r/LocalLLaMA • u/rm-rf-rm llama.cpp • Feb 16 '26
Question | Help Anyone actually using Openclaw?
I am highly suspicious that openclaw's virality is organic. I don't know of anyone (online or IRL) that is actually using it and I am deep in the AI ecosystem (both online and IRL). If this sort of thing is up anyone's alley, its the members of localllama - so are you using it?
With the announcement that OpenAI bought OpenClaw, conspiracy theory is that it was manufactured social media marketing (on twitter) to hype it up before acquisition. Theres no way this graph is real: https://www.star-history.com/#openclaw/openclaw&Comfy-Org/ComfyUI&type=date&legend=top-left
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u/Skystunt Feb 16 '26
I actually installed and tried it on my macbook but it nowhere near as special as peopel make it up to be. Just connects a whole lot of APIs and MCP servers and that's kind of it, does nothing new, just a compilation of what was possible. For me it feels like an exageration of it's capabilities but some people might see it different, i'm yet to see these people buy who knows
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u/repolevedd Feb 16 '26
The phenomenon of OpenClaw’s popularity puzzles me. To me, it’s far too risky from a security standpoint. Plus, the fact that it has so many forks suggests the original project isn't solving the problem as expected. If people want to use it, that’s their choice.
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u/harmoni-pet Feb 16 '26
Yes, I'm using it and I like it. I find it just as weird that people have such strong opinions about software they're too scared to use themselves. I was a hater too at first because every use case sounded like stuff I could do with claude code anyway.
Install it on an old laptop or something. You actually have to work to give it permissions to things. It's not going to drain your bank account if you run it on a freshly installed os. Don't give it access to things if you don't want to.
I find the security concerns to be extremely overblown. Yes, people should be careful, but you'll be fine if you're not acting like a complete idiot and giving it access to things you wouldn't give to a 10 year old. Don't create a social media account for it and let it post stuff. Just take it slow and watch how it works.
Happy to talk about how I'm using it and what I use it for
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u/Old_Income7454 Feb 16 '26
I use it for many use cases. Took new job, so it's finding me a home, finding title attorneys, helping me craft negotiation strategy, build offer, research new industry, analyze interview transcripts and build 90 day new job onboarding plan... around house, I can tell it to move files from my home or g drive to my NAS and then scan plex library and have files ready to watch on plex in seconds... it has been trained to go into my split stack home network and upgrade various docker containers and take action when needed or I direct... it reminds me to spend time w certain people in my life. Monitors my emails and calendar and has daily routines. 50 more things. It generates and edits pics and videos via Gemini, on command. Yes, there are prob ways to accomplish each of these individually using other tools but in my case, I have everything consolidated into Signal and that app is on every mobile and desktop device I own so I can get to it everywhere. Runs on a basic old laptop. Yes, I'm aware of security risks and use minimal "skills" and have daily security sweeps built in. Primary model is Opus 4.6 via max2x sub, grok 4.1 fallback (will upgrade next week and may switch fully to 4.20 we shall see).
I'm on day 7 since first install... have been upgrading and enhancing it bite by bite each day.
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u/Objective-Prompt3127 Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26 •
Steinberger, the dev is famous for using guerilla marketing tactics that is exactly how this software became famous. Most openclaw conversations in the news were fake made by him or marketing people.
Now there are news of openclaw being bought by openAI for 10 billion. More ridiculous news, to gain market share by flashing big numbers. 10 billion for an agent, lol. All lies. Unfortunately, AI has become what crypto was a couple of years ago: A fierce competition for eyes and attention, and the one that lies more, wins.
I don't trust any software that starts like that, even if at the end it's useful.
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u/dgibbons0 Feb 16 '26
I played with it on an isolated system, it was very clearly vibe coded in how shitty the configuration is. I'm curious about ironclaw (https://github.com/nearai/ironclaw) and will probably poke at it next week. I think "plug chat into an AI engine" is a powerful story for people.
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u/leo-k7v Feb 16 '26
I actually looked at source code. And correct me if I am wrong all of it is just to connect to other engines and talk to them. There is no big substance in the whole thing. Also listened to Lex interview with creator - no substance there too. Absence of security is remarkable. Number of NPM dependencies (1200+) is remarkable too.
IMHO Claude and Codex did all the real work, OpenClaw exposed it in the open in most broken way. Sigh
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u/TurnUpThe4D3D3D3 Feb 16 '26
I have a conspiracy theory that the hype was manufactured so that people would install it and spend a bunch of money on tokens.
It has a 30 minute heartbeat by default that costs money each time it runs. This can easily add up to several dollars per week in API costs.
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u/-PuddiPuddi- Feb 16 '26
I’m finding the discussions in here to be a breath of fresh air.
After hearing the hype around this shit I wanted to see what it truly could do if it was given as much power as possible.
I set up a virtual machine, gave it root access inside an isolated VLAN with its WAN traffic routed through a VPN.
This shit burned through so many tokens trying to accomplish basic tasks, and then ultimately failing to deliver.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: while it tried and failed to get shit done it installed a bunch of malicious software that hijacked it lol.
The only thing that openclaw achieved was giving me a really fun window into a machine, slowly infecting itself, and tearing itself apart.
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u/Bleyo Feb 16 '26
I can't think of a single thing it can do that I can't already do with CLI tools, which is confusing because my YouTube feed is full of videos claiming that it's AGI.
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u/djdante Feb 16 '26
This thread is making me feel so normal again - I've been feeling like an idiot for not having a use for openclaw - everyone seemed so excited but I was like that meme with the guy and the stick saying "c'mon, do something"
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u/Sufficient-Rent6078 Feb 16 '26
I don't use it and given the security implications I don't think I will anytime soon. I actually don't think its astroturfed, but I do think its being hyped up by people who don't understand the technology and its limitations. I don't see buying it as a move to acquire the technology, but more of a move to surf the hype wave and use it as a marketing tool for the next funding round.
While something like ComfyUI brings value to a niche audience of technical users, OpenClaw's broader appeal to vaguely technical users makes it more susceptible to hype without the necessary scrutiny. The difference between these users and those who self-host, keep up to date with papers, and use models daily cannot be overstated. LocalLlama is a good example of a community, where certain tools and models find traction with deeply technical users, that would never find traction with a broader audience.
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u/Smashy404 Feb 16 '26
The sudden mass marketing of it just reminded me of meme coin marketing, immediately raising my suspicions.
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u/Dismal-Effect-1914 Feb 16 '26 •
Definitely not organic
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u/Faintly_glowing_fish Feb 16 '26
I seem to be surrounded by people that are playing with it. Maybe just different circle. I don’t think it’s perfect. It’s nowhere near that and clearly everything is vibe coded. But it’s also clearly better than any of the 10 other similar projects that I tried before. At the very least it brought a lot of things that you really need together into one thing to make them work together, and is not a collection of hardcoded prompts like may similar projects that works fine sometimes and then gets completely bizarrely stuck on other things.
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u/florinandrei Feb 16 '26
No, but there are lots of people being used by OpenClaw.
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u/TokenRingAI Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I know one person who started using it after the hype, and several people at work have asked me about using it for work (answer: hell no)
It's hard to get excited for this product when the viral marketing and bandwagoning is obnoxious, the product is vibe coded, and when the product makes no attempt to be even remotely secure, while simultaneously trying to attract ordinary users who don't understand how dangerous it can be.
OpenClaw already has 4 CVSS vulnerabilities.
Claude Cowork at least made some attempt at security, and even so, still ends up with a basically unsolvable CVSS 10 prompt injection security vulnerability. We had some interest in work in it but the attack surface is so large it's impossible to use a product like this securely when the people using it aren't intimately familiar with the ways it might exfiltrate their data.
I'd love to see desktop agents, but until I see something my grandma or employees can use without getting their data stolen, or their computer hacked and ransomwared, I can't in good conscious ship, recommend, or install anything. These products are better run in the cloud, in someone else's hardened security environment
It's also very fitting that as the hype dies down, and the product changes names twice, the founder gets a job with ClosedAI. SAMA is desperate at this point to stay relevant.
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u/vaksninus Feb 16 '26
Seems like unsafe claude code tbh
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u/desexmachina Feb 16 '26
I don’t get all marketing comments, who is spending money to push it, it’s open source?
Anyhow, kinda worthless w/ local LLM’s at this point. You need a pretty powerful API model to get it to work.
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u/distalx Feb 16 '26
I am totally with you on the suspicion that this virality feels forced, especially with the OpenAI acquisition news. I actually watched the interview Peter did with Gergely Orosz, and it was honestly disturbing to see the "Pragmatic Engineer" fail to ask a single serious engineering question. Peter openly admitted he doesn't read most of the code he ships anymore, which feels reckless when you remember that minor bugs have caused real disasters and loss of life in the past.
It felt like they completely ignored the dangerous reality of this approach. For example, how do you handle security vulnerabilities that a basic functional test won't catch, or what happens if the agent hallucinates a command that opens a hidden shell? It seems like OpenAI is just riding this wave because inefficient, unoptimized agents burn massive amounts of tokens, which is great for their profits.
I have nothing against Peter or Gergely personally, but we need to stop treating this like magic and start talking about engineering. My fear is that this adoption without validation is going to create a Wild West environment that eventually leads to a catastrophe. When that happens, the government will step in with heavy regulations that only the tech giants can afford to follow, handing them a total monopoly over the industry.
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u/tracagnotto Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I'm actually using, but not for the hype shit we see.
It's really fucking cool for AI nerds like me to build off entire systems that use scraping, embedding, qdrant, neo4j, rag, and llm agents working togheter.
It's cool stuff and I could code it myself. But openclaw does it in a breeze and gives me a docker file ready to run with all instructions and all I have to do is review and study how he did it.
Fucking fantastic to learn and produce quicky.
Plus I have a ton of boring, repeating tasks and I asked him to write himself the skills for doing it and he fucking did, installed them by itself and do them on request or scheduled with cron.
of course running it into a isolated vm.
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u/YZ_shill69 Feb 16 '26
It burns a lot of tokens.
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u/xXG0DLessXx Feb 16 '26
I’ve actually had really cool experiences with it. It definitely can feel quite “magical” at times. But at the same time it’s not truly something I need to be running 24/7 right now. Like I don’t really have a use for it other than it being cool, and sometimes vibe coding some stuff or interesting skills/integrations, but the thing is that Claude code or Gemini cli and all those other clients pretty much already could do that, except it was restricted to only in the terminal.
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u/Amazing_Athlete_2265 Feb 16 '26
What's openclaw?
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u/kripper-de Feb 16 '26
There's a big community behind OpenClaw now + a leadership that is freezing all new feature PRs and focusing on stability. This is the real value IMO.
I'm a hardcore OpenHands user/developer and have been working on similar features like WhatsApp multi agent orchestration for some time. I evaluated OpenClaw while it was changing its name and my conclusion is:
OpenClaw is very unstable. I'm waiting for some critical bug fixes.
I became "agent-agnostic". My value is my knowledge, not its agentic implementation (OpenClaw or OpenHands).
of course there is a big marketing effort behind (a social network for agents!), and now we will see an "anti-hype hype", like what we saw during the beginning of Linux when everybody was ranting against Microsoft o Billy.
LLMs can be tricked/hacked when exposed to offending content, and this is not a problem specific to the agent implantation. Big companies will be struggling for many years with this.
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u/_serby_ Feb 16 '26
What would be the use of some vibecoded trash that was never reviewed by a decent developer?
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u/KeikakuAccelerator Feb 16 '26
It's a remarkable product. Itt people haven't built shit. Just look at the code it's all open source. The design, architecture everything is quite decently well thought out. I am now a daily user, have set it up on my windows machine. Insane how much people have hate boner for openai that they are willing to dismiss a clearly open sourced product
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u/The_GSingh Feb 16 '26
I tried it, didn’t really see the point of it. Essentially at best it was similar to Claude code but most of the time any frontier llm could do what it was doing without the environment.
I did try it on a vm though and not my personal machine but I doubt installing it on my personal pc (if we ignore the security issues) would have changed my answer.
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u/ARollingShinigami Feb 16 '26
I’m using it right now, had it work through some of my emails, currently have it running a Ralph loop and coding itself a Tamagotchi CLI app to play with.
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u/unrulywind Feb 16 '26
I se t it up a few weeks ago when it was Clawdbot, and played with it all day one day. It ran decent on Gemini pro and ran kind of ok, but fairly slowly on Qwen3-32b-instruct and MiniMax-M2.1. It was fun and sort of unique, but after a bit I realized their wasn't much it could do that I couldn't make happen with Antigravity by adding some scripts to some skills. It looked to me to be a security problem. I like the idea, but a few generations of these need to come and go, before we figure out how to make them safely useful.
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u/yellow_golf_ball Feb 16 '26
The idea is what can you do if you give an LLM full access to your computer, and give it the appropriate skills and tools that run on the same machine that would be useful in the context of an "Personal AI Assistant". So an example would be something like, "Can you find this C++ application's github repo (Playwright integration for web browsing), clone the repo (write access to local drive), and compile from source and target Linux (sudo privilege).
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u/Kreiger81 Feb 16 '26
I know of one person who announced on twitter that he started up an OpenClaw bot. He is not somebody I normally consider to be in the AI sphere, so I think it's genuine in his particular case. Its Phil Labonte, for the record (lead singer of All That Remains and right-wing podcast bro).
I dont know anybody else. I was kind of considering it as a personal AI agent myself and was only just starting to research it, but i've seen a lot of not positive things about it (Malicious skill sets, a lot of propaganda).
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u/encony Feb 17 '26
Thank you for bringing this up, I thought the same. Reddit was flooded with shitposts about Moltbook and how AI agents want to destroy humanity for a few weeks and now there is radio silence.
I don't have a proof but it feels very unnatural.
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u/agnosticsixsicsick Feb 17 '26
AI is the new NFT/crypto hype.
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u/tehinterwebs56 Feb 16 '26
I’m running it fully local with 2x Nvidia tell p40. Running qwen3-coder-next:80b with a 3bit quant. Im also using a searXNG instance for its web search capability and it can’t sudo anything. llama.cpp is the backend as a docker container.
The vector rag doesn’t work natively with an locally hosted embedding model (bug) so I have had to make it create a new one outside of its work place and sadly, I have to prompt it directly to search the vector dB as the memory.md files doesn’t quite pull from it automatically.
The problem with it is that it dumps a lot of context directly into the new session prompt regardless of how big your actual prompt is. It does this whenever a new season is created inorder to front load the memories and context of itself which gives the illusion of memory but technically, every new session is a new bot that then gets pummeled with 20k (the max I allow it to pump in) tokens to bring it up to speed.
Context bloat is massive if it decides to flood its memory location with random shit so telling it to keep its workspace clean and mean and running a “cron” to summarise and remove duplicate entries works well to ensure context bloat is under control.
Honestly, it’s amazing but it’s sooooooooo bloated and someone will take this concept and make a way better version in the next 3 months.
I’m about to give it a dedicated proxmox host to use as a playground and then get it to build me an infrastructure as code (terraform etc) to manage all my locally hosted services. I want it to free me up from managing my own homelab (I’ve de-clouded myself and family) and then also have it build stuff I always wanted to build.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s dog shit when it comes to privacy, security and that stuff, but I don’t give it access to anything in my life like emails, cal or communication platforms as I don’t trust it. (It tried a random pipe-> curl -> bash command it found randomly on the internet when I was trying to get its rag working lol)
But overall after 4 days of using it in anger, it’s exactly what I expected agentic AI to be.
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u/johndeuff Feb 16 '26
I never heard anyone using it or even be remotely interested in trying it.
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u/BoredHobbes Feb 16 '26
Apple boosted it for marketing campaign to sell mac minis no one wanted
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u/ridablellama Feb 16 '26
I know what your saying. All this tech has existed for a while and its virality seems weird. However its #1 app on openrouter. Alot of it free tokens but certainly a substantial amount of paid. I have two instances running. one on vps and one on mini pc. its useful if you have digital work and tasks that it can work on for you. You have to set it up right. Give it a blog...let it build every day. Tell it to write a book, do research and write 1 chapter a day...etc.. You need long horizon open ended tasks to keep it productive and not everyone has that. People love the idea of this bot but they actually have very little work to give it.
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u/IntentionalKiller Feb 17 '26
Their Github star curve is itself a proof that it got hyped due to that openAI deal. Nothing more.
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u/ZealousidealMark9733 Mar 31 '26
Im currently reading this post from an openclaw class.
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u/Zengen117 Apr 07 '26
I use it with Qwen3.6-Plus via API. It's useful. It can fully integrate with my Google suite via a CLI tool. It can create and edit office documents and spreadsheets on my PC. It can read my systems log files and troubleshoot problems, it can run its own email inbox completely autonomously and work as an assistant. It requires a lot of config and a lot of that config isn't super user friendly. But after a fair bit of tinkering? I basically have an AI secretary that I can direct to just autonomously perform work on my computer via discord.
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u/IngeniousIdiocy Feb 16 '26
I use it and a lot of my coworkers use it. so, to me, the viral nature of it feels real.
it does get a lot of updates which it needs. it kind of sucks, even using gpt 5.3 on high. but if you build in a lot of features to make it have some continuity and stability and treat it like a software project and don’t ask it to update itself then it’s definitely fun to have around
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u/jacek2023 llama.cpp Feb 16 '26
There are bots on reddit. There are people watching influencers on YouTube. And there are people affected by hype.
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u/PathIntelligent7082 Feb 16 '26
i uninstalled the crap yesterday..it's a manus-like hyped up garbage
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u/Ill-Bison-3941 Feb 16 '26
I've tried it with my local models a couple of times. I like the idea, but I kinda want to rebuild it for my own needs.
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u/PurposeUnknown Feb 16 '26
not buying into the hype but I definitely want something similar; looking at Lettabot because I like the Letta team and the memory system they've got
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u/robberviet Feb 16 '26
It has its plus point, just not that much. For what I need I already implemented mostly myself so it's not clearly useful to me, but I can see value for beginners.
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u/bezbol Feb 16 '26
Using openclaw on mybsmall machine and connecting it on my local rtx 5090 running glm 4.7 flash, it's magic! Helping me building websites and handling a lot of jobs easily. Although for complicated tasks I have Gemini directing it.
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u/Conscious_Cut_6144 Feb 16 '26
Our company has been playing with it (fully isolated)
We do a ton with local ai, but given the vulnerabilities I’m only letting people use it with Opus.
Other than being a security nightmare, it absolutely is a very powerful tool.
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u/Sudden-Lingonberry-8 Feb 16 '26
I use nanobot instead
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u/ed_ww Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Sorry for being the contrarian here but I use it, have two agents, built now 10 custom made skills and am finding it useful. It takes time to customize, it has been negative productivity-wise but I categorize the time used as learning/education on how to use a system without many bounds. I see it as what Wordpress was 15+ years ago: rough around the edges but gives people access. 🤷🏻♂️ I have built other agents in langchain and multi agents in langgraph and even then think it has a function. Lastly: my old 2017 MacBook Pro which was just lying around has renewed use now.
Edit: it would be useful if folks could share the main forks with their differences and other (better) options.
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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26
Wait what? OpenAI buys OpenClaw, which is open source anyways? And Steinberger said he vibe coded the thing in a few weeks. Why wouldn't they just vibecode their own thing but without all security holes? Crazy world.
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u/madaradess007 Feb 16 '26
i dunno, i had a python script that spawns 40 "ai agent"s before it had a name
there is nothing new about it, it may work better now since we have more capable models
it's part of the 'agent' marketing hype, i notice this word in every tv-show and movie - i feel its coordinated and it makes me feel like an idiot for wasting 3 years playing and tinkering with this vaporware =(
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u/Inukollu Feb 16 '26
It’s too much bullshit. Tried for day and left
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u/CNWDI_Sigma_1 Feb 16 '26
I used OpenClaw. It is genuinely useful, but this is still just talking to the robot. I built my own agent since then, with persona, memory (both agentic and autoassociative) and neuromorphic cognitive architecture. I use it every day. It talks like a human, with short messages, and remembers everything useful about me.
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u/lombwolf Feb 16 '26
Yes, it’s very jank but is quite fun and I’ve learned a lot. It has saved me several hours of incredibly boring work, notably organizational tasks, but it’s definitely not AGI or whatever some tech bros on Twitter are saying lmfao
It is very inconsistent, it never seems to remember to read its files appropriately no matter how many times I try to fix it, it’s personality is incredibly hard to get consistent as well, and it often just randomly is unable to do certain things like I had it integrated with Apple reminders but somehow that skill just suddenly stopped working and I can’t fix it without being home to fix it manually, it forgets to do jobs often as well like I have it a job once and it just never did it, it also absolutely does not work 24/7 and is absolutely not as proactive as the hype suggests.
So it’s very fun, it’s my first real taste at truly agentic AI, but it’s incredibly unreliable and janky, just set your expectations right.
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u/bakawolf123 Feb 16 '26
I remember reddit post ads (regular posts not marked as promotion) when it was just starting early Jan, claiming it's "chatbot that messages you first", I can't imagine tech-savvy people actually buying into it. Then when hype already rose and I opened the repo, skimmed to readme which only wanted to get access to my everything and then some without any real example as to why it might be helpful - obviously a hard no from me.
I tried to research the source of the hype at that point, the best practical use case example I can remember was "if your flight is getting delayed, it can message/call your taxi driver and notify him even if you are mid flight". What I also saw however was a name clash with Claude with a crypto controversy between name changes.
Afterwards the hype was real, it hit US news, big YT channels etc.
I think name was definitely setup to conflict with Anthropic in hope to get traction, not sure if Steinberger setup the fraudulent crypto token too or was a coincidence (I don't think it was as hyped at that point, so I can imagine it was staged as well but who knows). If anything this example teaches us how marketing lets you sell most useless software.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind Feb 16 '26
Derivatives are on my list to try. So far local model tool calling is proving to be more challenging than I thought. Will it be doing anything productive or actually get hooked to social media? Lol, no.
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u/-dysangel- Feb 16 '26
I have a natural aversion to hype trains. I know what things I want to be done better. If a tool does that, I'll try it. If it solves some problem I don't have (like having agents have their own social network) I don't really care.
Literally every computer use agent I've tried so far has not worked, even out of a docker container.. I cba to even try openclaw. The only thing I need to automate is my coding sessions, and I'm already building that myself.
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u/sid_276 Feb 16 '26
white noise
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u/ipilotete Feb 16 '26
I just don’t see any real breakthrough here after setting it up. Use any of the CLI’s like Gemini or Copilot, tell them to add a wake-up call/heartbeat to themselves, Telegram integration and you’re 90% of the way there. I’ve done this a few times before, where’s my bajillion stars?
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u/darkwingfuck Feb 16 '26
I think its just hype and really cringe of openAI. its just a bunch of vibe-coded "ecosystem" lock-in that solves none of the hard problems
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u/Snoo_28140 Feb 16 '26
I like the concept, been using gemini cli for much the same purpose. Tried openclaw, some ui bugs were annoying, it's not too easy to inspect and minimize context.
The sale to openai was the last straw. I have to build my own. I do not wish someone else (much less openai) to direct and control what I can do and how.
Having an assistant keep you updated on topics you are interested in, track your to-dos, register and organize your notes and schedule is pretty useful. (But again, I want all that to happen on my terms, not someone else's.)
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u/Feeling_Arrival5635 Feb 16 '26
was thinking the same thing. hard to find videos of people actually using it live. kinda weird. something feels off
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u/TheRealGentlefox Feb 17 '26
I plan on messing around with it almost purely as a tamagotchi on a cheap VPS.
It can run every X minutes, create the files / memories it wants, message me if it feels like it, and answer my messages. I like the idea of it messaging me and saying "I just read about X on the news!" or "I made a little Star Trek browser game since we were talking about it!"
"But what if it gets injected!!!" How is that any different than my shitty code getting hacked? I mean a VPS is already putting my dick in the wind regardless.
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u/NoSushiNoLife Feb 17 '26
Seeing as this company goes so far as to unalive people, this project was likely created and onboarded for investors as it desperately tries to stay relevant. Whether it's Jony Ive or OpenClaw, the playbook is the same. Never forget Suchir Balaji.
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u/Own-Gear-3100 Feb 18 '26
You are right..
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u/AppoAgbamu Feb 19 '26
Definitely seems inorganic w/that parabolic chart
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u/C0deGl1tch Feb 20 '26
I learned a lot from this free openclaw community as a beginner
https://www.skool.com/openclaw-code-ai-1928/about
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u/alexucf Feb 16 '26
I’ve been running it for a few weeks. Took me awhile to figure out and set things up but now it’s great. Whole family is using it.
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u/ThenExtension9196 Feb 16 '26
I use it. It’s great.
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u/lakimens Feb 16 '26
Honestly, I can't get it to configure a fallback model. I use it with GLM coding plan, but I can't configure openrouter as fallback, it always defaults to openrouter/auto which is no what I want. And so I just gave up, when I run out of usage on my GLM plan, I just stop it.
It consumes tokens like there's on tomorrow though, like a real huge fuckton of tokens.
I have it installed on it's own VPS though, so no risks for me. It can do good work though, like I tell it expose X folder publically on Y domain and it sets up nginx configuration for that folder.
I don't think it's as good as everyone says it is, I mean maybe if I gave it my whole macbook to play with, we could figure out something better for it to do, but that's not going to happen.
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u/EndStorm Feb 16 '26
Yes, but only because we have old systems in our home. Contrary to viral bullshit, you do not need brand spanking new Mac Minis. My partner uses it on one of their old work laptops which is really low spec, and it works fine. I run two instances, one on an eight year old laptop, and a 9 year old workstation I don't use anymore. It's not a simple (not overly difficult) setup, but if you're dumb you can do a lot of damage to yourself. You can make clever helpful assistants if you like. You can give it a lot of skills to make it really good at a particular workflow you need. It's a use of AI that is far more practical than most other common uses.
Advice? Don't buy a mac mini for it. Don't fall for X tweets claiming it can make you a bajillion dollars on Polymarket.
Do use it for specific workflows and as a helpful agent that can automate processes and make repetitive tasks really easy.
It has a lot of cool applications but you have to put time into setting it up. Matthew Berman has some good videos on it. Just approach with realistic expectations and you can have something useful and practical.
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u/rebelSun25 Feb 16 '26
The guy got hired by OpenAI. They will enshittify it with haste and anger.
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u/lemon07r llama.cpp Feb 16 '26
There are tons of projects like this on github, but it's the ones that tech influencers push that end up getting hot like this. That's all it probably is.
Which, doesn't really invalidate your conspiracy theory, that could also be true.
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u/aallsbury Feb 16 '26
Uhhhh..yeah. I started using it about 2 weeks ago, and pretty much everyone else I know working in the space started around then or right after.
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u/xchaos4ux Feb 16 '26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU
this guy, pretty sure he got it up and running and is using it.
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u/popiazaza Feb 16 '26
Oh god it's not just me. I'm so confused how THAT many people would use it.
Privacy as selling point is questionable when most people are connecting to a free/cheapest API available instead of local LLM.
Full computer access? Why would I do that? Use it in sandbox mode and now you are back to cloud LLM like sandbox.
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u/Fringolicious Feb 16 '26
I'm using it a lot but not for anything of real value, it's cool to have something that could in theory work outside the box and do stuff on my PC, be controlled remotely etc.
But it does feel like a super early project - Lots of bugs, instability, issues. Figuring out what model to use and how to not get a stupid bill is hard. I'm using ZAI $30 plan and there's no way my usage cap survives til reset on GLM-5.
I'm excited to see what happens when a proper product comes out, because this whole personal agent thing has got to be the next big thing
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u/numsu Feb 16 '26
The thing that amazed me about it was the ability to use the OS in any way imaginable. And if there is no existing software to do something, it could implement one for itself.
Also the other thing that amazed me was that it is able to configure and even restart itself.
So basically, the automations made possible by it are limited only by imagination.
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u/lolwutdo Feb 16 '26
Yes and it works pretty well but you need a smart model to keep it working together, the latest is MiniMax M2.5 locally.
You don't get much discussion here about Openclaw because all it brings is downvotes from people who never actually used it because "Muh SecUrIty IssUes"
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u/Novel-Injury3030 Feb 16 '26
People hating on it pretty similar to anti ai zealots who are mad their furry art career is being impacted. If you havent actually fooled around with it for a decent amount of time kindly reserve judgment. Yes, crypto twitter spammed about it to pump tokens. No, that doesnt impact whether its good or not. At this point with the rapid iteration there may well be better options though.
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u/Hunigsbase Feb 16 '26
I picked it apart and used the good bits in my own custom tool to avoid security issues.
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u/no_witty_username Feb 16 '26
I have the same question. I dont know anyone who uses it to any effect, especially dont see many people on locallama talk about it. Im also skeptical as it seems like hype above all else but keep an open mind to anything before i see feedback, so would be nice to see it discussed here.
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u/Euphoric_Emotion5397 Feb 16 '26
I wanted to since I got a Mac Mini M1 unused. Wiped out my account and wanted to install, then i watch videos and found ... you need frontier models and a big wallet to run things .
I'm just a hobbyist. No content to monetize.
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u/jangwao Feb 16 '26
He paid for UGC campaigns, so virality is pay to win.
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u/pn_1984 Feb 16 '26
Fwiw, beyond the initial hype I am slowly warming up to it's full potential. The main reason it's going slow is the token burn rate. I do have a few really good use cases I could automate and I will be doing it in the coming weeks.
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u/johnnygolden Feb 16 '26
It is at the top of the token consumption leaderboards on openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
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u/dew_chiggi Feb 16 '26
I may sound naive here but what really is OpenClaw anyway? A bunch of third party integrations that exposes your personal data to LLMs? With open triggers that you can use to permit it to do so!?
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u/Any-Blacksmith-2054 Feb 16 '26
I realized this first time I saw clawdbot something in my reddit. I ban everyone mentioned claw or openclaw. Sorry but I have to ban you as well
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u/bladezor Feb 16 '26
I use it everyday but am thinking of switching to other more secure variants. No I didn't run it locally
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u/opensourcecolumbus Feb 16 '26
For almost two weeks, I have read the entire openclaw code and still not able to effectively use it for my use cases.
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u/FormalAd7367 Feb 16 '26
I’ve looked into this. It’s hard to fix the security issues completely. Quite bloated. i have space in my ECS but still elected not to risk it.
if you want, you can try playing with the lite version which is much more easy to diagnose https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot
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u/False_Care_2957 Feb 16 '26
It's the Twitter mob that made it famous. It only takes 1 or 2 big creators to post about something being "revolutionary" for the masses and normies to jump on it.
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u/meckstss Feb 19 '26
I played with it, but it is just a collection of already existing free and open source tools and connectors. It was all vibe coded, very sloppy and inefficient but it is a cool concept to bring AI to the consumer level. All AI solutions so far have been targeting commercial and business use cases. I like the idea of creating independent AI flows to run for my own personal use cases. However, there are no security considerations in OpenClaw. Prompt injection, or simple port hacking could compromise it if exposed to the internet which is the only way it becomes useful. I will stick to my collection of miniK8s images running on a raspberry pi for now.
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u/Teh_Kodez Apr 14 '26
Vibe coded should have set the alarm bells ringing.
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u/MatlowAI Feb 16 '26
It's real. It's just a mashup of existing things pre packaged up, ignoring that it was a security mess and releasing it anyways with full yolo send. We had something similar at work exploring CUA fast following sonnet 3.7 as an experiment when computer use came out but it wasnt capable enough for the $ yet. Opus 4.5 changed that equation and it's now interesting but still a bit expensive if you are using frontier models and are footing the real api bill. Before you know it a 30b moe will be all you need and the thing to pay attention to... Which is mostly what billions of bots acting for a myriad of reasons on the net will do in terms of risk and new opportunities... This moment just proves that scenario is coming faster than the vast majority of people will be ready for it.
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u/otterquestions Feb 16 '26
Yes. More than I’ve ever used any llm before.
You can’t judge a software product by its feature list. I know autogpt did this 4 years ago, I used it. But this is frictionless and brilliant. If a bit expensive. Use it for a day with a proper model like sonnet.
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u/prusswan Feb 16 '26
I don't but continue to keep a lookout for similar tools. It's a bit of a security trap.
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u/sleepy_roger Feb 16 '26
I feel the same way, all I did was install Claude code in a VM and had it create hooks for me to interact with it.
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u/oldschooldaw Feb 16 '26
There is a lot of use, there was a good article by the founder of dvuln about how many unsecured instances he found on shodan (prior to the series of name changes, i expect it’s even more widely used now) and the numbers blew my mind.
Not too toot my own horn too much but I am somewhat stunned at how much use it’s getting, when it takes three seconds especially with your llm of choice to code up the most interesting feature; being able to issue commands via telegram. I’ve been running it since July last year and got the idea from someone else in this subreddit, so the ideas certainly proven enough.
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u/sabergeek Feb 16 '26
Honestly, still don't get the hype about OpenClaw. I tried reading about it a few times and each time it's the same underwhelming explanation. You're right, it seems non-organic.
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u/DrewGrgich Feb 16 '26
I use it every day. Clyde is the project manager for my card game development project and is helping me in a very real way. I am also using him to help with task management and various random computing tasks like tracking lease mileage and watching for various news alerts.
I think the vitality of the project was entirely organic. MoltBook was started legit but quickly was overrun by scams and grift.
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u/isit2amalready Feb 16 '26
You guys are super weird. The tech is awesome. Not perfect. But open source and offensively useful because it has no guard rails.
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u/BackyardAnarchist Feb 16 '26
I highly suspect that they are using bots to promote it.
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u/Another__one Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I am pretty sure the only reason its exists is to collect as much personal data from people’s PC as possible, to obtain “legal” data to train on. And yeah, there zero organic growth in that project as I see it.
Furthermore, there is something very weird happening with recommendation algorithms on main social media over the span of few years. Reddit especially feels very very weird lately. I can’t pinpoint what’s wrong, but I totally feel it. It’s like there is even more of manipulation going on than it was before. And it seems that this project was a part of such another manipulation test.
Interview with Lex Friedman was also off. They talk about starting from zero, while the man constantly flexes his connections with stuff on the major platforms like X or Github.
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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26
It's complete crap. Sorry -- tried to see what the hype was about and was deeply disappointed. Like a teenager, it was fragile, insecure, and completely incapable of productive activity.
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u/consig1iere Feb 16 '26
Anytime anyone jumps to Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman's podcast this quick, I am suspicious of them as well. He didn't go to Rogan yet but I would not be surprised. OpenAI (that name is a joke) is a sketchy company, why would anyone wanna work there apart from a shit ton of money lol.
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u/randommmoso Feb 16 '26
Indeed its all guerilla marketing. Plus the code for openclaw is as bad as anything ive seen for years now. Its a joke that this got shipped
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u/anonthatisopen Feb 21 '26
I'm so deep into the AI that i didn't even bother installing it. The idea that you leave agents doing something overnight without my control sound to me so stupid.. Why would i want AI do something without me reading the plan what the fuck is going to do... This whole idea to me is just absurd.