I really don’t understand what it does. Is it just the equivalent of chron jobs but with agents?

I run a Discord where we've had a custom coded bot I created since before LLM's became useful. When they did, I integrated the bot into LLMs so you could ask it questions in free text form. I've gradually added AI-type features to this integration over time, like web search grounding once that was straightforward to do.

The other day I finally found some time to give OpenClaw a go, and it went something like this:

- Installed it on my VPS (I don't have a Mac mini lying around, or the inclination to just go out and buy one just for this)

- Worked through a painful path of getting it a browser working (VPS = no graphics subsystem...)

- Decided as my first experiment, to tell it to look at trading prediction markets (Polymarket)

- Discovered that I had to do most of the onboarding for this, for numerous reasons like KYC, payments, other stuff OpenClaw can't do for you...

- Discovered that it wasn't very good at setting up its own "scheduled jobs". It was absolutely insistent that it would "Check the markets we're tracking every morning", until after multiple back and forths we discovered... it wouldn't, and I had to explicitly force it to add something to its heartbeat

- Discovered that one of the bets I wanted to track (fed rates change) it wasn't able to monitor because CME's website is very bot-hostile and blocked it after a few requests

- Told me I should use a VPN to get around the block, or sign up to a market data API for it

- I jumped through the various hoops to get a NordVPN account and run it on the VPS (hilariously, once I connected it blew up my SSH session and I had to recovery console my way back in...)

- We discovered that oh, NordVPN's IP's don't get around the CME website block

- Gave up on that bet, chose a different one...

- I then got a very blunt WhatsApp message "Usage limit exceeded". There was nothing in the default 'clawbot logs' as to why. After digging around in other locations I found a more detailed log, yeah, it's OpenAI. Logged into the OpenAI platform - it's churned through $20 of tokens in about 24h.

At this point I took a step back and weighted the pros and cons of the whole thing, and decided to shut it down. Back to human-in-the-loop coding agent projects for me.

I just do not believe the influencers who are posting their Clawbots are "running their entire company". There are so many bot-blockers everywhere it's like that scene with the rakes in the Simpsons...

All these *claw variants won't solve any of this. Sure you might use a bit less CPU, but the open internet is actually pretty bot-hostile, and you constantly need humans to navigate it.

What I have done from what I've learned though, is upgrade my trusty Discord bot so it now has a SOUL.md and MEMORIES.md. Maybe at some point I'll also give it a heartbeat, but I'm not sure...

inb4 "ClAWS run best on AWS."

Perhaps the whole cybersecurity theatre is just that, a charade. The frenzy for these tools proves it. IoT was apparently so boring that the main concern was security. AI is so much fun that for the vast majority of hackers, programmers and CTOs, security is no longer just an afterthought; it's nonexistent. Nobody cares.

What is the benefit of a Mac mini for something like this?

Did Claws the name from Claude? I haven’t been following but didn’t some make OpenClaude and that turned in OpenClaw and ta-da a new name of a thing?

simonw> It even comes with an established emoji [lobster emoji]

Good thing they didn't call it OpenSeahorse!

Excited to see and work with things in new ways.

It's interesting how the announcement of someone understanding and summarizing it is seen as more blessing it into the canon of LLMS, whereas sometimes people might have been doing things for a long time quietly (lots of text files with claude).

I'm not sure how long claws will last, a lot was said about MCPs in their initial form too, except they were just gaping security holes too often as well.