OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally

Open claw: aka. open door to a remote privilege escalation potentially granting root access to your computer (and if you're using it "as intended" possibly all of your email/internet logins/accounts, your credit card, etc.) to any text your model ingests from the internet...

It's already true of LLMs in general that they represent a privilege escalation opportunity to any text they ingest. But with human in the loop, and a well-formed sandbox, the blast radius and risk are both reduced..

Convenience is the root of much evil.

I have found the Pi agent harness, running in a docker container, with Qwen3.8-27B in back in LM Studio, to be amazing and i use it daily. Just last weekend I used it to do PDF editing which previously would have required me to download really shady software online to do.

I have never tried OpenClaw so maybe I am missing out but considering how much my agent can modify the Pi environment to work better, I am happy with the workflow I have established.

Does anyone have a good pro vs con for Pi vs OpenClaw? I have never tried using a cloud model via a local agentic harness.

This is pretty cool. I'll wait to watch some videos on it, but I haven't quite found a tool that is excellent for both single player and multi-player.

I'd like to have basically the Codex Desktop App / Mobile app for my personal use, connected to local LLMs. But I'd also like to be able to have a shared space, where my family and I can work together to do things like plan trips. This would then store artifacts like our itinerary, ideas, html mini sites for the trip for us to work on and use together. Agents sit alongside us helping us plan and organize. Buzz is decent for this use case, but hasn't fully nailed the mark.

I actually think I would like to use OpenClaw but everytime I go to the docs I give up.

It feels so intimidating. There's so much stuff going on. Maybe it is good for agents who can just motor through that volume, but me personally, I would want something simpler, maybe an `OpenClaw-lite`

How do people bypass captcha or robot checks? All I wanted is a price aggregator but it always gets blocked by major retailers.

I like the idea but do not have a good use for these semi-autonomous agents. Or any notion for a decent use, frankly. What do people do with them?

It sounds great to have an always-on box which does things. Like a server. I have servers. There are even Signal and other transports so you can communicate with the box conveniently. And then what?

Still a no from me until these things can display any degree of intuition, and even then it's probably still a no.

You're asking for trouble if you hook an autonomous agent up to anything that you care about. You're insanely naive if you give it access to everything.

OpenAI can't even monitor its own shit properly with teams of well paid engineers, and you are one novel prompt injection technique away from your entire digital life going up in smoke.

Also...

>Today we released by far the largest update in the history of OpenClaw. It was built by 933 contributors, including 569 first-time contributors, and is composed of over 16,000 pull requests.

This is not the flex you think it is. That's horrifying lol

Actually I use Hermes Agent who delegates tasks to OpenClaw. It works perfectly, we run OpenClaw experiments with my partner as an independent drop shipper, it’s much more complicated setup, which cannot disclose publicly, but it works. The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor :)

It was first, but it's like Langchain built tools first. Nowadays, everyone's got a better assistant. Grok's looks like the most exciting, though I just have a custom built one. Has a headed browser when it wants and everything that I can pop into from my phone. It's so easy to write this kind of software it's a waste to pay someone for it.

The story in the "The Daily Claw" thing they are showing is like Claudese dialed up to max

I still remember Karpathy's breathless excitement about "claws" and how all autonomous agents would be called "claws" in the future.

Now fast forward six months and nobody uses OpenClaw anymore and nobody is talking about "claws".

I love it.

Accidentally indeed. Im sure it’s tough to do anything intentionally when you are sieving through the slop heaps.

Somehow people are suddenly not impressed nor amazed by such announcements…

This was useful for the 1-2 months where models were good enough to use all their newfound tools but not good enough to vibe code them themselves.

Now, just install codex (or claude code or whatever) on a vps, tell it to make a way to email it, then email it to make a way to text it etc etc. takes a few minutes and when you need another bridge just have codex make it.

Obligatory question: who is still using OpenClaw? It's been a minor meme about how much discussion about OpenClaw fell of a cliff after March; the Google Trends graph is funny: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=OpenClaw&date=today%201-...

One thing I really like about Claude Code, Hermes, and other harnesses, is how much feedback they give about what they are doing. They take you along for the ride, which builds trust.

I tried OpenClaw for about 10 minutes, and the feedback I got (even using Claude under the hood) felt very "trust me bro, I've got this" - which made me trust it less.

I'm sure there's a way to get more verbose feedback? But I did feel too out of the loop to feel comfortable.

"Hard times create strong programmers, strong programmers create easy times, easy times create vibe coders, and vibe coders create slop."

how many people fall into the openclaw trap because they just need a way to command agents from mobile, and cron tasks? Only thing I am missing with codex is the ability to recall anything from any session (I see it in this openclaw "2" release note so I guess it wasn't in openclaw "1" anyway). I guess claude and codex can look up transcripts globally too, just not as a first class feature.

OpenClaw trend was like Pokémon Go from 2016. A bunch of mindless people followed a trend just because it was a trend.

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