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Posted by brdd 1 day ago

A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw(brandon.wang)
267 points | 415 commentspage 6
cess11 15 hours ago|
'the sweet sweet elixir of context is a real "feel the AGI" moment and it's hard to go back without feeling like i would be willingly living my most important relationship in amnesia'

I'm not so sure that I would use the word "sane" to describe this.

IshKebab 16 hours ago||
Can this thing deal with the insane way my children's school communicates? Actionable information (children wear red tomorrow) is mixed in with "this week we have been learning about bees" across five different communication channels. I'm not exaggerating. We have Tapestry, emails, a newsletter, parents WhatsApp, Arbour and Facebook.

I guess the difficulty is getting the data into the AI.

Skidaddle 14 hours ago||
Yes, I have Claude summarize the rambling, repetitive, slightly unhinged emails from my kindergarten teacher. Otherwise I simply ignore them.
bondarchuk 15 hours ago||
That's six channels actually.
IshKebab 13 hours ago||
Oh yeah it used to be five but they added Facebook because - I quote - "we hope that we can create another line of communication for reminders and messages".
4corners4sides 9 hours ago||
This article convinced me to try to set up OpenClaw locally on the my raspberry pi but I realised that it had no micro SD card installed AND it used micro HDMI instead of a regular HDMI for display which I didn't have…

Some of the takes in this article relate to the "Agent Native Architecture" (https://every.to/guides/agent-native), an article that I critiqued quite heavily for being AI generated. This article presents many of the concepts explored there in a real-world, pragmatic lens. In this case, the author brings up how initially they wanted their agent to invoke specific pre-made scripts but ultimately found out that letting go of the process is where the inner model intelligence was able to really shine. In this case, parity, the property whereby anything a human can do an agent can do was achieved most powerfully buy simply giving the agent a browser-use agent which cracked open the whole web for the agent to navigate through.

The gradual improvement property of agent native architectures was also directly mentioned by the article, where the author commented on giving the model more and more context allowed him to “feel the AGI”.

ClawdBot is often reduced to “just AI and cron” but that might be overly reductive in the same way that one could call it a “GPT wrapper” in the same way that one could call a laptop an “electricity wrapper”. It seems like the scheduler is a significant aspect of what makes ClawdBot so powerful. For example the author, instead of looking for sophisticated scraper apps online to monitor prices of certain items will simply ask ClawdBot something like: “Hey, monitor hotel prices” and ClawdBot will handle the rest asynchronously and communicate back with the author over slack. Any performance issues due to repeated agent invocations are ameliorated by problem context and runbooks that are automatically generated and probably cost less time than maintaining pipelines written in plain code for a single individual who wants a hands-off agent solution.

Also, the article actually explains the obsessions with Mac Mini’s which I thought was some kind of convoluted scam (though apple doesn’t need scams to sell Macs…). Essentially you need it to run a browser or multiple browsers for your agents. Unfortunately that’s the state of the modern web.

I actually have my own note taking system and a pipeline to give me an overview of all of the concepts, blogs and daily events that have happened over the past week for me to look at. But it is much more rigid than ClawdBot: 1) I can only access it from my laptop, 2) it only supports text at the moment, 3) the actions that I can take are hard coded as opposed to agent-refined and naturally occuring (e.g. tweet pipeline, lessons pipeline, youtube video pipeline), 4) there’s no intelligent scheduler logic or agent at all so I manually run the script every evening. Something like ClawdBot could replace this whole pipeline.

Long story short, I need to try this out at some point.

oncallthrow 16 hours ago||
Do you mean “bullish”?
ahoka 16 hours ago||
Bull and bear markets. Bull’s horns are pointing up (expecting growth, optimistic), bear’s claw is pointing down (expecting recession, pessimistic). Yeah, it’s stupid.
the_af 15 hours ago||
So they indeed meant "bullish"? That's what "bullish" means.
djeastm 15 hours ago|||
That would be the more general/traditional way of saying it, but in modern investment circles the focus seems to have turned towards the actual people being "bulls/bears" and not just the attitudes of the market. A person is a bull or a bear, as opposed to a person being either bullish or bearish.

So in this construction, a "bull case" is a "case that a bull (the person) can make".

jollyllama 9 hours ago|||
It's probably what he meant but it's more accurate this way.
luplex 16 hours ago|||
"a bull case" gets lots of google results, so it seems to be a commonly used construction amongst analysts. Basically it means "The case that OpenClaw will develop as a bull".

"bullish" seems more common in tech circles ("I'm bullish on this") but it's also used elsewhere.

standarditem 16 hours ago||
"Bullish" means optimistic or even aggressively optimistic. It's typically used in the context of markets.
evrimoztamur 16 hours ago|||
Sane is an adjective, 'X but Y Noun' expects Y to be an adjective if X is also such. Sane/Bull Case-> Sane/Bullish Case
causal 16 hours ago|||
Right, so they probably meant bullish
zackify 16 hours ago||
I just can't get over how none of this is new. 6 months ago I was running "summarize my work" tasks using linear and github mcps

just using a cron task and claude code. The hype around openclaw is wild

runjake 15 hours ago||
A lot of it is, in fact, new.

The hype around OpenClaw is largely due to the large suite of command line utilities that tie deeply into Apple’s ecosystem as well as a ton of other systems.

I think that the hype will be short-lived as big tech improves their own AI assistants (Gemini, improved Siri, etc), but it’s nice to have a more open alternative.

OpenClaw just needs to focus on security before it can be taken more seriously.

bfeynman 12 hours ago|||
What part is new? the thing that took off is that it allows technophiles who couldn't probably flash a raspberry pi to feel like they are hackers. All of this stuff exists in tons of random AI apps that exist already it just wasn't really that much of a value add, there is just a virality of it reaching audiences that previously only knew how to use a chat app.
Skidaddle 14 hours ago|||
I wouldn’t call it new, just conveniently packaged and with more momentum. I’ve been running an apple-mcp server on a Mac Mini for Claude to use to manage my reminders in addition to Gcal + gmail, and I could have just as easily added messaging capabilities.

Call me crazy, but… I feel more likely to trust Anthropic than anybody else when it comes to safety on things like this.

reacharavindh 16 hours ago||
To me, the magic is around interactions with personal info where they are - iMessages, e-mails, etc. I still am wart to open up like this, but it certainly is not as simple as Claude code and cron task. The “you can already do this via rsync + FTP” comment on Dropbox Show HN thread comes to mind.
verdverm 13 hours ago||
It's a bit different than the Dropdox situation because the market is already flooded, the big players have their options, the cycle is rapid (who's langchain?)

I hope, think, and build towards a world where there will be fewer winner-take-all in this foundational tech

willmadden 11 hours ago||
AI is useful for researching things far more quickly before making a decision and for automation/robotics. Motivated people don't need a nagbot to replace their calendar.
chaostheory 15 hours ago||
I some lose utility but my openclaw bot only has its own accounts. I do not give it access to any of my own accounts.
insane_dreamer 15 hours ago||
> let me be upfront about how much access i've given clawdbot: it can read my text messages, including two-factor authentication codes. it can log into my bank. it has my calendar, my notion, my contacts. it can browse the web and take actions on my behalf.

this is foolish, despite the (quite frankly) minor efficiency benefits that it is providing as per the post.

and if the agent has, or gains, write access to its own agents/identity file (or a file referenced by its agents file), this is dangerous

modzu 5 hours ago||
uh ohhh... forgot how to think..
gabrieledarrigo 13 hours ago|
> i haven't automated anything here, but booking a table by talking to clawdbot is delightful.

Omg. Just get the phone and call the restaurant, man.

I really don't want to live in this timeline where I can't even search for b&b with my gf without burning tokens through an LLM. That's crazy.

pfortuny 13 hours ago|
It is impressive what people find "delightful, "a joy", "fresh air" these days.
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