

1. When I get a weekly Scarecrow Video pre-order email, extract a list of movies and use my Letterboxd rating history to determine which of them might be interesting to me. Let me know what I should pay attention to.

I tested this on five of the pre-order emails I had sitting around; it was useful for attention conservation.

2. On a daily basis, check Beacon Cinema's list of upcoming movie series and send me a note if there's a new one.

So useful that when I turned off openclaw, I vibe coded a general purpose RSS bridge (yeah, I know about the PHP one and the existing Python ones) and added a scraper for the Beacon page.

My general paradigm, which is not the only available paradigm, is that the claws are strongly useful as information filters. The risk is that they filter out the wrong thing, of course.

Here are some things I use it for:

1. monitoring anything online and giving me a summary when something changes

2. contribute or make edits to any online forum (where TOS allows it)

3. Giving it access to any API / cli gives you a natural language interface to that service.

4. Memory / notes retrieval. It can search through its discussion / thought history and answer detailed questions about what happened in the past.

5. Any standard GPT cases but it has a much more specific memory of who you are and what you might be interested in.

6. If you ever want to add capabilities you just tell it to add a new skill to do xyz and it just does it.

It's a mess in terms of code/filesystem organization, but it's nice to be able to text somebody "hey, create and deploy a branch of codebase X with feature Y" while I'm on the go. Not exactly magic, and probably not sustainable, but there's definitely something to it.

Also, attaching an LLM with my raindrop.io and Todoist credentials to cron is fun. Haven't got the kinks worked out, yet, but it's pretty incredible how much data-shifting I can do now. Saved me a lot of clicks.

I am planning on using it to visit some websites before I wake up and compile them in to an epub and send it to my kindle

Twitter grasps at usefulness, mostly for engagement farming (those TUI dashboards with a thousand agents mucking around).

Me and others I know use it for things similar to the following:

- I get a lot of emails from various organisations about talks and events (today there was one by andrew barto). I ask it to read emails from announce@*, filter to those adjacent to my field, or from notable people, fill the RSVP form using generic details(which it knows!) and then add it to calendar (I don't want to add all)

- giving me the latest updates of my wandb run

- gives me morning abstract+summary(intro + conclusion) of arxiv papers matching keyword / author i specify.

- a specific product I buy (grocery) is very popular and runs out of stock quick every week. I have it watch my quick commerce provider's website and tell me when it becomes available.

- do simple things like summarise new papers add to group zotero

- send discord msg to collaborator, wait for an OK, and then do merge on this repo from this branch provided checks pass

If I had to "pitch" it, I would say this:

Remember those "taking 4 hours to write an automation for something that takes 2m of your day" activities that you never ended up automating? Well it no longer takes 4 hours to write the automation. Most of the above is just a python script no new ability really, but now it takes 1m to write. Making it worth it.

For longer tasks you do very often, I would say you're better off writing a python script. Similarly for important scripts that you want good error handling for.

And really long complex scripts means you'll have to debug it. At which point you might as well write it yourself in the first place.

The telegram gateway makes it super convenient. Many mobile UIs are garbage as you know, so you can ask it to wrangle info into any format and put it there.

However, it absolutely drinks tokens IME. Hard to get it to limit tokens without destroying usefulness. I get some credits so I don't pay. If you pay and are not rich then it's probably not worth it at today's prices.

Honestly, I installed Hermes Agent last weekend, and while there isn't any "killer use case", the combination of "your little assistant agent on it's own machine" and good messaging integration is really quite cool.

I've set it up with it's own mailbox, and a git token to make PRs etc. So far I've set up a few automations (check thing X and message me if Y) but the combination of enough "intelligence" to be able to triage/suggest solutions, messaging via a standard messaging app, and a sandboxed environment for code execution, all packaged as "this is your helpful assistant" is fun.

In theory it's nothing I couldn't do with Claude Code + some integrations, but having all of that out of the box + setting the expectation that this is legitimately a helpful assistant you can message and email with any mad request you have does shift the way I see it.

Though yes, the more fun you have with it, the more of a security threat the whole thing becomes, and it's slightly terrifying. I briefly considered giving it view only access to my emails and decided that was just too high risk. But treat it as a vaguely clueless but not incompetent intern and works?