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redact207yesterday at 8:22 PM8 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

Bridged7756yesterday at 9:30 PM

My thoughts exactly. If whatever i wanted it to do was so unimportant that I can trust this thing to have full control over it and to do it successfully why even do it anyways? The risks of giving it full unparalleled API key access and control fully outweigh whatever gain.

bdcravensyesterday at 9:46 PM

Every time I've sat down to consider how it could be useful, I can't think of anything that I couldn't build as a series of cron jobs and Playwright scripts. (even using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting at first, but then the tokens are spent and I don't have ongoing cost)

I can only guess it's really not for "us", but rather for those who aren't afraid of technology but aren't really engineers.

Kiroyesterday at 9:39 PM

It's massive in China. Search for "raise a lobster" and check out the videos from the events.

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rvzyesterday at 8:35 PM

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

Exactly. These companies are only hyping openclaw so that we continue to spend hundreds of dollars a day worth of tokens on their infrastructure.

That’s why companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and many others all want you to spend more on tokens on openclaw and they don’t care if it has no use-case.

All I see is this: Almost no-one other than the hosting providers and course sellers are making money on openclaw and its clones but not those who are running openclaw itself.

What a scam.

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canadiantimyesterday at 9:22 PM

Openclaw simply makes the effectiveness of working with claude code and similar available to a broader audience that hadn't been exposed to it before. Sure Cowork does similar, but I believe that's still why Openclaw became so popular.

heliumterayesterday at 9:41 PM

There is one usecase: you can laundry your actions and just say "oopsies, llms when rogue I guess"

It's not pretty and not honest but if you're desperate I guess it's an option

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doctorpanglossyesterday at 9:51 PM

"Thing that has huge adoption is fake, they're all morons!"

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sayYayToLifeyesterday at 10:41 PM

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