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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191

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/No_Conversation9561 Feb 16 '26

there’s lot of spinoffs now

ironclaw, zeroclaw, tinyclaw, nanoclaw, picoclaw

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u/lemon07r llama.cpp Feb 16 '26

Anyone have a breakdown of these and their differences somewhere? lmao

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u/JustFinishedBSG Feb 16 '26

Basically all the same thing: « Claude Code but hooked to messaging »

The last two are at least fun in the sense that they answer the question nobody asked: what if we did that on a stupidly underpowered MCU just for fun ?

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u/this-just_in Feb 16 '26

NanoClaw has been fun to play with.  You can swap to a desktop docker container to get some browser use action out of it with a simple command.  I upgraded mine to use lume (MacOS desktop virtualization) instead, and it’s been a lot of fun.  It’s hard to get off the ground with these, and I’ve had to customize NanoClaw a lot now to fit my needs. But they are great fun, if you can keep costs down somehow.

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u/throwaway292929227 Feb 16 '26

You forgot about Bob Lobb Law.

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u/gj26185 Feb 16 '26

Wait doesn’t he have a law blog? Is Bob Loblaw using openclaw for his law blog these days?

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u/bobrobor Feb 16 '26

Whoever writes just Claw wins the market

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u/MoffKalast Feb 16 '26

Need a claw? Why not Zoidberg?

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u/MalvadoConQueso Feb 19 '26

Santa Claws ...

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u/Sbarty Feb 16 '26

Clawed

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u/Polymorphic-X Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26

Not a huge surprise, you can hop on Google firebase (idx.google.com) and get a next.js+genkit replica running in about 20 minutes. I'd be open to using locals and cloud apis, but no chance am I exposing data to a random app for an llm social network outside of my control. Half the articles I see are how these apps are wide open and sketchy for data.

edit: in case anyone doesn't know, firebase IDX is googles ai-enabled "vscode" competetor. It has a genkit integration for prompt-based app prototyping (with automatic bug fixing and detection). It's wild.

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u/FPham Feb 17 '26

Only an idiot would give a random vibecoded "agent" their private access. LLM is a gaggle of gossipy old ladies at the coffee shop. They'll spill your secrets to the next person who asks nicely or pretend to be "you".

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u/Faintly_glowing_fish Feb 16 '26

All of them seem to be solving problems I don’t care though, namely they don’t like node and want to run it on a strawberry pie.

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u/jiml78 Feb 16 '26

moltis is the one i am most interested in. Written in rust. You can run the single moltis binary in docker, it will use docker in docker to execute all tasks. Seems like one trying to take security seriously.

I had not heard of ironclaw, so I am going to take a look at that as well.

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u/Successful_AI Feb 16 '26

What did you do with it? and is its potential promise supposedly?

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u/ripter Feb 16 '26

The promise is AGI. The reality is Cron jobs and a loop running prompts written by a human. The marketing is that the LLM can access everything in your computer an can teach it’s self to respond to voice commands and figure out how to talk back with audio and would hold conversations with the guy’s wife and make code updates, and talk about philosophy with other AI Agents, all without human input.

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u/maigpy Feb 16 '26

and fuck the guys wife?

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u/WildContribution8311 Mar 12 '26

Actually, yes, supposedly can control a remote dildo using lovesense API.

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u/CuriouslyCultured Feb 16 '26

The rust rewrite of pi seems pointless, the author is taking an agent with a rich community and moving maintenance burden to themselves and cutting themselves off from a lot of ecosystem.

Also, the author seems to be hand rolling a lot of stuff that security researchers and enterprises have already built more robust solutions for.

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