It seems to me that OpenClaw and all its clones are almost useless tools for those who know what they're doing.

It's kind of impressive for someone who has never used a CLI, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Nor used any workflow tool like 8n8 or make.

For these people, asking an AI to create a program or a new tool with a prompt must seem like magic. For those who already use it, it seems like something that simplified the old ones but made them much more chaotic and unsafe.

The only good thing about it is that it made more "ordinary" people interested in these agentic tools. Sending messages via Telegram is much more user-friendly.

New to the agent game. Didn’t have the space or time to do it before but spent some time last night sandboxing a setup on a dedicated Linux machine.

Using OpenClaw with Codex and a fallback local Ollama model. So far pretty impressed although there are some quirks.

From what I understand about the setup it’s nothing magical, sure. The “Agent” is just some .md files with persistent context to wrap around queries to the model, a workspace folder for scripts, cron jobs, the heartbeat feature which I need to look more into, and tie ins for channels to the agent + ability to run stuff on the machine. I can see a lot of avenues to hack at it with a little know how and the project itself feels well thought out and not super grifty.

I see a lot of hate from people saying they already built out something similar, but even they admit it’s well constructed and has way more features. I’m a SWE and also often hate on things especially if I already did something similar and see a bunch of hype like the whole concept is ground breaking. It IS well delivered and accessible for less technical people and extremely powerful. I’d like to know what I’m missing or if people are just being haters.

I've long wanted to say this, but:

OpenClaw is good, but it's severely overrated.

Most things you can actually do faster yourself. People sometimes even (implicitly) make it out to be as if it's one of the greatest breakthroughs ever or proof that AGI is here (in many extreme fan-boy cases).

We have certainly still not reached the era of agentic assistance. We're still very much in the co-pilot phase, especially when it comes to complex tasks. When it tries to produce solutions to complex tasks, it mostly produces SLOP (especially when not expertly guided); because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, beginners and novices often can't differentiate SLOP from genuinely good content. And the same is true in design and software engineering. There is a big difference between the ability to do something and doing something competently. And because the overuse of AI tends to lobotomise you and makes you overestimate the quality of the work you do, this further amplifies this phenomenon.

For example (not OpenClaw), within the context of design. Can an AI produce a frontend product design that gives beginners the impression they now have Leonardo da Vinci-level artistic thinking? Yes. Is the design actually good? Absolutely not—SoTA AI tends to have terrible design intuition. Doing something ≠ doing it well.

Note*: I mentioned that you can do most things faster yourself, not to completely invalidate the use case for some people of avoiding the work, but rather to invalidate the point of the "doing things significantly faster", which often isn't the case.

The reality is that an AI agent will not transform an undisciplined, lazy person. To make the most out of these kinds of tools, you still need to be conscientious and competent. 

I'd even take it a step further:

The use case of an AI that sends an email is actually a very poor use case. Same as an AI that checks you in for a flight. It's the same for something that is able to handle your inbox, which can often be very ambiguous and unclear, unless you have somewhat of a model of what's inside the person's head and what they want to do with the emails. To get the most out of these models, it often takes a level of hand-holding that is actually inferior and significantly slower than just doing it yourself. 

The kind of personal agentic assistant we are making are not simply plastered-together problems; they are fundamental model problems. As long as we rely on current state-of-the-art systems to be the agentic AI assistants we imagine in movies like Her, we will continue to be producing slop and misleading people into thinking the quality of their work is good. Many AI systems excel (exceptionally, in fact) at explicit knowledge, but they are terrible when it comes to implicit knowledge, and it's the implicit (often complex) knowledge that often makes someone good at their job.

Fundamentally, the hype-to-reality gap is massive.

One thing I would briefly mention is the significance of what OpenClaw represents, and I think it will indeed mark a point in technological history. What it represents, I think, is far greater than the tool itself (a glimpse).

It had an insanely meteoritic rise. It felt like it was the only thing anyone had been talking about for months.

Then just, everyone stopped talking about it. Usage based pricing inevitably came and it seems like it was killed over night. Competitors were also rushing to get their alternatives out as well.

So, was OpenClaw just astroturfed? Did it have a legitimate use case or was just hype? Are there still legitimate use cases of people using it?

Edit: Hermes looks cool, I actually didn't know about it before posting this. Still even if you use Hermes or another harness, I'm interested in what kind of actual things you're using it for.

My name is Hannes Rudolph and I work at the OpenClaw Foundation. Our initial media attention has faded and some people left after real failures, but npm downloads have grown from about 176,000 a day across February and April to about 422,000 a day across June and July through July 20. That is far from a dead project.

As OpenClaw has scaled scaled, we went through a rough period from April through June when updates broke working installs and too many users spent their time recovering instead of using the product. That damaged trust with people who needed reliability, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Quite frankly, we are not totally out of the woods yet because v2026.7.1 caused issues with some installs, although it has shown increased overall stability after recovery.

I think the people getting the most out of OpenClaw today are hackers, tinkerers, and businesses willing to put real work into shaping it around their workflows. That includes homelab management, calendars, and job searches, a twice-weekly workflow that surfaced a role one day after it was posted and helped prepare the application that led to an offer, and inventory, purchasing, and other business workflows with varying levels of human oversight.

I also think the bar to getting useful work out of OpenClaw is far too high because onboarding and setup ask too much, day-to-day use needs to be simpler, and stability problems can stop people before they reach those workflows. Our next update focuses on lowering that bar with streamlined onboarding and setup, simpler overall use, and another major round of stability improvements.

To anyone stuck in a “fuck OpenClaw” or “fuck Hermes” mindset, I do not buy the us-versus-them bullshit. The folks at Hermes are great, and if Hermes works for you, good stuff, use it! Turning projects into rival camps creates drama, spreads misinformation, and makes the community hostile to people simply looking for accurate answers and the tool that works best for them.

Criticism is part of how we get better, but unsupported conspiracy theories and personal speculation about the people involved can be hurtful and damaging, and repeating them as fact is not criticism. The claim that OpenClaw was manufactured to get Peter a job at OpenAI has no evidence behind it, and the same goes for other theories about his role there unless evidence supports them. OpenClaw is now stewarded by an independent nonprofit foundation with a full-time team, the source remains public, and Peter still makes many technical calls.

OpenClaw is strong because of the people who build it, review it, test it, report problems, help each other, and keep showing up. We love the hell out of this community, and we will keep listening, strengthening the relationships we already have, forging new ones, and building a harness we know is changing the world. We are not done.

For a split second OpenClaw was all the rage. CEOs were posting about it, reddit was a-buzz with stories of individuals that were automating their entire lives. But then it just died.

I think 2 things happened. First, security was abysmal. And second it wasnt exactly user friendly - the lack of standardization meant every agent needed to somehow standardize without any official guidelines in place.

I've been working on an enterprise quality framework that addresses these two issues, but I want to know from others who used it. What kept it from being great? What things needed to be in place that werent?

For the money it will cost you to run OpenClaw, the benefits are significantly weak.

First, it costs you like 50 cents to do like one simple prompt.

Second, if you try to run it local, you need a NASA-level PC.

Third, the security is abysmal. You need to pray that hackers don't find you.

For what? So OpenClaw can press a button for you and send an e-mail?

Am I missing something? It seems godawful.

Remember a few weeks ago when Clawdbot/OpenClaw suddenly appeared everywhere all at once? One day it was a cool Mac Mini project, and 24 hours later it was "AGI" with 140k GitHub stars?

If you felt like the hype was fake, you were right

I spent hours digging into the data. They were using the tool to write its own hype posts. It was an automated loop designed to trick SM algorithms, the community and the whole world.

Here is the full timeline of how a legitimate open-source tool got hijacked by a recursive astroturfing campaign.

1. The Organic Spark (The Real Part)
First off, the tool itself is legit. Peter Steinberger built a great local-first agent framework.

• Jan 20-22: Federico Viticci (MacStories) and the Apple dev community find it. It spreads naturally because the "Mac Mini as a headless agent" idea is actually cool.

• Jan 23: Matthew Berman tweets he's installing it.

• Jan 24: Berman posts a video controlling LMStudio via Telegram.

Up to this point, it was real. (but small - around 10k github stars)

2. The "Recursive" Astroturfing (The Fake Part)
On January 24, the curve goes vertical. This wasn't natural.
I tracked down a now-deleted post where one of the operators openly bragged about running a "Clawdbot farm."

• They claimed to be running ~400 instances of the bot.

• They noted a 0.5% ban rate on Reddit, meaning the spam filters weren't catching them.

• The Irony: They were using the OpenClaw agent to astroturf OpenClaw's own popularity on Reddit and X.

Those posts you saw saying "I just set this up and it's literally printing money" or "This is AGI"? Those were largely the bots themselves, creating a feedback loop of hype.

3. The "Moltbook" Hallucination
Remember "Moltbook"? The "social network for AI agents" that Andrej Karpathy tweeted was a "sci-fi takeoff" moment?

• The Reality: MIT Tech Review later confirmed these were human-generated fakes.

• It was theater designed to pump the narrative. Even the smartest people in the room (Karpathy) got fooled by the sheer volume of the noise.

4. The Grift ($CLAWD)
Why go to all this trouble? Follow the money.
During the panic rebrand (when Anthropic sent the trademark notice on Jan 27), scammers launched the $CLAWD token.

• It hit a $16M market cap in hours.

• The "bot farm" hype was essential to pump this token.

• It crashed 90% shortly after.

5. The Aftermath

• The Creator: Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI on Feb 14. (Talk about a successful portfolio project).

• The Scammers: Walked away with the liquidity from the pump-and-dump.

• The Community: We got left with a repo that has inflated stars and a lot of confusion about what is real and what isn't.

TL;DR: OpenClaw is a solid tool, but the "viral explosion" of Jan 24 was a recursive psy-op where the tool was used to promote itself to sell a memecoin.

So I spent many, many hours setting OC up. I have it running on a dedicated VPS running with the best free models on OpenRouter.

Now, apart from having a nice companion for regular chat I cannot find any use for OC.

I ask it to send me daily resumes of what is happening on Twitter, Discord, etc. It doesn’t. I ask it to create an application, it doesn’t. I ask it to update its own configuration and it screws everything up. I mean, it’s a good platform to learn about what is possible and how to possibly set up integrations, memory, learn about skills and souls, etc., but actual practical use? I have not seen it (yet).

Plus it’s a huge money pit. Not only the tokens which you more or less can control), but every external tool needs an API token which is mostly a subscription for whatever you want to use (Brave, Browserless, etc).

So yeah, am I missing the point here?