You don't. YOLO!

What am I missing?

Additionally, most of the integrations are under the table. Get an API key? No man, 'npm install react-thing-api', so you have supply chain vulns up the wazoo. Not necessarily from malicious actors, just uhh incompetent actors, or why not vibe coder actors.

There has been some work around this practically being tried out using it for structured data outputs from LLMs https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim...

I won't claim I understand its implementation very well but it seems like the only approach to have a GOFAI style thing where the agent can ask for human help if it blows through a budget

I still have Opus review the shit out of & plan my work. But it doesn't need to be hands on keyboard doing the work.

But I was inspired to use Claude Code to create my own personal assistant. It was shocking to see CC bang out an MVP in one Plan execution. I've been iterating it all week, but I've had it be careful with token usage. It defaults to Haiku (more than enough for things like email categorization), properly uses prompt caching, and has a focused set of tools to avoid bloating the context window. The cost is under $1 per check-in, which I'm okay with.

Now I get a morning and afternoon check-in about outstanding items, and my Inbox is clear. I can see this changing my relationship to email completely.

Not doing so feels like asking for trouble.

I wouldn't trust its internal sandbox anyway, now that would be a mistake

They can now combine cronjobs and LLMs with a single human sentence.

This is huge for normies.

Not so much if you already had strong development skills.

EDIT: But you are correct in the assessment that people who don't know better will use it to do simple things that could be done millions of times more efficiently..

I made a chatbot at my company where you can chat with each individual client's data that we work with..

My manager tested it by asking it to find a rate (divide this company number by that company number), for like a dozen companies, one by one..

He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.

The more I see the more it seems underwhelming (or hype).

So I've just drawn the conclusion that there's something I'm missing.

If someone's found a really solid use case for this I would (genuinely) like to see it. I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my dev/work workflow more efficient.

With all that said, I haven’t mentioned anything about the economics, and like much of the AI industry, those might be overstated. But running a local language model on my macbook that helps me with messaging productivity is a compelling idea.

Unless or until you figure out a decent security paradigm, and I think it's reasonably achievable, these agents are extraordinarily dangerous. They're not smart enough to not do very stupid things, yet. You're gonna need layers of guardrails that filter out the jailbreaks and everything that doesn't match an approved format, with contextual branches of things that are allowed or discarded, and that's gonna be a whole pile of work that probably can't be vibecoded yet.

The next part that makes this compelling is the integration. Mind you, scary stuff, prompt injection, rogue commands, but (BIG BUT) once we figure this out it will provide real value.

Read email, add reminder to register dog with the township, or get an updated referral from your doctor for a therapist. All things that would normally fall through the cracks are organized and presented. I think about all the great projects we see on here, like https://unmute.sh/ and love the idea of having llms get closer to how we interact naturally. I think this gets us closer to that.

OpenClaw is just an idea of what's coming. Of what the future of human-software interface will look like.

People already know what it will look like to some extent. We will no longer have UIs there you have dozens or hundreds of buttons as the norm, instead you will talk to an LLM/agent that will trigger the workflows you need through natural language. AI will eat UI.

Of course, OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot has lots of security issues. That's not really their fault, the industry has not yet reached consensus on how to fix these issues. But OpenClaw's rapid rise to popularity (fastest growing GH repo by star count ever) shows how people want that future to come ASAP. The security problems do need to be solved. And I believe they will be, soon.

I think the demand comes also from the people wanting an open agent. We don't want the agentic future to be mainly closed behind big tech ecosystems. OpenClaw plants that flag now, setting a boundary that people will have their data stored locally (even if inference happens remotely, though that may not be the status quo forever).

I think that's absolutely crazy town but I understand the motivation. Information overload is the default state now. Anything that can help stem the tide is going to attract attention.

the amount of things that before cost you either hours or real money went down to a chat with a few sentences.

it makes it suddenly possibly to scale an (at least semi-) savy tech person without other humans and that much faster.

this directly gives it a very tanglible value.

the "market" might not be huge for this and yes, its mostly youtubers and influencers that "get this". Mainly because the work they do is most impacted by it. And that obviously amplifies the hype.

but below the mechanics of quite a big chunk of "traditional" digital work changed now in a measurable way!

The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.

I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.

It's got four things that make it great:

1. Discord/Slack/WA/etc integration so those apps become your frontend

2. Filesystem for long term memory and state

3. Easy extensibility with skills

4. Cron for recurring jobs

Sure, many of these things exist in other systems but none in a cohesive package that makes it fun and easy.