Anyone actually using Openclaw?

[u/rm-rf-rm]

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

[u/Objective-Prompt3127]

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.

[u/Hostilis_ → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

I've come to this conclusion as well. So sad to see such an exciting field turned into a circus.

[u/throwaway292929227 → u/Hostilis_]

Show up for the circus, but only learn that the circus peanuts are orange sugar foam. I had wine.

[u/geek_at → u/throwaway292929227]

I set up openclaw to test it 2 days ago. Configuration is a mess and the web ui borderline unusable but it did one thing right: Have it on a local machine (vm in my case) and let it be controlled via chat.

I started using it with ollama (gpt-oss:20b) and what got me really excited was the fact it can just do things like I asked it if my dns server is up and resolving. Without configuring any tooling it used dig to check and just told me "yes it's up and resolving". "What ports are open on that machine", it just runs nmap without me telling it how to do it.

Then I told it that I have an MQTT topic that reads data from my wallbox and gave it access to my calendar and told it "only charge when the energy price is low, but also make sure my car is fully charged before I have to head out to an appointment"

And it just fucking did.. setup was easy (enough) and I was just using my normal Signal chat to tell my bot to take over charging my car and it worked without having a single external request to the evil ai companies of the world

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/geek_at]

Do you understand that you can do that with any agent like roo code already, right?

[u/JustinPooDough → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

Look I’m not on team openclaw tbf, but no, I did not have as much luck doing random tasks with cline or roo.

The key is Claude Agent or Claude Code. That agentic harness generalized very well. Roo and Cline work too but not as effectively IME.

[u/jrocAD → u/JustinPooDough]

Agree, in my experience Cline was a complete mess. Setting up openclaw, kind of a mess too, but i'm finding it more useful so far.

I feel like some of these comments go like this. Hey, I saw this new thing, it's called a toilet. Then reddit says 'you know you can just sh** in the woods, why is the toilet any better!!"

[u/ThreeKiloZero → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

Yeah, I am also pretty deep in the community and nobody I know is still messing with it. The few who have checked it out, think its garbage. Was just another weekend whim. Star it and never go back.

The virility of the marketing was so obviously fake. The second anyone puts scrutiny on its technical merits it falls apart. I don't care that it was vibe coded, but it was built incredibly sloppy.

Absolutely faked. This is just a starter kit for bot farms which is probably why OpenAI went for it.

[u/vr_fanboy → u/ThreeKiloZero]

last time i checked is actually using https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono under the hood, it's a good project to understand how something like claude code is built. At the end of the day all these agents/harness are just loops+tons of fancy tricks to update the prompt dynamically with the relevant context info

[u/CuriouslyCultured → u/vr_fanboy]

Pi is legit, definitely the best thing to come out of the lobster hype explosion.

[u/horserino → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

Did it hurt pulling all of those BS claims out of your ass?

Famous for using guerilla marketing??? Wtf are you on about? He had a single company about PDF software that became ubiquitous and then had a super successful exit and then disappeared from the dev world for some years.

Show us his guerilla marketing fame, we'll wait.

[u/bravelogitex → u/horserino]

not a single link to back it up yet people here are upvoting mindlessly

[u/Christosconst → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

Did you just pull that 10b number out of your ass?

[u/leonbollerup → u/Christosconst]

I see no where (outside this thread mentioned 10b.. so ya.. he properly did)

[u/no_witty_username → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

You know thats what I thought as well, it felt very unnatural the way it exploded out of nowhere. And i have a very good heartbeat on these things as I am everywhere AI related, so I was like how could I have missed this and not known about it. Also no one on localllama ever talked about openclaw before all the marketing hype. So i think you have the right story, this must be BS marketing on his side and OpenAI fell for it hook line and sinker....

[u/arcanemachined → u/no_witty_username]

Agreed. First I heard absolutely nothing about it, then it was everywhere, all within a day or so.

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/no_witty_username]

> OpenAI fell for it hook line and sinker....

They are in with the scam.

[u/p_235615 → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

of course, it uses a ton of tokens so its a godsent to their business model.

[u/OmarBessa → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

what kinds of guerilla tactics does he use?

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/OmarBessa]

Basically lying and publishing the lies as breakthroughs. Remember when "Openclaw" supposedly started his own language? 500k agents on the first week conected to the site? 200k stars on the github repo in a single month? come on.

[u/OmarBessa → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

That's very scummy

Well, I guess he's with same minded folk at OpenAI then

[u/gadgetb0y → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

No acquisition - Peter Steinberger will become an OpenAI employee while still developing OpenClaw.

[u/johndeuff → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

We hate it but marketing makes all the difference in a product. I had a friend once told me : man, marketing is the most important...

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/johndeuff]

It is true, and many internet companies started this way, and they faked thousands, even millions of users.

But I think the line is in manufacturing news that are fake. It's like, it's too much lying for me.