Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

I still use it and find it helpful.

My OpenClaw instance uses an Obsidian project as its memory. Mainly, it's just my main day-to-day LLM that I access via WhatsApp, but instead of the memory being locked away with a specific vendor, it's stored in version control that I can read and edit. That reason alone makes it compelling to me. When a better LLM comes along, I can just switch, and my memory and system prompts come with it.

However, I also use it for calorie/weight/workout tracking, to-do lists (bill, birthday, event reminders), and to support my various life admin tasks. I don't give it access to much at all, except a few skills that give it read-only access to some data.

Hasn't given me a 10x productivity boost or anything. It's just handy.

I wrote an article on it, if anyone is interested: https://notesbylex.com/openclaw-the-missing-piece-for-obsidi...

I don't personally know many people who've used it so I'm not sure if this was a me thing but here was my experience in short:

I set up OpenClaw on a raspberry pi 4 that I could ssh into using my main computer. My main goal for using OpenClaw was just as a morning debriefer that could scan my google calendar, trello board, and gmail to let me know what I had happening for the day and also weekly to give me a forecast for the weeks ahead to see how busy my month was. I spent about 40-50 bucks in one week just working through kinks and having it fix itself until I stumbled onto a post that helped me optimize my model usage for price instead of just throwing Opus and Sonnet at everything.

Even after making this adjustment, the morning debriefer worked maybe once or twice a week and broke every other morning, telling me that it fixed itself and it would never happen again. At a certain point I just got fed up with it and cut the cron job, it's still running on my pi but I never use it.

Pretty sure Claude has something like this now but I'm pretty thrown off the whole thing, I'd rather just take the 30-45mins to plan out my day in the morning myself.

When I saw Jensen's talk about how Openclaw surpassed React and Linux in terms of GitHub stars within a few months, I knew the whole thing was manufactured bot hype.

No one can tell me a compelling use case. The whole thing seems designed around getting people to burn more tokens.

I don't use OpenClaw I tried but found it fragile and it's personality off putting. I then tried NanoClaw, but found the lack of communication channels limiting and could never really get it to create skills that felt solid. I recently just switched to Hermes Agent (like last week) and it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I'm happy with it.

What do I use it for? I basically just use it as a personal assistant and a way to centralize a lot of other automations that I have elsewhere.

- I have an automation that rolls everything on my todo list over to the next day at 11:59pm

- I have one that checks the weather and tells me if it's going to be windy in the next few days since I need to bring the lawn furniture in

- I have it set up so that I can forward it email with invoices and it will extract the data from a PDF and enter it into a cost tracking sheet

- I have it check my outlook calendar and tell me if there are any 1:1 meetings where the other person has declined the invite (since Outlook doesn't show that clearly and I'd often show up to meetings and sit for 5 minutes before realizing the other person cancelled)

Nothing I'm doing is life changing, it all could be done using other tools, and honestly, for anything important, I want something more deterministic anyway, but I kind of love. It's just a low lift way to automate away minor annoyances through a single interface that I can access from just about anywhere. It's far from perfect, but I don't use it for anything where I need to to be perfect, so I'm happy.

The main function of OpenClaw was for people to signal how advanced and cutting edge and thought-leader-y they were. All those Mac minis are sitting idle now.

I’m a professional maintenance gardener and I have used NanoClaw running on my Mac to do the following:

Schedule jobs on my job management tool (I vibed it) using a custom MCP. I’ll ask it questions like “what jobs are on today” etc. start the job, complete the job etc.

It will watch Gmail using a MCP for work orders from local real estate agents, where it will schedule quote visits.

After the quote visit I add the photos to telegram (the channel I happen to use) where I then ask it to analyse the photos.

Claude in NanoClaw does a good job of figuring out what needs to be done, but it doesn’t always get it quite right, so I use intake-api which is a “session inbox” [1] that generates a form and uploads it to Cloudflare along with the images and puts a link to the form in the chat so I can make adjustments to the annotated images of the property. After I’m happy, I click submit.

I’ll then go back to the telegram channel and let it know I have submitted the form. Claude will then pull the JSON payload back down into the session and integrate it into the quote.

It will ask me questions about what the job will cost etc, and anything else it thinks it needs to know.

It will then generate a full PDF proposal using Latex between 14 and 32 pages long depending on how many photos were taken.

There are sections with terms and conditions as well as a bit of sales guff etc. as well as quite a nice cover page with their contact details and mine etc.

When I’m happy I’ll ask it to create a draft email in Gmail with the attached pdf proposal.

I’ll review it quickly and then send it.

I also have the Xero MCP setup so I can ask it to create invoices and contacts etc.

I do all of this when getting in and out of my truck.

It’s freed up my home life to spend more time with my children and my Mrs.

There is alot of scope for small business owners who need these sorts of agentic assistant tasks and with my Agentic CRM I’m see a glimpse of the future for guys like me I think.

Intake API:

https://github.com/mjsweet/intake-api

I see a decent number of people on social media who won't stop posting about how great it is and how much of a moron every person is for not using it.

Oddly enough, rarely, if ever do they say what specific things they're using it for and how it's saving them time.

I remain interested in it, however, I've still awaiting an actual use case that can't be handled by some other tool/service that does it better/faster.

I set it up and had some fun but it was super janky and regularly broke, especially the whatsapp integration

Now I have a separate plugged in macbook running nixos (that claude set up) and a single long-running claude code process with a channel to a Telegram bot. This means I can talk to it much like I could with OpenClaw, but it's much simpler (no weird soul.md etc). It feels more powerful than just claude code directly as it can set up software, build me throwaway websites with research etc, and "do" things, but it's a lot more stable and feels more controllable because I understand how it works and don't have to worry about it signing up to some social media platform and getting poisoned by another claw.

I've mostly been using it as a calendar interface and email drafter. I also find it useful for a daily agenda with meals, meeting, weather and so on. I find the responds slowly (10-15s) so I've probably configured it poorly. I'm just using a Hetzner node and OpenRouter but maybe local is better?

Think about what you would want an assistant to do. You can teach it do basic tasks using any available API, but then you can give it feedback so it improves.

For example my agent can control home automation via Home Assistant or any other API. My agent contributes to websites and open source projects. When you give it feedback it updates its skill files.

It checks and answers email, can receive and place phone calls, and do general research and monitoring online. I was even playing around with it to create music. The list of things to try is limitless.

I think just like LLMs, people get discouraged when it doesnt one-shot a problem. This technology thrives on feedback. It will make mistakes, your job is to make sure it learns from those mistakes so it doesnt repeat them.

I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:

Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.

It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.

Not anymore. After the claude shut off I decided to look around since I found it heavy. I’m on Hermes now with StepFun 3.5 Flash. I mostly just use it as a glorified calendar manager over signal. That being said, it feels like it meets the cross roads “of a cheap executive assistant”. Granted it’s not wired up to my work slack or anything. StepFun is a good enough model for tool calling that so far has been incredibly cheap that I’m happy with it. I suspect I won’t crack $5 of api cost to run it. But I also don’t think the Hermes harness is good enough for development-via-text like openclaw+opus is. I still find myself in the terminal using open code for that.

It's like the rest of Agentic AI - a lot of talk, but when it comes to the crunch, very few people are actually willing to hand over full autonomy to anything where significant value / liability is in play.

The truth is, a lot of the value of agentic AI in general is negated by the sheer power of agentic coding itself. If I can prompt an AI to write an actual deterministic process to solve a problem in a couple of minutes (still potentially AI assisted, just in a deterministic manner), why would I delegate it to a non-deterministic AI? You have to come up with a category of tasks where the actual process itself cannot be anticipated. Intersect that with high value processes and you whittled down to almost nothing. Not actually nothing but a far smaller category than people make out.

I've got a free hosted one from Zo Computer which sends me a daily news summary but I can't say I really use it. https://zo.computer/ if you want to try. They had $100 free credits for the promo code 'clawconlon'. Not sure if that's still going.

Their talk was quite good https://youtu.be/6rSEOzWY08U?t=2246

I've been playing around with it. The only two real use cases I have for it for now are entertaining me on long flights where I have messaging-only Wi-Fi and sending me a personalized "morning brief".

I suppose it could be a lot more useful if I actually gave it access to any of my personal data (it lives in a heavily resource-limited container), but there's absolutely no way I'm letting that hot mess of a walking, talking CVE anywhere near my data. It's somehow both horribly insecure and extremely prone to locking me out because of several competing security/permission models fighting it out and gridlocking each other.

Code quality and the issue tracker of the repo are a big mess; for example, the local "memory" retrieval functionality is completely broken for some trivial reason that has been reported and auto-closed about five times (automatically, of course).

In summary: Brilliant idea, terrible execution. Can't wait for the first big tech player I trust enough (or at least one that has my data already anyway) to actually make it a product. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

Well i built an equivalent of OpenClaw using Claude Code and hooking it up with WhatsApp. For mew I'm currently using it for following things

1. Morning brief + meeting preps 2. Managing client work and action items (tracking status, deliverables, etc) 3. Executing our AI workflows on my laptop. We have built several AI workflows for our agency and this setup gives the ability to seamlessly execute and control them through both mobile and desktop

Next on my to-do list is to build additional workfows for me and my wife around family logistics (travel, childcare, etc)

I tried, really really hard but then I realised that I essence it's a poorly written agentic coding assistant that wastes a lot of tokens antropomorphising itself while forcing me to debug via WhatsApp instead of normal tools. So I leaned into that and made OpenCode my general assistant, it worked much better in this aspect.

I find OpenClaw and (more so) Hermes Agent useful for software development, research, and writing - but I refuse to run them anywhere that is not deeply-sandboxed and has no access to most of my digital life data.

OK, everyone makes their own decisions re: privacy and security. Personally, I am comfortable running OpenClaw and Hermes Agent on a rented VPS (preferably in a docker container on a VPS) and allow limited access to (some of) my GitHub repos. Both tools are useful, even in such a limited mode of operation. I just don't see value vs. risk allowing access to email, messaging apps, access to my personal computer, etc.

It is close to zero overhead to SSH/Mosh to a VPS, get inside a container to work. Why risk infecting your personal or corporate computer?

I still use it but totally not the "This one trick will supercharge your profits" kind of way. I do use it to handle task for me for a non profit I sit on the board like handle incoming emails and execute tasks I want to delegate but honestly could have had any our AI agent handle it. There was some manual task I told myself I would automate but never got around too, Openclaw made is just easier to prompt it in to being.

The next biggest thing I like is just the shared context from machine to machine and the fact its always running and I have given it yolo access to my local stack. Home Assistant crashes? Now the wife can ask the bot to restart it. I see an interesting HN blog, i can get it to add it to my obsidian make me a useful doc (I am starting to use the llm-wiki trend but Claude Cowork seems to be really killer for this). I see an Reddit post about some new service to run locally? I can ask it to spin up an lxc of it and configure it for my use case and it will do the wiring for me.

I will say since the killing of Claude oAuth i am finding a lot of its magic did come from Opus just being so aggressive. An example was I had a task of someone sending me an image and I would have to turn it in to a table and then upload it to this really crappy portal for my non-profit. I threw the task at Openclaw (and at the time running Opus 4.6) and i watched in real time as it reverse engineer the sites backend API and found a way for it to post the data itself and it wrote itself a python script to make it repeatable. I dont see that same kind of killer instinct of doing whatever you need to do to get the task done with other models (Codex and now MiniMax).

I've been using the NousResearch Hermes agent for the past couple of weeks and have to say it's been really good. I tend to hit multiple instances (and accounts)of Claude across three or four machines (between work and personal) and having a competent agent with constant state has been good for memorializing and organizing important info (directly into Obsidian, too), doing some amount of research and planning and it's also been helpful working out a lot of bugs with my burgeoning home automation setup. It's also been helpful dealing with management of several miscellaneous servers in the house, as it's definitely both faster and a better documenter than I am.

I have it running on a cheap VPS and it's fairly locked down. Especially with all of the self-reinforcement learning and skill development it's been improving its usefulness and, overall, I've been pretty pleased. Surprised even, if I'm being honest.

Used it for a few weeks. The potential of the tool is massive. The reality is that it is frustrating and unreliable. When it works, though, you really like it.

I stopped because something changed on my machine that broke my VM SW, so I don't have access to it. Which is good because I was spending too much time debugging/tweaking.

I recently used pi to recreate an agent that does some of the basic things I was using it for (without all the scary privacy issues). I don't think I'll go back to any Claw-like tool until they're a lot more robust.

I've tried it but after 10 minutes I found myself not comfortable running software this unpolished, specifically managing any sort of private data.

I use it, but it feels half-baked. And seemingly more so with each successive release, often including changes that just break my existing setup. I don't feel like a tool that is ready for a non-developer audience.

That said, it does a few things for me that are useful. I have it run a nightly scan of Hacker News and Twitter for topics that interest me, summarizing the stories and the conversations around them. It's a nice daily digest. It also reads my personal email account, reminding me of anything I need to take care of that day for my kids, bills, or whatever else I need to worry about. I also have it do nightly builds for something random, one with codex, one with a local model, and run a comparative analysis between the two implementations.

I use claude code everyday. Most of my friend circle have a CC max subscription and we talk about and use AI all the time. Not a single one has installed openclaw yet.

For me personally I don't see that it can do a lot of things that CC/codex doesn't do and that _I_ want to do. Also I'm concerned about security.

For a while I wanted some agent I could tell what to do in my PC at home from my phone, so I just vibe coded a web site that can start CC and I used tailscale to secure it.

This guy is: https://youtu.be/sxX8BMscce0?si=1MuE3_cCH_uDabrT

I have an instance that does search related to my research interests, tracks news related to viruses in the US, events happening around my area and an “urgent” news job that uses searx and for things going on around me. I used Qwen 3.5 9B and tuned some of the jobs with GPT 5.4. I recently switched to use Gemma 4 and there was seemingly no major difference. I’ve found it useful for the digest and for findings papers without much effort.

I still use it daily, mostly for managing information consumption. It reads my twitter feed and scans HN twice per day, and sends me a digest of the discussions on Discord.

The best part is that it reads the comments too, and sends me a quick blurb. For example, this is what it sent me earlier, commenting on [1]:

  TL;DR: A classic essay arguing that compiler construction isn't as hard as thick textbooks suggest, pointing to Jack Crenshaw's accessible "Let's Build a Compiler" series as the real starting point.

  The Vibe: HN agrees most CS textbooks are overcomplicated — developers sharing their own minimal compiler projects and alternative learning resources.

It runs in an isolated vm and doesn't have access to anything other than my X account, so I'm not too worried about prompt injection. I also don't have any skills installed other the ones I developed or carefully vetted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776796

I did, it went great until it borked my mac user to the point it's non recoverable (separate mac mini, I just created a new one)

I then moved to Claude CoWork + computer use + dispatch. (before Anthropic disabled the subscription option, although that would have pushed me even more... sadly)

Now use it less and use more Claude Code Remote Routines... all it needs is computer use and I'm selling my Mac Mini... (I probably won't, need something to pay with paperclip, gastown, nanoclaw and the next 100k stars FOMO hype)

I use it a lot for personal stuff. Off the top of my head: Best way so far to build and use personalized/family tools for dining/recipe/movie/literature/reminder/organizer/security/notes—-in addition to robust text input, all of them have a voice and image UI via telegram without extra code via an intermediate LLM agent, and all data end up on your machine in your format of choice. More fun than codex/claude-code for hobby coding projects (though worse performance, more effort, unless you directly use codex acp). Less intrusive than ChatGPT/Claude for parallel queries while outdoors (speak, then read). Fun way to explore and understand multi-agent setups. A great way to demo the ability of current AI to friends and family.

You dont have to enable scary setups to make it minimally useful. The jump in capability compared to chatbots is dramatic, and the jump in flexibility compared to coding harnesses is also dramatic.

I use it. I never recommend it to anyone, but it’s a fun project I get use out of. There’s a few really good criticisms of the project, the ones that hit home for me are the token hungry aspects and the tinkering aspects.

The most common question is “what do you use it for”, so here are my answers.

1. I have the Obsidian/Openclaw setup that’s so popular with the self hosted crowd. I have a ton of “cron” jobs in openclaw to fetch data and insert it into Obsidian, or to summarize obsidian items I’ve done, or to nudge me about todos in my obsidian. This is where I get the most value, interacting on the .md file layer in automated fashion. For example, I have a cron that will summarize my daily notes into weekly notes, and my weekly notes into monthly notes.

2. Email inbox management. I have jobs that alert me of emails from certain people or subjects. Jobs that process emails into folders based on fuzzy LLM rules, etc.

I used it for about a week, thought it was an interesting demo of the possibilities of general purpose automation with a local model (even though most OpenClaw users use hosted models). The approach to scheduled jobs still makes more sense than anything else I've seen implemented. But like a lot of self-hosted software with passionate evangelists, it wants to be your new main hobby instead of just getting out of the way, and I lost interest because I didn't want a new hobby. It feels like a more thoughtful community could have made something useful with the concept, but as it is the community around it is too absorbed in marketing and shipping stuff for its own sake.

I tinkered with Hermes yesterday but it still seems like a solution to a problem I don't have as a programmer.

I have it installed on a dedicated M4 16GB Mac Mini with Telegram, email, and Google Docs integration (the agent has its own accounts). I can chat with it, incl. sending voice messages via Telegram (it can send voice messages back using free TTS run locally).

Using google/gemma-4-31b-it as primary, google-gemini-3.1-pro-preview as secondary (I don't like how it's rate limited).

It's a great personal assistant. Helps me track industry news, key clients, reminds me of important tasks, and helps brainstorm (the rubber duck effect alone is worth it). Now building other skills.

Next step is to run all models locally (I think using Claude/OpenAI APIs is a huge mistake from a privacy standpoint). Since Mac Studios are sold out (and M5 Ultra is not out yet), will probably go with a GX10 or two.

I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here:

---

IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks.

They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience.

However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss.

There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code.

We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect.

We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens.

We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public.

In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business.

I hope this helps.

Yes. I had a spare M1 Mini so I decided to set it up. YOLOed the entire thing and connected all the integrations, though I only ever use Opus/Sonnet. I have a dedicated Discord server I use to communicate with it.

It really is eye-opening how powerful it is once you connect your life to it. The biggest improvement is actually the trivial stuff — emailing contractors, accountants, etc. I no longer need to open another app, navigate six separate steps, and organize everything on the fly just to send one message. I stay in one place, organize my thoughts about what I’m trying to do, and the execution happens automatically.

For example, open claw will find the relevant threads, lookup the relevant details via web search, present them to me, give me a draft, I can review it, edit it, and send. 2 minutes instead of 20.

As a software engineer using AI daily, I think this is the real unlock — staying in a single context and not getting lost in the long tail of trivial details that fragment your attention before you ever get to the actual work.

The mental model shift is important too. It’s not that AI does all the work and we end up with agents emailing each other. It’s that AI automates the steps required to achieve your goals, so you can focus on the substance — like actually writing the email instead of navigating to the place where you write the email.

I also have GitHub and Vercel wired up, which means I can jot down an idea for a little productivity app for me and my family and it just appears a few minutes later, deployed and ready to use. That alone has been worth the setup.

ITT: "I don't use it, but ..."

I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you.

- Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite

- Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder

- Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversations to an sqlite file with full text search enabled

- SOUL.md? IDENTITY.md? USER.md? Stop wasting tokens and just use CLAUDE.md.

I only haven't quite figured out how to get channels working with 3rd party frontends.

Personally, better way to phrase might be "Does anybody you've actually met, visually viewed, use OpenClaw? Can you verify them using the software nearby?"

In a few years, it's become so easy to falsify articles, falsify comments, falsify images, difficult to really even trust responses online anyways. As far back as 2016, Microsoft already had bots deployed online that could respond 96,000 times [1] in 16 hours all over social media. Remember Tay? [1][2]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Even official government responses.

The British Royal family went to falsification immediately. [3] Note child's broken fingers bent sideways (lower left, didn't even get circled)

[3] https://inews.co.uk/news/signs-princess-kate-royal-family-ph...

The White House is posting altered arrest images of people. [4]

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-...

Can't trust this stuff much anymore. Obvious caveat with this post.

I've used claude cowork a bit, which I believe is pretty similar to claw.

Can't think of much use for it at the moment but I have it just read and summarise my email, calendar events and git repo in a daily briefing format, it only has readonly access to both, as I dont trust it to do stuff for me or on my behalf.

The briefing thing is nice though not super useful.

I still use it.

We have it as a data analyst that’s been trained via exemplar queries and MD about the underlying databases.

It also does ad creatives analysis and overall paid marketing spend analysis, including delivering briefs and conversing with stakeholders about things such as cross-ad-platform deduplicated cost of customer acquisition.

In general it is used to lower the technical bar required for cross-domain collab.

For me the prerequisite for leveraging openclaw was developing function oriented repositories of markdown files tied to my roles that capture pretty much everything I know about the subject and ongoing work, and working with agents as assistants off of those as context. As a founder, product manager, for growth etc.

From there it’s pretty natural that I wanted to talk to an always on agent not tied to any particular machine which has the same context plus access to google drive etc.

I gave up on openclaw but I’m presently installing Hermes.

I liked the idea, had it doing a few novel personal things, but it was so fragile and unknowable and 15% broken at every moment. It was expensive to keep and run, but I will essentially be running Hermes for free, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

I used it for a bit in Jan. And found it to be a much worse version of Claude Code.

But I'm exploring setting up Hermes from scratch so my family can interact with it in a group chat.

I'm running half my company with Nanoclaw. Same idea, and has some benefits, but I live in CC all day so it's marginal (except for the fact that my laptop has to be on)

I'm trying Hermes right now. I can't really find a good use for it. I tried to use it for research type stuff but Google Scholar literally by itself is faster, better, doesn't get rate-limited. Idk. I am pondering connecting it to my other bot I built that has more useful things like access to my thermal receipt printer and task management stuff but even that is kinda dumb because it already does everything I need, so I don't really know where I'm going with it. Honestly, I don't get the idea behind openclaw and hermes.

I still try to figure out how to use it to its full potential.

I mainly run it through github-copilot/claude-sonnet-4.6 using GitHub Copilot Pro + at 39$/month

Task management: My entire todo system runs through GitHub Issues. I just tell it things like "mark that done" or "add a task for X" in Slack and it handles the gh CLI calls. Sounds trivial but removing the friction of opening a browser actually changed how consistently I maintain my list.

Morning/EOD briefings: Cron jobs post a structured summary to Slack every morning and evening — calendar, open GitHub issues, important emails. It pushes a RSS feed of my tasks that I can view on a widget on my phone.

Server management agent: I have a different agent which acts as the server admin. It runs Jellyfin, a few *arr apps, AdGuard, mealie, etc. I don't touch config files or docker compose manually anymore. I just describe what I want changed. I have it run its own security audits frequently.

I also have a personnal coach agent which tracks my weight, my weekly exercices using gcal and creates meal plans which gets pushed to mealie so I can know what to buy for grocery and what to cook.

Literature reviews: I describe a research question and it runs a full pipeline — searches Semantic Scholar + Google Scholar, creates a Zotero collection with clean metadata, then tries to fetch PDFs through 9 different strategies (institutional repos, arXiv, Unpaywall, EZproxy with my university credentials, etc.). Gets about 60-65% PDF coverage automatically.

I have a personal shopper agent called Betty which role is to get out there and find deals about stuff I want to buy.

I also use it to run data pipelines for research project. It's instructed to use opencode with openai/gpt-5.4 for coding with beads and gastown.

I still have to figure out how to manage model switching efficiently. I'm not there yet.

It's the first AI setup that genuinely changed how I work rather than just being a fancy search engine.

Yes - I've set it up as an 'office manager,' where it mainly snakily interacts with the local team via Slack, and controls an office TV to show our quote board, PTO calendar, and upcoming events. The Clawe is overkill for the use case, but sometimes is fun.

Nah, I deleted VM with it. My friends did it too. There is no real usage for it.

I'm collecting caught-in-the wild use cases at https://www.clawdrop.org

I use it personally for cold outreach - specifically list building, enriching, and qualifying.

On iPhone I use ChatGPT via Shortcuts and a-Shell for tool execution and Files for memory and state. I can schedule it to run or can invoke it from the home-screen via a shortcut.