alt Hacker NewsI'm very interested in this kind of thing as a kind of ADHD brain augment, like it's monitoring my slack, github, email, calendar, active terminals, etc, and helps me prioritize what I should work on as well as weighing whether this or that ping is worth interrupting me for.
I assumed that's what openclaw basically was, but is Orb different from that? And is it fundamentally a different model from the request/response, or is it just request/response in an autonomous loop?
Exactly what my thoughts were when I first heard about Openclaw, that’s the exact idea of Orb that you pointed out. Letting you make less decisions, right now AI gives you answers but still requires decisions based on the outputs it gives you. This would deepen the actual ability of agents in those channels you listed.
On a fundamental level the backend was designed to do as little LLM calls as possible, for instance it’ll do scans of my screen every 15 seconds, log what’s on it and what’s going on, and store it in a local database, then Orb reviews the entire database every 6 hours for me. Then it’ll schedule wakeups for itself throughout the day, up to 4 so it doesn’t waste my tokens, and schedule notifications based on the last database dump it made.
I have my Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build all useable by using the “claude -p; codex -p…etc” so you can also use multiple CLI’s in conjunction at the same time on different projects or the same project.
So your question about a loop is kind of right, but it really just collects your data all day and stores it locally on your PC then calls the LLM of your choice and it reviews all the data and makes those proactive moves we’ve discussed. You could theoretically get it to always be scanning by an LLM but that would be a drastic waste of money from what I’ve seen since most things don’t require a call.