But this is not such a big deal.
I made an open-source lightweight daemon in Go that fills that gap. All it does is to provide the means to connect to popular messaging systems like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. and expose this all through the CLI.
The project is hosted here: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk
My personal realisation recently has been that the unix way is the best way. We just need to go back creating daemons and lightweight composable CLIs and let agents do their thing. They are increasing being trained to operate the command-line and they are getting pretty good at it.
or someone will just make it email lewd pics to people’s bosses for the lols
turns out it doesn’t even need to be an attacker…
The only people who tried to hack "hackmyclaw" are casual attempts from HN readers when it was first posted.
Meanwhile, tons of actual OpenClaw users have been owned by malware which was downloaded as Skills.
Also, there have been plenty of actual examples of prompt injection working, including attacks on major companies. E.g. Superhuman was hacked recently via prompt injection.
I do still find some things useful about my nanoclaw setup - convenience and easy scheduling of LLM related tasks. Well, promising actually, not useful yet. But autonomy is not one of those things.
And if you don't know how, CC does.
I don't know. You can even use systemd if you like.
Run Claude -p and Claude already has mcp,'s configured so it can do anything I wanted.
You have people talking about the tired topic of the lack of moat for AI businesses. But people should be calling out the moat that most tech businesses take for granted. Forget the moat that prevents other businesses, what about the moat that prevents your own users from creating your own product "from scratch"?
Which IMO they should anyway if they are doing advanced automation
Since I control the server and all the code it’s very simple to setup up schedules or new tools.
I really want a native iOS chat client that connects directly to my home server.
> Here's my own implementation!
Insert xkcd standards joke.
https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
All plugins run in one Docker container, but they're isolated from each other by different *nix users, so they can't read each other's files. That's much more lightweight, and you don't have to run one container per plugin.
Crucially, plugins can't read each other's secrets or modify each other's code. I even have a plugin configuration webpage that doesn't go through an LLM, so the LLM never sees your secrets if you don't want to.
as OpenClaw and now NanoClaw became "enterprise", now we need a new FemtoClaw to pick up the indie/boutique place
It’s it someone is trying to avoid the thing talking to the internet or reading your emails, it’s just that it sometimes has the strange itch to change some files outside of the project.
Yeah, that about sums up how terrifying it is to give these agents so much access to things.
Point is, don't jump off a cliff.
For my use case I want ssh access and being able to use docker in docker. This allows for things like test containers and docker compose. You can get all of that working with docker. But you kind of have to fight docker the whole way.
NanoClaw might have different needs, and docker could work better for it, and I hope so for their sake. But I’m not optimistic.
That's how this argument sounds... And it really isn't a strong argument
Openclaw itself is buggy but the idea is amazing.
If "agentic use case" is shorthand for "use case that would benefit from giving non-deterministic systems blanket access to private local data and external accounts" than I can't imagine any such use cases.
I always have my backpack with me, so if I need milk I can pick it up on the way back. And I am pretty sure that I have to notice if I need milk myself.
The tech sounds cool, but whenever I hear about actual applications, I don't see the point.
"Find me the cheapest ticket to Las Vegas for the first week of June. Buy one at anytime that you think is reasonable. Wait until no later than two months from now before buying. Get two tickets if my brother can also go".
"Email me if anyone posts a Sega multi mega for sale. But only if it's in black color".
I have no idea if OpenClaws can already do such a task or not, I don't have one, but it opens up new possibilities. If it isn't there yet, it will be.
That’s kind of the confusing thing for me, I wouldn’t have a human personal assistant do anything for me as long as any money is on the line. I couldn’t teach them my preferences well enough to trust them to do it the way I want, instead of just doing it myself.
Personal assistants only make sense to me if you’re so rich that money doesn’t really matter to you anyways.
Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites.
You don’t have to trust them with money. You can ask them to send you the info for you to do the final step.
> Your trip booking thing for example is something I would never give to a human assistant.
Maybe not you, but people already use personal travel agency for their booking need, see for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/travelagents/comments/1i4fiod/best_...
Air ticket booking agency used to be popular before the Internet made that business obsolete.
> The alert for stuff on sale can already be done on the usual price tracking websites
Sega multi mega is a rare collectible item. No price tracking websites have it. You need to frequent online groups or forums of enthusiasts. eBay may have ones, but information (e.g color) may be missing, and follow-up is required. OpenClaw can do that for you.
For example, when I was at M$, management came to us extolling the virtues of Cortana and the then new "smart inbox". The manager was ecstatic. And for him, it maybe really was the neatest thing since sliced bread. And I know plenty of people with 10000+ unread in their INBOX. For them, it might be lifesaver.
But all the engineers in the room were "eek, get it away from me and make sure it never gets near my inbox". I personally maintain an INBOX-0 policy, not always perfectly, but it works for me. Unreads never last for more than a few minutes. So I have "situational awareness" of my e-mail, and when Apple also introduced smart inboxes, they broke that situational awareness while adding nothing whatsoever to my benefit. And people I communicate with also started losing e-mails, because they got sorted somewhere they weren't expecting.
So turn that shit off.
Again, I think the tech is cool, and I would actually really like to both better understand and try out the tech. But to try something out in earnest, I need some concrete use-case, and so far the use-cases I have seen range from "meh" to "get it away from me".
For agentic coding, I also needed some concrete use cases, and I found where it worked really well, where it struggles, and where it's just horrible.
Bottom line is that there's a big difference between "not useful to me" and "not useful". If it was the latter, nobody would have human personal assistants either... but that's not the case.
And the people who have (the need for?) human personal assistants seem like a very small subgroup to me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Those are not good examples for why people have a human assistant, you have human assistants to do in-person or person-to-person things that you don't have the time or desire to do yourself. They are simply not the same as releasing a 24/7 ai roulette process on the internet with all your payment and account info.
The online monitoring examples can be done with current automation tools and scripts
I understand, if we imagine a world where everyone is constantly plugged into the computer all the time, and every bit of human activity is coordinated and surveilled by the computer at all times, this shit appears to be quite useful. Otherwise and even if, it's total schlock.
Like, "hey openclaw can you order me groceries" is great, but the only reason is that there's a wageslave on the other side of that transaction who has to drive to the grocery storef and pick the groceries out. Pretty soon that slave is going to be all of us and my god it makes me feel like an insane person that the boosters of this tech don't see that.
The point still, is that OpenClaw opens new exciting (and dangerous) opportunities for non technical users.
The milk thing was just an example of a tool that can intelligently combine things for you, not a literal "it's a calendar with a milk function".
This is a bit like "if I want to call my friends, I have a phone a home, why would I need a mobile?" which somewhat betrays a lack of imagination.
My openclaw now searches for the relevant content upon her request, sends the URL to a Stacks docker instance, monitors the Stacks instance for when the download completes, grabs the resulting epub from a local file share, then sends it to her kindle email. She doesn’t even send me the request anymore; she sends them straight to the Discord bot.
It also corrects our calendar every night. She often just through something on the calendar like “[son’s name] speech”, but we have speech appointments in either of two locations, and I have a strong preference for calendar items in the format “[person] - activity”. If she puts the city name with the speech appointments (“[son’s name] speech [town]”), openclaw reformats the title accordingly and adds the physical address of the speech therapy office we go to in that town. This means Apple Calendar sends us notifications when it’s time to leave, instead of just 30 mins prior.
I have a few others as well, but those are real world examples. Maybe they don’t matter for your use case, but they’re good for mine.
Like sure, it is. But when I'm out doing something and she texts me a book title and author, I'd have to make a mental note to take care of it next time I'm free. It also means having a stack of epub files in my phone/tablet/laptop downloads that I've got no use for.
For me, Gemini has been hit or miss and somehow less useful than Assistant was 2+ years ago.
I have Gemini Pro for free for a year because I bought a Pixel phone, it answers very fast, so I like it. Let's see how I'll feel about shelling out real money when the subscription ends. But on the phone, I still use Assistant (and just have a shortcut to launch the webpage in my browser), because the phone was forcing Gemini, but after 5 minutes of usage I found it was slower for my usages (usually I just tell it to set an alarm and add a reminder/calendar event), and when I asked about my tasks, Gemini would get the task listing from Google Tasks, and keep it in its history... that'll pollute my chat history!
I've had a similar deal. "Free" means included, and we are the beta testers!
In the last month, Gemini successfully persisted Google notes and calendar events. It also malfunctioned by adding these to chat context...(and not persisting to Google Calendar or Keep.)
Same commands. Different outcomes. It's unusable.
It's just a MEMS mic, a battery, and an ESP32, very simple but it works amazingly well. I wrote a companion Android app for it and it works extremely reliably!
Sneak peek: https://imgz.org/i6xDDz6x/
Thank you, must make one!
Your projects are amazing, saw your site a couple days ago and just saw your submissions now, love it and thanks!
Thats it. Its just pets.com
Edit: although as a counterpoint to my cynicism, just the intgreations and deamon-ness can be a game changer if the user experience is good. Thats the critical thing. If you can actually delegate tasks to it and not worry about them then it'd be great. But if your gonna have to worry if its done properly, or that it would delete your emails, then it doesnt work yet. But the dream of a robot assistant is inviting. I just dont think the underlying AI is there yet
Ai Agent as it has been for months, plus skills, plus a cron job to prompt it to do things every 20 minutes or 2 hours or however often you want.
It was easy to install it, and get it running. I could @Andy message it on whatsapp but after that it fell apart fast.
I asked it to login to Facebook and check my notifications, and it started saving credentials and random things in the repo as json files. And din't work. It was hard to even figure out what was happening and why it didn't work.
Then I tried messaging it again and it didn't respond to me.
These things are extremely brittle despite the enourmous amount of github stars. I think it's just normies starring things trying to get on the train unfortunately. The promise of an AI Jarvis is unrealized still.
> The tool consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images...