I find some value as kinda a better alexa.

I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.

I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"

I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.

It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa

It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.

> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks?

Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.

Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work.

This is cheap replacement for ordinary people.

It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.

I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.

I see the appeal, but I also see the risks.

If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value.

The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes.

That's all great, until it isn't.

Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.

This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant.

It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything.

I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.

> letting an AI into my comms

Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool.

Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails.

Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.

Mostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.

Newb technies love it.

There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.

Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.

It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage.

I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol

It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.

Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.

I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.

No.

But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af.

Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.

no, it's only for scammers

Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.