First you have to agree that Claude Code might be useful for some non-repo task, like helping with your taxes or organizing your bookmarks.
Next, consider how you might deploy isolated Claude Code instances for these specific task areas, and manage/scale that - hooks, permissions, skills, commands, context, and the like - and wire them up to some non-terminal i/o so you can communicate with them more easily. This is the agent shape.
Now, give these agents access to long term memory, some notion of a personality/guiding principles, and some agency to find new skills and even self-improve. You could leave this last part out and still have something valuable.
That’s Openclaw in a nutshell. Yes you could just plug Discord into Claude Code, add a cron job for analyzing memory, a soul.md, update some system prompts, add some shell scripts to manage a bunch of these, and you’d be on the same journey that led Peter to Openclaw.
I share the feeling; but people using it are mostly non-technicals (despite the 50+ config files lol) and are just runing it constantly to do random things.
But a message bot + Claude Code/Codex would be the better version
I tried it for 2 days and honestly don't see the usefulness either. Although, the big reason is that I paired it with Claude, which only uses the per token billing method. Here are the few improvement on a simple Claude usage:
- As you mentioned, the message bot thing was kind of cool.
- It can browse the internet and act (like posting on MoltBook, which I tried).
- It has a a permanent "memory" (loads of .md files, so nothing fancy).
- It can be schedulded via cron jobs.
Overall, nothing really impressive. It is very gimmicky and it felt very unsafe the whole time (I had already read about the security issues, but sometimes you gotta live dangerously). The most annoying part was the huge token consumption (conversations start at 20k+ because of all the .md files) and it cost me roughly $12 for a few hours of testing.
Non-technical people haven't even heard of OpenClaw or Github, let alone know how to use and deploy them. Non-technical people don't even know what OS their Samsung or iPhone is called.
If you can find something on Github and deploy it on your system, you're part of the technical crowd.
>My hairdresser knew all about it and had ordered a Mac mini.
Your hairdresser can't be a technical person because they're a hairdresser ?? I know a surgeon who writes FOSS software as a hobby. What does profession have to do with being technical or not? Most technical people are self taught anyway.
I know them very well, and they are not a coder, or a 'technical person' by a broad HN definition.
What I'm saying is that we are at the point where technology is so pervasive in our society, and the lure of AI so seductive, that many more people are excited to try things out than I might have expected.
I suppose it has similarities to the early to mid 1980s and the home computing revolution. Where many people thought they should have a computer at home, even if they were not sure what they'd do with it.
Had someone at work as me about this and they visibly cringed with I told them its my understanding you let the agent unfettered access to everything on your machine so it can do a lot more stuff than say a Siri can.
They immediately said, "Why in the fuck would I want to do that?"
I didn't know either and then we both stood there in an awkward silence. I think he was expecting OpenClaw to be some insanely cool AI Agent and discovering the "juice isn't worth the squeeze" kind of hit him harder than I expected.
1) accessibility to non-technical folks. For the first time, they are having the Claude Code experience that we've had as software engineers for some time now
2) shared, community token context. Many end users are contributing to one agent's context together. This has emergent properties
Does it only work with chat apps? I've never used it, but I thought all the hype was from it being promoted as the first real general-purpose PC-using layer that could run on anything. What can it run on then?
It's a worse version of Claude Code that you set up to work over common chat apps, from what I gather?
Why would I not just use a Discord/WhatsApp bot etc plugged into Claude Code/Codex?